zaterdag 2 mei 2015

U.S. Supports Al-Qaeda

Climbing into Bed with Al-Qaeda

Exclusive: President Obama is tolerating the smuggling of high-tech U.S. weapons to a Syrian rebel coalition led by an Al-Qaeda affiliate, as these Islamists — supported by the Saudis and other U.S. allies — mount a new offensive to topple the secular government in Damascus, as Daniel Lazare explains.


After years of hemming and hawing, the Obama administration has finally come clean about its goals in Syria.  In the battle to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, it is siding with Al Qaeda. This has become evident ever since Jisr Ash-Shughur, a small town in the northeastern part of the country, fell on April 25 to a Saudi and Turkish-backed coalition consisting of the Al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al Sham, and an array of smaller, more “moderate” factions as well.
Al Nusra, which is backed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, is Al Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate. Ahrar al Sham, which is heavily favored by Qatar, is also linked with Al Qaeda and has also cooperated with ISIS. The other groups, which sport such monikers as the Coastal Division and the Sukur Al Ghab Brigades, are part of the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army and are supposedly as anti-terrorist as they are anti-Assad.  Yet they nonetheless “piggybacked” on the offensive, to use The Wall Street Journal’s term, doing everything they could to further the Al-Nusra-led advance.
King Salman greets the President and First Lady during a state visit to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 27, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
King Salman greets the President and First Lady during a state visit to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 27, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
American clients thus helped Al Qaeda conquer a secular city. But that is not all the U.S. did. It also contributed large numbers of optically-guided TOW missiles that the rebels used to destroy dozens of government tanks and other vehicles, according to videos posted on social media websites. A pro-U.S. rebel commander named Fares Bayoush told The Wall Street Journal that the TOW’s “flipped the balance of power,” giving the Salafists the leverage they needed to dislodge the Syrian army’s heavily dug-in forces and drive them out of the city.
With Syria charging the Turkish military with providing “logistical and fire support,” it appears that the rebels transported the missiles across the Turkish border, located less than eight miles to Jisr Ash-Shughur’s west.  Whether the pro-U.S. factions or Al Nusra carried the TOW’s over is unknown. But there is little question as to the ultimate source.
In late 2013, Saudi Arabia went on a buying spree, purchasing more than 15,000 Raytheon anti-tank missiles at a total cost of more than $1 billion. The purchaseraised eyebrows since TOW’s are mainly useful against tanks and other armored vehicles, a threat that the Saudis have not had to face since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
But now it all seems clear. Up in arms over supposed Shi‘ite advances in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, the arch-Sunnis of Riyadh purchased the missiles with the intention of transferring them to the Syrian Salafists in the hopes of reversing the Shi‘ite tide.
U.S. regulations prohibit such third-party transfers, yet so far Washington has not uttered a peep. U.S. policy is also to arm moderate rebels only on the condition that they have nothing to do with Al Qaeda. Yet the response in this regard has been nil as well.
A senior administration official admitted to the Washington Post that the White House is “concerned that Al Nusra has taken the lead.” But he said that it is aware that “because of the realities of the battlefield, where the more moderate opposition feels compelled to coexist” with terrorist groups, cooperation will occur. He also said the administration is “not blind to the fact that it is to some extent inevitable” that U.S. weapons will wind up in terrorist hands. But all he could say in response is that “it’s not something we would refrain from raising with our partners.”
The administration, in other words, knows that its clients are teaming up with Al Qaeda and knows that American weapons are finding their way to the terrorists. Yet all it can say in response is that it may raise the topic at some later date. For now, it is thoroughly on board with the Al-Nusra offensive.
It is as if 9/11 never happened. Yet rather than protesting what is in fact a joint U.S.-Al Qaeda assault, the Beltway crowd is either maintaining a discreet silence or loudly hailing Al Nusra’s advance as “the best thing that could happen in a Middle East in crisis,” to quote Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest.
Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, was equally enthusiastic. “Nusra’s pragmatism and ongoing evolution mean that it could become an ally in the fight against the Islamic State,” she wrote.  “…While not everyone likes Nusra’s ideology, there is a growing sense in the north of Syria that it is the best alternative on the ground – and that ideology is a small price to pay for higher returns.”
A growing sense among whom – Alawites and Christians who rightly view Al Qaeda as a genocidal threat? A dozen years ago, anyone suggesting an alliance with Al Qaeda in any form would have been a candidate for lynching. But now foreign-policy pundits like Mead and Khatib feel free to broach the topic without fear of contradiction.
Why? America’s relationship with Al Qaeda has long been more ambiguous than Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment would like ordinary Americans to understand. Not only did the U.S. join with the Saudis in midwifing the modern jihadist movement during the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, but, post-9/11, the Bush administration worked feverishly to cover up ties between Osama bin Laden and its long-time Saudi allies.
Saudi nationals, including members of the bin Laden clan, were allowed to fly out of the country in the days following the attack with at most cursory questioning by the FBI. A crucial 28-page section of the joint congressional report on 9/11 was suppressed while an investigator with the subsequent 9/11 Commission was fired after attempting to look into the question of Saudi funding. [See Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (New York: Twelve, 2008), pp. 109-11.]
Bush and Cheney “refus[ed] to declassify anything having to do with Saudi Arabia,” former Navy Secretary John F. Lehman, a member of the special commission, later complained. “Anything having to do with the Saudis, for some reason it had this very special sensitivity.” [Ibid., 185-86.]
The Bush administration was eager to establish links between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein – which were, of course, nonexistent – and at the same time desperate to suppress abundant evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and the House of Saud.
While vowing to “smoke out” bin Laden, Bush’s real interest was in taking down Saddam. In the end, U.S. policy toward Al Qaeda turned out to be not too different from that of Riyadh: hostility when it dared bomb the homeland, but tolerance and even approval when its activities dovetailed with U.S. foreign-policy goals.
As long as ISIS, Al Qaeda’s hyper-brutal spin-off, confined itself to making life miserable for the Baathist regime in Damascus, the U.S. was thus content to look the other way. It was only when Islamic State left the reservation and attacked America’s clients in Baghdad that it took umbrage.
But where U.S. officials once felt obliged to keep relations with Al Qaeda under wraps, the accelerating pace of events in the Middle East are now allowing them to speak more openly. Amid plunging oil prices, a hard-line king has taken the throne in Riyadh, an equally tough-minded prime minister has won re-election in Israel, while the U.S. is counting on an unprecedented nuclear deal to improve relations with Iran.
The effect has been to reset the rules, although not quite in ways that people expected. Where the impending deal with Iran soon led to speculation that “the most fundamental realignment of U.S. foreign policy in a generation” was underway,<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[14]<!–[endif]–> the reality has been the opposite as Republicans and Democrats rushed to reassure their strategic partners that the old alliance would continue undisturbed.
Thus, Netanyahu’s clout on Capitol Hill has only grown while Saudi Arabia and the other Arab gulf states have gained a free hand to do what they like with regard to the Shi‘ite “crescent” supposedly threatening them from Sanaa to Beirut.
Little more than a month after his accession, King Salman met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and agreed to stepped-up support for Syria’s Sunni rebels, including those with ties to Al Qaeda that had previously been beyond the pale. Instead of boycotting such groups as the U.S. demanded, the new approachwas to support Al Nusra and other such forces on the grounds that they were the only ones capable of getting the job done.
The upshot came a couple of weeks later when Al Nusra and Ahrar al Sham announced the formation of a new coalition known as the Army of Conquest (Jaysh al Fateh) that would include a number of smaller Islamist groups as well. In late March, the new coalition took Idlib, about 30 miles northeast of Jisr Ash-Shughur. In late April, armed with U.S.-made TOW’s, it took Jisr Ash-Shughur.
Anxious to shore up relations with the Saudis in view of the impending deal with Iran, the Obama administration did not dare object. The same logic prevailed when Saudi Arabia launched its air assault on Yemen on March 25, just as the negotiations with Iran were moving into high gear. If Riyadh felt it had no choice but to subject Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, to nightly bombing raids, then the U.S. would not object either.
As a Defense Department official observed, it’s “important that the Saudis know that we have an arm around their shoulder.” More than a thousand Yemenis have died as a consequence, some 300,000 have been forced to flee their homes, while Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has taken advantage of the chaos to seize control of the port of Al Mukalla in the country’s east and much of surrounding Hadramawt province as well.
But where the U.S. had once used drones to harry Al Qaeda regardless of the collateral damage to the surrounding civilian population, its attitude now seems distinctly blasé. If the Saudis don’t care about Al Qaeda’s new foothold, then the U.S. doesn’t care either.
As such policies drive Syria and Yemen to collapse and generate a tidal wave of refugees, the only consolation is that the Saudis may be cracking under the strain as well. With its mountainous terrain and deep tribal divisions, Yemen has long been a study in controlled chaos. But Riyadh has seemingly done everything in its power to make a bad situation worse.
As U.S. diplomats noted, the Houthi insurgency now tearing the country apart did not start on its own. To the contrary, it was a surge of Saudi-financed Wahhabist propaganda that played into the worst fears of Yemen’s Shi‘ite minority and put the Houthis on the warpath. As secret State Department cables noted in 2009, Saudi-backed Salafism “has spread rapidly in Yemen over the last two decades,” causing Houthis to feel “increasingly threatened.”
Where it was once said of the northern province of Sa’ada that it was “so Shi’a that even the stone is Shi’a,” residents felt besieged by a growing profusion of Sunni-Salafist schools and mosques bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s cash-rich petro-sheiks.
Growing Saudi sectarianism fueled Houthi sectarianism and pushed the country into all-out civil war. U.S. diplomats also assailed the Saudis for attempting to impose a military solution on the Houthis rather than seeking a political settlement.
As U.S. Ambassador Stephen Seche put it in November 2009, Riyadh was foisting so much military aid on Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh – now, ironically, a Houthi ally – that it was inevitable that the guns would “find their way into Yemen’s thriving grey arms market. …  From there, it is it is anyone’s guess as to where the weapons will surface, potentially even in the hands of extremist groups bent on attacking Western interests in Yemen – and ironically, Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries in the Gulf.”
“We urge the [State] Department,” Seche went on, “…to convey to these ‘friends of Yemen’ that they are undermining their goal of a stable and secure Yemen by providing large amounts of money and military assistance.” It was excellent advice, but unfortunately it fell on deaf ears.  Instead of less militarization, the Saudis opted for more – with predictably disastrous consequences.
Nonetheless, there are signs that the Saudis may at last have bitten off more than they can chew. Riyadh, for example, initially announced that Pakistan would be among the ten Sunni-majority states participating in the anti-Houthi operation. But when Riyadh specified that Shi‘ite soldiers would not be welcome, Islamabad balked.
With Shi‘ites comprising as much as 20 percent of the Pakistani population, the requirement would have inflamed religious tensions and pushed the country closer to Lebanese-style civil war. While doing little to slow the Houthi advance, the nightly bombing raids have meanwhile highlighted the kingdom’s inability to follow up with a land offensive. While strong in the air, the kingdom turns out to be a paper tiger where it counts, i.e. on the ground.
Indeed, Salman’s recent political purge, the most sweeping in decades, may be a sign that dissatisfaction is growing in royal ranks since Prince Muqrin Bin Abdul Aziz, the chief victim, was known as a critic of the war. The more military intervention war turns into a dead end, the more dissent will intensify – and if there’s one thing Saudi Arabia’s absolute autocracy can’t tolerate, it’s political dissent.
Finally, there is the recent arrest of 93 alleged ISIS members on charges of plotting attacks on the U.S. Embassy and other targets. If the charges are true – always a big “if” when Saudi Arabia is concerned – then it is a sign that despite spending billions for a high-tech barrier along its northern border, the kingdom is still unable to keep ISIS out.
No matter how much it cozies up to the good Al Qaeda, it still faces trouble with the bad. With Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi promising to exterminate the kingdom’s own 15-percent Shi‘ite minority if he ever takes power, it is a sign of how religious extremism is thriving in an atmosphere of heated sectarianism that the House of Saud has done so much to promote.
The result is a four-way collision that has been years in the making.  Struggling to hold his rickety Middle Eastern empire together while making a deal with Iran, Obama is unable to say no to the Saudi steamroller. But since he can’t say no to the Saudis, he can’t say no to the Saudis’ partner, Al Qaeda. The U.S. finds itself back in bed with terrorists it had promised to avoid.

Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).


Buying Democracy

Rapid Rise in Super PACs Dominated by Single Donors

Saturday, 02 May 2015 00:00 By Robert FaturechiProPublica | Report 
Sheldon Adelson listens to Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey address a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, March 29, 2014. Adelson, a casino magnate, was among the biggest contributors to single-donor super PACs, according to ProPublica analysis. (Photo: John Gurzinski/The New York Times)Sheldon Adelson listens to Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey address a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, March 29, 2014. Adelson, a casino magnate, was among the biggest contributors to single-donor super PACs, according to a ProPublica analysis. (Photo: John Gurzinski/The New York Times)
The wealthiest Americans can fly on their own jets, live in gated compounds and watch movies in their own theaters.
More of them also are walling off their political contributions from other big and small players.
A growing number of political committees known as super PACs have become instruments of single donors, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal records. During the 2014 election cycle, $113 million – 16 percent of money raised by all super PACs – went to committees dominated by one donor. That was quadruple their 2012 share.
The rise of single-donor groups is a new example of how changes in campaign finance law are giving outsized influence to a handful of funders.
The trend may continue into 2016. Last week, National Review reported that Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination would be boosted not by one anointed super PAC but four, each controlled by a single donor or donor family.
The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling helped usher in the era of super PACs. Unlike traditional political action committees, the independent groups can accept donations of any dollar size as long as they don’t coordinate with the campaign of any candidate. Previously, much of the focus in big-money fundraising was on “bundlers” -- volunteers who tap friends and associates for maximum individual contributions of $5,400 to a candidate, then deliver big lump sums directly to the campaigns. Former president George W. Bush awarded his most prolific bundlers special titles such as “Ranger” and “Pioneer.”
While bundling intensified the impact of wealthy donors on campaigns, the dollar limits and the need to join with others diluted the influence of any one person. With a super PAC, a donor can single-handedly push a narrower agenda. Last year, National Journal profiled one such donor – a California vineyard owner who helped start the trend by launching his own super PAC and becoming a power player in a Senate race across the country.
Beyond the single-donor groups, big donations are dominant across all kinds of super PACs, according to the analysis. Six-figure contributions from individuals or organizations accounted for almost 50 percent of all super PAC money raised during the last two cycles.
“We are anointing an aristocracy that’s getting a stronger and stronger grip on democracy,” said Miles Rapoport, president of Common Cause, an advocacy group that seeks to reduce the influence of money on politics.
ProPublica’s analysis identified 59 super PACs that received at least 80 percent of their funding from one individual during the 2014 cycle. They raised a total of $113 million, compared with the $33 million raised by the 34 such groups that existed in 2012.
Donors who launch their own PACs are seeking more control over how their money is spent. And many have complained about the commissions that fundraising consultants take off the top of their donations to outside groups. But the move carries risks if the patron is new to the arena.
In one cautionary tale, a reclusive 89-year-old Texas oilman with no political experience launched Vote2ReduceDebt, one of the nation’s highest-spending conservative super PACs. A ProPublica investigation found that much of the donor’s millions went to entities run by the group’s consultants or their close associates. The super PAC imploded as principals traded allegations including self-dealing, faked campaign events and a plot to siphon the PAC’s money to a reality TV show.
Bill Burton, a former Obama administration official who helped found Priorities USA, the juggernaut super PAC affiliated with the president’s reelection campaign, said he expects donors to face more problems if they continue to go it alone.
“One of two things is going to happen,” he said. “We will either see widespread flaunting of coordination rules or we will see some pretty spectacular failures to the tune of millions of dollars.”
The single-donor super PACs identified by ProPublica span the political spectrum. Among the top conservative donors were Richard Uihlein, a packaging supplies businessman, and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg spent heavily on both sides but leaned Democrat. Hedge fund titan Tom Steyer dominated on the left.
In 2012 the largest single-donor super PAC was former TD Ameritrade CEO Joe Ricketts’ Ending Spending Action Fund, which raised over $14 million, 89 percent of which came from Ricketts. It was the ninth-largest super PAC by spending. In 2014 Steyer’s Nextgen Climate Action was the largest super PAC, raising almost $78 million, 85 percent from Steyer. (Steyer’s wife, Kat Taylor, is a member of ProPublica’s board of directors, and the couple has donated to ProPublica.)
In addition to the super PACs dominated by a single individual, dozens more received the great majority of their funding from one corporation, labor group or advocacy organization. In 2014, those PACs represented 8.6 percent of super-PAC fundraising.
PACs dominated by one donor could run afoul of disclosure laws, according to Larry Noble, the former top lawyer for the Federal Election Commission. Under the rules, political ads must include disclosures about who funded them. Noble said election law would require groups funded by one person to list that donor’s name, not just the name of the PAC – though he couldn’t recall the FEC addressing such a case.
Naming the super PAC instead of the donor in the ad, Noble said, also allows the groups to delay disclosing where their money comes from until the next FEC filing date – potentially weeks after the ad runs.
“It defeats the purpose of the law to allow someone to hide behind a super PAC if they are the only funder,” Noble said.
“They want to make it more authoritative, like there’s more support. It looks better to say the ad is from Americans for Good Government than from John Smith… That just makes a mockery of the law.”
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source. 

ROBERT FATURECHI

Robert Faturechi covers campaign finance.
Before joining ProPublica, he was a reporter at The Los Angeles Times, where his work exposed inmate abuse, cronyism, secret cop cliques and wrongful jailings at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. In 2013, he used an unprecedented cache of confidential personnel records to show the agency knowingly hired dozens of cops with histories of serious misconduct. His stories helped lead to sweeping reforms at the nation’s largest jail system, federal indictments of deputies and the resignation of the sheriff.
Before working at The Times, Faturechi was a reporter at The Sacramento Bee. He grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from UCLA in 2008. He now lives in San Francisco.



    Baltimore Looting


    The Real Looting of Baltimore...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js6vDZ8NPfM&feature=em-subs_digest



    U.S. Terror

    Report: 1.3 Million Lives Lost In US War On Terror

    Above: Victims of a February, 2012 US air strike that killed 8 children in Kapisa, Afghanistan.

    Physicians for Social Responsibility releases startling analysis of the death and destruction inflicted upon Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan from the “War on Terror” in Body Count

    On March 19, 2015–the 12th anniversary of the onset of our country’s ill-fated military intervention in Iraq–Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) is releasing the latest edition of Body Count for North American distribution.
    The pdf of Body Count is available for download here:www.psr.org/bodycount
    The report, authored by members and colleagues of the German affiliate of the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), is a comprehensive account of the vast and continuing human toll of the various “Wars on Terror” conducted in the name of the American people since the events of September 11, 2001.
    This publication highlights the difficulties in defining outcomes as it compares evaluations of war deaths in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Even so, the numbers are horrific.  The number of Iraqis killed during and since the 2003 U.S. invasion have been assessed at one million, which represents 5% of the total population of Iraq.  This does not include deaths among the three million refugees subjected to privations.
    Dr. h.c. Hans-C. von Sponeck, UN Assistant Secretary General & UN Humanitarian
    Coordinator for Iraq (1998-2000) calls the report, “a powerful aide mémoire of their legal and moral responsibility to hold perpetrators accountable.”
    Body Count takes a clear and objective look at the various and often contradictory–reports of mortality in conflicts directed by the U.S. and allied forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The result is a fuller picture of the devastation and lethality to civilian non-combatants throughout these regions. Unfortunately, these deaths have been effectively hidden from our collective consciousness and consciences by political leaders seeking to pursue military solutions to complex global issues with little, if any, accountability.
    At a time when our nation is once again contemplating new and expanded military operations in Iraq and Syria, Body Count underscores the scope of human destruction that helps fuel the widespread anger at the Coalition Forces. It similarly provides the context to understand the rise of brutal forces such as ISIS thriving in the wake of our leaders’ failures. After an estimated cost of at least three trillion dollars over a decade of warfare, we need to fully account for our responsibility and learn the appropriate lessons to avoid a tragic exacerbation of the explosive situation we face today.
    Download the report at www.psr.org/bodycount.
    Contact: Tim Takaro, MD, MPH, MS
    Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences
    Simon Fraser University
    778-782-7186  ttakaro@sfu.ca 

    Ukraine 137

    The May 2nd Odessa Massacre: Why Obama’s Coup-Regime Still Runs Ukraine

    Global Research, May 01, 2015
    odessa tragedy

    The May 2nd Ukrainian massacre of anti-regime pamphleteers last year at the Odessa Trade Unions Building, burning these pamphleteers alive there, was crucial to the Obama Administration’s solidification of its control over Ukraine. That massacre was designed to, and it did, terrorize the residents in all areas of Ukraine which had voted overwhelmingly for the man whom Obama had just ousted, Viktor Yanukovych. Especially in the Donbass region, Yanokovych had received 90%+ of the votes. In Odessa, he had received three-quarters of the votes. (Later will be explained why this terror against the residents of such regions was necessary for Obama’s purpose of solidifying his control over Ukraine’s government.)
    So, the shocking methods of executing these people, and its being done in public and with no blockage of video images being recorded of these events by their many witnesses, and with the newly-installed Obama government in Kiev doing nothing whatsoever to prosecute any of these horrific murderers, there was a clear message being sent to the people who had voted for Yanukovych: If you resist the new authorities in any way, this is how you will be treated by them. This is how you will be treated (and that video was posted to the Internet by the perpetrators and their supporters, by headlining, “48 Russian Subversives Burned To Death In Fire At Trade Unions Building Fire In Odessa,” so that any other ‘Russian Subversives’ would have no doubt. However, those victims’ identities were subsequently published, and all of the victims were actually Odessa locals, none were Russians. The perpetrators were racist fascists, after all; and, so, being a ‘Russian’ meant, to them, being from a hated ethnicity, not necessarily being a citizen of Russia.) Terror was the obvious purpose here, and Obama was behind it, but nazis were in front of it, and they were proud of their handiwork — proud enough to film it and then to display it to the public.
    If the President that you had voted for were subsequently to be overthrown in an extremely bloody coup — or even if it had happened in an authentic revolution — then how would you feel? And, if, two months later, people who were peacefully printing and distributing flyers against the illegally installed replacement regime were publicly treated this way, then would you want to be ruled by that regime?
    Yanukovych had been elected in 2010 in an election that was declared free and fair by international observers; and, furthermore,according to wikipedia, ”All exit polls conducted during the final round of voting reported a win for Viktor Yanukovych over Yulia Tymoshenko.[162][163][164].” But, starting in Spring of 2013, which was as soon as Obama got into position all of his key foreign-affairs appointees for his second Presidential term, after the 2012 U.S. election, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine immediately started organizing, for Maidan square in Kiev, public demonstrations to bring Yanukovych down, and they placed at the head of this operation the co-founder of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, Andriy Parubiy, a man who had long studied Hitler’s methods of political organization. The troops, actually mercenaries, that provided the snipers who fired down onto the demonstrators and police in Maidan square in Kiev in February 2014 and pretended to be from Yanukovych’s security forces, were trained not by Parubiy but instead by Dmitriy Yarosh, who was the head of Ukraine’s other large racist-fascist, or nazi, organization, the Right Sector, whose CIA-and-oligarch-backed army numbered probably between 7,000 and 10,000. Yarosh selected the best of them for this operation. Whereas Parubiy was the main political organizer and trainer of Ukraine’s far-right, Yarosh was the main military organizer and trainer of Ukraine’s far-right.
    So, Obama’s operation to oust Yanukovych was fully dependent upon Ukraine’s far-right, which was the only nazi movement that still retained deep and strong roots anywhere in Europe after World War II. Obama built his takeover of Ukraine upon people like this. As is clear there, they were very well trained. Yarosh had been training them for more than a decade. (He had been doing it even prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union.) Yarosh had carefully studied successful coups; he knew how to do it. Just as Obama had very skillfully selected his political campaign team for his 2008 White House run, he very carefully selected his American team for what would become the chief feature of his second-term foreign policy: his war against Russia, central to which was his campaign to install rabid haters of Russia into control of Ukraine, right next door to Russia (in the hope of ultimately placing missiles there, against Russia). He had groomed Dick Cheney’s former foreign-affairs advisor Victoria Nuland as the spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s State Department (Nuland and Clinton were also personal friends of each other, so she was a skillful choice for this post), and then he boosted Nuland in the second term to the State Department post which oversaw all policymaking on Ukraine. Likewise Obama boosted Geoffrey Pyatt into the Ambassadorship in Ukraine, as the operative there to carry out Nuland’s instructions. Nuland made the decision to base the Maidan demonstrations upon the political skill of Paribuy and the paramilitary muscle of Yarosh. They headed her Ukrainian team.
    Wikipedia says of Parubiy, and of Obama’s other Ukrainian operatives:
    Parubiy co-led the Orange Revolution in 2004.[5][11] In the 2007 parliamentary elections he was voted into theUkrainian parliament on an Our Ukraine–People’s Self-Defense Bloc ticket. He then became a member of the deputy group that would later become For Ukraine!.[5] Parubiy stayed with Our Ukraine and became a member of its political council.[12]
    In February 2010 Parubiy asked the European Parliament to reconsider its negative reaction to former Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko’s decision to award Stepan Bandera, the leader of the [racist-fascist] Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the title of Hero of Ukraine.[13]
    In early February 2012 Parubiy left Our Ukraine because their “views diverged”.[14] In 2012 he was re-elected into parliament on the party list of ”Fatherland”.[15] [Yulia Tymoshenko heads the Fatherland Party; and she had been Obama’s choice to become the next President of Ukraine, but she was too far-right for even the far-right voters of northwestern Ukraine, so Poroshenko won instead.]
    From December 2013 to February 2014 Parubiy was a commandant of Euromaidan.[16] He was coordinator of thevolunteer security corps for the mainstream protesters.[17] He was then appointed Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine.[6] This appointed was approved by (then) new Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on June 16, 2014.[18]
    As Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Parubiy oversaw the “anti–terrorist” operation againstpro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.[19]
    Working directly under Parubiy in that “anti-terrorist operation” or “ATO,” was Yarosh, who in an interview with Newsweek, said that he has “been training paramilitary troops for almost 25 years,” and that his “divisions are constantly growing all over Ukraine, but over 10,000 people for sure.”
    On May 14th of last year, there appeared, at Oriental Review, an important news report, “Bloodbath in Odessa Guided by Interim Rulers of Ukraine,” which described the roles of Yarosh, and of these others. It opened: “The information provided below was obtained from an insider in one of Ukraine’s law-enforcement agencies, who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.” It said:
    “Ten days before the tragedy a secret meeting was held in Kiev, chaired by the incumbent president Olexander Turchinov, to prepare a special operation in Odessa. Present were minister of internal affairs Arsen Avakov, the head of the Ukrainian Security Service Valentin Nalivaychenko, and the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Andriy Parubiy. Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskiy, the Kiev-appointed head of regional administration of the Dnepropetrovsk region, was consulted in regard to the operation.
    During that meeting Arsen Avakov has reportedly came up with the idea of using football hooligans, known as “ultras,” in the operation. Ever since his time as the head of the Kharkov regional administration he has worked closely with the fans leaders, whom he continued to sponsor even fromhis new home in Italy.
    Kolomoisky temporarily delivered his private “Dnieper-1” Battalion under the command of law-enforcement officials in Odessa and also authorized a cash payment of $5,000 for “each pro-Russian separatist” killed during the special operation.
    Mykola Volvov was wanted by the Ukrainian police since 2012 for fraud.
    A couple of days before the operation in Odessa Andriy Parubiy brought dozens of bullet-proof vests to local ultra-nationalists. This video shows an episode of handing the vests to the local Maidan activists in Odessa. Take note of the person who receives the load. He is Mykola Volkov, a local hard-core criminal who would be repeatedly screened during the assault on Trade Unionist House gun-shooting at the people and reporting about the “incident” by phone to an official in Kiev.
    Preparations
    Ultranationalist militants from the extremist Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA-UNSO), who could be recognized by their red armbands, were also used during the operation. They were assigned a key role in the staging of the provocations: they masqueraded as the defenders of the tent city on Kulikovo Field, and then lured its occupants into the House of Trade Unions to be slaughtered.
    Fifteen roadblocks were set up outside of Odessa, secured by militants under the personal command of Kolomoisky’s “Dnieper-1” Battalion, as well as Right Sector’s thugs from Dnepropetrovsk and the western regions of Ukraine. In addition, two military units from the Self-Defense of Maidan arrived in Odessa, under the command of the acting head of the administration of the president, Sergey Pashinsky – the same man who was caught with a sniper rifle in the trunk of his car on Feb. 18 on Independence Square (Maidan) in Kiev. Pashinsky later claimed that he had not been fully informed about the plans for the operation and had dispatched his men only to “protect the people of Odessa.” Thus, there were a total of about 1,400 fighters from other regions of Ukraine in the vicinity at the time – thus countering the idea that there were “residents of Odessa” who burned down the House of Trade Unions.
    Deputy chief of Odessa police and principle coordinator of the operation Dmitry Fucheji mysteriously dissappeared soon after the tradegy in Odessa.
    The role of the Odessa police forces in the operation was personally directed by the head of the regional police, Petr Lutsyuk, and his deputy Dmitry Fucheji. Lutsyuk was assigned the task of neutralizing Odessa’s regional governor, Vladimir Nemirovsky, to prevent him from putting together an independent strategy that could disrupt the operation. Fucheji led the militants right to Greek Square where he was allegedly “wounded” (in order to evade responsibility for subsequent events).
    The operation was originally scheduled for May 2 – the day of a soccer match, which would justify the presence of a large number of sports fans (“ultras”) downtown and would also mean there would be a minimal number of Odessa residents on the streets who were not involved in the operation, since the majority of the city’s population would be out of town enjoying their May Day holidays.
    It should also be noted that Kolomoysky himself was directly connected to the U.S. White House.
    If not for this horrific massacre, then the voters in the anti-coup regions would have remained inside the Ukrainian electorate, participants in the May 25th Presidential election to succeed Yanukovych as Ukraine’s new President: they would have been Ukrainian voters because the public sentiment in those regions still was not yet predominantly for separating from Ukraine; it was instead for the creation of a federal system that would have granted Donbass, Odessa, and the other anti-coup areas, some degree of autonomy. But that way, with the moderating influence of the voters in the far southeast, the resulting national government wouldn’t have been rabidly anti-Russian, and so wouldn’t have been, like the present one is, obsessed to kill Russians and to join NATO, for a NATO war against Russia. Obama needed to get rid of those voters. He needed them not to participate in the 25 May 2014 election. The May 2nd massacre was the way to do that. Here was the electoral turnout in the 25 May Ukrainian Presidential election. As you can see, almost all of the voters in that election were located in the parts of Ukraine that had voted overwhelmingly for Yulia Tymoshenko in the 2010 election, against Yanukovych.
    Obama did his best to get the nazi queen Tymoshenko elected as Ukraine’s President; but, now that she was publicly and openly campaigning as the rabid anti-Russian that she had always been, and now that even many Ukrainian conservatives had qualms about going to war against Russia, since there was now so much political rhetoric favoring doing that, Poroshenko won, Tymoshenko lost. Poroshenko had played his cards just right: having been a supporter of the Maidan and of the overthrow of Yanukovych but not publicly associated with the nazis. He was even one of the people who informed the EU’s investigator that the coup was a coup, no authentic revolution.
    Publicly, Poroshenko gave no hint that he knew that Yanukovych had been framed for the February sniper-attacks that had been organized by the U.S. White House and that the overthrow had been a coup. In fact, on May 6th, just days after the massacre, and less than a month before the 2014 Presidential election, Poroshenko said, “Proof was presented at the Verkhovna Rada’s session behind closed doors today that what happened at the House of Unions can be called a terrorist attack.” (This had to be “behind closed doors” because it was fictitious and thus needed to be blocked from being examined by the public.) By that time, the polls already showed that he was going to win the election, and he knew that his only real audience was the man sitting in the U.S. White House.
    Obama didn’t get the more overt anti-Russian President that he had wanted, but he still controls Ukraine. The installation by Nuland of Arseniy Yatsenyuk as the ‘temporary’ new Prime Minister to lead Ukraine after the coup, until a new President would be elected on May 25th, turned out to be permanent, instead of temporary. And Petro Poroshenko can’t do anything that Obama doesn’t want him to do. So: Obama still remains the virtual Emperor of Ukraine.
    The people of Ukraine shouldn’t praise or blame either their Prime Minister or their (perhaps merely nominal) President for what has been happening in their country after the coup; they should instead praise or blame those men’s master: Barack Obama. He’s the person who made Yatsenyuk the Prime Minister, and who controls Poroshenko even though he didn’t prefer him over Tymoshenko.
    Ukraine is just part of the American Empire now. Any Ukrainian who doesn’t recognize that would have to be a fool. It’s the outright nazi part of the American Empire, but it’s part of the American Empire nonetheless. Obama is the first U.S. President to install a racist-fascist, or nazi, regime, anywhere; and he did it in Ukraine, which has long been the ripest place in the world for doing that sort of thing. The May 2nd massacre was an important part of the entire operation. This is why that important massacre is ignored as much as it can be, in the U.S.
    It’s important history, but it’s history that 99% of Americans are blocked from knowing. So: pass this article along to everyone you know (and, via facebook etc., even to some people you don’t know); and they, too, will then have access to the documentation that’s linked-to here, just as you did.