The Ukrainian crisis and Europe – the opinion of experts

January 10, 2023

Source

by Batko Milacic

Since the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, we have been bombarded with mass information and opinions about the war and Europe’s attitude towards it. As someone who deals with geopolitics, I carefully followed the conferences and debates of European experts and politicians and their arguments. That is exactly why I would recommend the online conference and debate that was held on January 5th. The information presented in the debate is very interesting for anyone dealing with the Ukrainian crisis and European policy towards the crisis.

Hansjörg MÜLLER (former member of Bundestag from AfD): Training soldiers makes Germany participant of the war. A Bundestag council stated that Russia would be right if attacking Germany in the framework of international law, because Germany started participating in anti-Russian aggression. Treating Ukrainian soldiers in German hospitals is a good sign of humanity. Sending weapons and training soldiers has nothing to do with humanity. It is act of aggression of war. Regarding the peace opposition in Germany: about 40 percent of German citizens do not believe the media propaganda that Russia started the war. Every history has its prehistory. The war did not start 24.2.2022, but six days earlier, when Ukraine started to shell Donbass 10 times more than before. The prehistory for that is the illegal coup on Maidan, which was financed and operated by the Americans. In Bratislava conference NATO drew a red line where Baltic States, Ukraine and Belarus should be dragged into NATO. All this started in the beginning of the 20th century, when the Anglo-Saxons realised that if the German empire develops further, there will be a power independent of Anglo-Saxon control of seaways, which was the initial spark of the WWI. The ongoing crisis is nothing more than continuation of the ongoing Anglo-Saxon aggression against Germany and Russia for more than 120 years. Land-Lease of 1941 was renewed in 2022. Who provoked this war? It is the Anglo-American weapons industry. There will be no regime change in Russia. The main questions is: who has bigger warehouses and production of weapons. When Russia wins, it will be a change for the new financial system and a big blew for the US.

Patrick POPPEL (geopolitical expert from Austria): Austria is part of the West in this conflict and supporting the interest of NATO. NATO is supporting Ukraine. Austria is a neutral country by constitutional law but in practice not. Also during the pandemics, many politicians worked against the law and the constitution of Austria. People in our government and the media are not neutral. Neutrality is the special weapon of Austria. This neutrality was given to us by Russia, because SovietUnion liberated us. Austria was kept outside NATO and Warsaw Pact and given a constitution of neutrality. Supporting Ukraine is a big mistake because Austria is loosing the reputation of neutral country. When Russian special operation started, many people and political groups called for Austria joining NATO. This was cancelled after many people do not agree with this. There is very bad atmosphere against Russia in Austria. Even after the sanctions there was a big dialogue with Russia. We have to fight against propaganda. We have to show people the truth to have future with Russia. There are many criminals among the refugees and some of them are very rich. Refugee story from Ukraine is like all refugee stories: a big lie. Russia will win this war. But Austria is a looser in this war. Because we have joined the wrong side. Because our mission is to be neutral and a place of dialogue.

Gunnar LINDEMANN (Berlin regional parliament member from AfD): Since the Maidan Germany has not been a neutral country. German politicians were at the Maidan and talked to people at Maidan. There was a revolution from the outside, from NATO countries. This was the time when the war in Donbass started. Since than about 50 000 people were killed in Donbass. They made Minsk agreements with Germany and France, but in fact Ukraine did not keep Minsk agreements.

Because most of the population in Donbass is ethnic Russian, the Russian Federation is helping Donbass people in the conflict. The war did not start in 2022, the war started in 2014. Germany is taking part in the conflict. AfD is the only German party that does not want to send weapons to Ukraine. There are up to 1 million Ukrainians coming to Germany, and they are alowed to stay and get money from German government. Until November 2021, 85 000 people from Ukraine came to Berlin as refugees, only a thousand Ukrainians in Berlin are working. Germany has no place for more refugees. There are lots of Ukrainian men among the refugees as well. Lots of Roma people are coming as Ukrainian refugees but in reality they are from the Balkans. Also thousands of black people come from Ukraine as refugees calling themselves ”students”. EU is paying for the transportation of wounded soldiers to German hospitals. Treatment of Ukrainian soldiers is paid by the German health insurance. As long as these parties are in power, German will send more weapons, even for 20 years. If government changes in Ukraine, we will stop sending weapons. But more important is government change in the US. Maybe the USA loses the interest to fight war in Ukraine. The conflict in Ukraine is possible to solve only in diplomatic way. We have to start diplomatic initiative. We need friendship with Russia.

The entire conference can be viewed at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdxjHrkfsYU

Author: Batko Milacic – analyst and historian from Montenegro

Betrayal (Andrei Martyanov)

September 11, 2022

Please visit Andrei’s website: https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/
and support him here: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=60459185

While I have a very different take on 9/11, Martyanov, again, is spot on.  Highly recommended!

OPEC to EU: No Alternative to Russian Oil

April 12 2022

By Staff, Agencies

Current and future sanctions on Russia could spawn one of the worst oil supply shocks in history, OPEC Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo warned EU officials on Monday, adding that it would be impossible to replace the volume of oil lost in such an event.

Some seven million barrels of Russian oil per day are leaving the world market as a result of sanctions and other restrictions on Russian trading, Barkindo explained.

The OPEC official also told the EU that the current volatility in the market is due to “non-fundamental factors” beyond OPEC’s control and that it is the responsibility of the EU to promote a “realistic” approach to energy transition.

The EU has announced that it plans to join the US and UK in instituting an embargo on Russian energy products. However, unlike the US and UK, Europe imports a majority of its energy supplies from Russia, and experts have warned that attempting to cut off the supply could have catastrophic results.

In particular, Germany is anticipating the collapse of entire industries, while the head of Austrian energy giant OMV has declared it would be “impossible” for his country to quit buying Russian gas.

While the US has promised to step up and fill the gaps with its more expensive liquefied natural gas exports, most of Europe’s LNG terminals are already operating at capacity, meaning there would be no place to store the fuel. Other countries are eager to use the crisis as an opening to push into renewable fuels.

Nevertheless, the European Parliament demanded last week an immediate and total embargo on Russian imports of oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear fuel, and it is expected to have a significant negative impact on European standards of living if followed through.

Some countries, such as Hungary and Slovakia, have made clear they plan to ignore the ban in the interests of self-preservation, though others have warned their citizens to tighten their belts and get ready for lean times ahead.

Oil and gas aren’t the only commodities whose supply is drying up amid the war in Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine together produce about a third of the world’s wheat exports, and both countries are also major exporters of sunflower oil and fertilizer. As a result, food prices have hit historic highs, and many countries and NGOs are warning of food shortages looming in the near future.

A Brief Examination of Some Facts Related to Mass Vaccination

 BY GILAD ATZMON

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By Gilad Atzmon

The case of Israel, leading the world by far in the mass vaccination contest, doesn’t leave much maneuvering room for skeptics. Since Israel launched its vast vaccination campaign in December, it has been witnessing an exponential rise in COVID-19 cases and deaths. By now, the British Mutant has become Israel’s dominant COVID strain. Israel’s health system is on the brink of collapse.

In my article Guinea Pigs United I pointed out that the rise in cases and deaths correlates with the distribution of vaccines. In Israel, the Orthodox Jewish communities that were vaccinated en masse saw COVID cases rise 16-fold, while Israeli Arabs who at large refrained from vaccination saw numbers of COVID cases dropping sharply.

But Israel is not alone. Some other states have followed a similar path and their situation is becoming as catastrophic as the crisis we witness in the Jewish State. 

I would have loved to believe that it is not too late for Britain to postpone the current mass vaccination campaign and closely examine the possible correlation between mass vaccination and mutants.  For those who wonder, I am not against vaccines or modern medical practices, but I do contend that before a nation decides to inject a new substance into its muscle, it may want to verify what this substance is and what are the exact implications involved. It is crucial to verify, for instance, whether the rise in lethal mutations that we have seen in Britain is related to mass vaccination and the vaccine trials that have been taking place in the kingdom since the summer.  The rapid change in the age of COVID-19 cases which we see in Israel and Britain also correlates with mass vaccination. Do we know what are the implications of vaccines on pregnant women or embryos?

It is hardly a secret that those who seem to be enthusiastic about the vaccines are also claiming to be in favour of ‘good science’ or even ‘real’ science as they often refer to it. The statistical facts that are related to mass vaccination are not very promising. Examining the situation in the countries that are engaged in mass vaccination such as Israel, Britain, the USA and the UAE reveal that these countries witnessed a clear decline in COVID cases and deaths during late November and early December. However, just a few days after those countries launched their vaccination campaigns, the numbers of COVID cases and consequently deaths went through the roof.

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 In comparison, you should also examine the case of Britain’s neighbours such as France, Belgium and Holland. Those countries are subject to similar climate, urban conditions, and demography, yet COVID’s curve in these countries is completely the opposite: COVID deaths and cases that were in decline since mid-November, early December are still dropping until now.  None of these countries saw a sharp rise in cases, let alone deaths, in the given period (December, January).

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 As I was writing these lines I was informed that Portugal is also facing a COVID crisis. A brief examination of its latest data reveals that its COVID curve is identical to Britain and Israel. I obviously assumed that the current sharp rise in COVID cases is somehow related to the vaccine. A quick internet check revealed that Portugal started its mass vaccination campaign on 27 December. As you can see in the graph below, until that date the numbers of COVID cases per day were in clear decline. Yet, 3 days after the mass vaccination campaign started the numbers of cases started to grow exponentially. Portugal’s health system is now on the verge of collapse. Its situation is identical with other countries that favoured the mass vaccination path. 

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On Optimism

 Both British and Israeli governments report almost once a day about some ‘positive signs’ that may suggest that the ‘end of the pandemic’ is just behind the corner. These news are usually supported by claims about a ‘decline in cases.’ Needless to mention that reports on the ground usually contradict these optimistic suggestions.  But since we are in a scientific mode, let’s examine the ‘statistics.’

 A quick glance at British and Israeli ‘numbers’ reveal that the numbers of new cases in late January are in sharp decline, and this seems to be positive news,  yet the number of daily deaths keep climbing. This is very worrying.

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However, a quick examination of other European and Middle Eastern COVID statistics in countries such as Austria, France, Germany and Jordan reveals that the graphs representing numbers of new cases and daily deaths are almost identical in shape. How do we then explain the peculiar anomaly that is reported in Israel and Britain: a ‘decline’ in cases on the one hand, a sharp exponential rise in deaths on the other?

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 One (clumsy) possible explanation is that in the mass vaccinated countries less people are contracting COVID, yet for those who do the virus is far deadlier. This would mean that that if the vaccine is producing some positive results for the vaccinated (such as immunity), the general impact on the whole of society is pretty devastating, the number of deaths is growing rapidly.

 Another explanation which I believe is far more likely is that both the British and Israeli governments are conducting less tests. This obviously leads to a reduction in the number of new verified cases. It may look good in the Guardian or the Jewish Chronicle’s headlines but unfortunately it doesn’t stop the disease or its lethal impact.  

 In Israel, mass vaccination was Bibi’s genius political ploy, except that it didn’t work very well (so far). It is more than likely that Trump also gambled on a vaccine being approved ahead of the election.  As we know, Pfizer actually announced its ‘success’ very soon after the election. Needless to mention that Boris Johnson shares one or two features with Bibi and Trump.  It is more than likely that in the USA, Israel and Britain, mass vaccination was unleashed as a political tool. Peculiarly, it is the progressive and leftist crowds who are most enthusiastic about the vaccines delivered to them by the most outlandish right wing political icons of our time.

What is it that drives certain nations to morph into testing grounds with some possible grave implications? What is it that drives some nations to the vaccine yet pushes others to be vigilant and suspicious? I will try to address these crucial questions in my next paper.

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تفاصيل الهجوم المسلح في وسط العاصمة النمساوية فيينا

المصدر

شهدت العاصمة النمساوية فيينا مساء يوم الاثنين، هجوما مسلحا راح ضحيته 7 أشخاص على الأقل، فيما أصيب العشرات.

وفي ما يلي تسلسل الأحداث:

– إطلاق أعيرة نارية في وسط العاصمة فيينا.

– وسائل إعلام نمساوية: هجوم مسلح يستهدف معبدا يهوديا.

– الشرطة تدعو لتجنب جميع الأماكن العامة أو المواصلات.

– مقتل شخص في الهجوم.

– الشرطة تعلن إصابة ضابط بجروح خطيرة في إطلاق نار في وسط فيينا.

– اعتقال مشتبه به بشأن إطلاق النار.

– أحد المهاجمين يفجر نفسه.

– مقتل أحد عناصر المجموعة المسلحة.

– الداخلية النمساوية لا تستبعد أن يكون إطلاق النار وسط فيينا هجوما إرهابيا.

– انتشار كثيف للشرطة في فيينا.

– وزير الداخلية: نعتقد أن هجوم فيينا نفذه عدة أشخاص.

– وزير الداخلية: نعتقد أن إطلاق النار في فيينا هجوم إرهابي.

– الشرطة: هجوم فيينا شمل 6 مواقع.

– الداخلية: لا يمكن تأكيد أو استبعاد ارتداء أحد المهاجمين حزاما ناسفا.

– وزير الداخلية: عملية ملاحقة الإرهابيين المحتملين مستمرة في فيينا.

– الجيش النمساوي يشارك في عملية خاصة في وسط فيينا ويتولى حماية مرافق العاصمة.

– الشرطة تلقي القبض على 4 مشاركين في تنفيذ الهجوم.

– الشرطة تنفي صحة الأنباء عن اختطاف رهائن.

– المستشار النمساوي سيباستيان كورتس: الشرطة تتصرف بحزم مع المهاجمين ونحن نمر بساعات صعبة.

– مستشار النمسا: الشرطة تتخذ إجراءات حاسمة ضد المسؤولين عن الهجوم الإرهابي الشنيع.

– مستشار النمسا: منفذو هجوم فيينا مزودون جيدا بالأسلحة وتلقوا تدريبات على مستوى عال.

– القوات الخاصة تواصل ملاحقة مشاركين في تنفيذ الهجوم.

– وزير الداخلية: مهاجمو فيينا مسلحون وخطرون وطلقاء.

– حسابات على “تويتر” تتوعد الشرطة النمساوية بهجمات أخرى.

– تشكيل مركز عمليات بمشاركة المستشار النمساوي على خلفية هجوم فيينا.

– رئيس مستشفيات مدينة فيينا يؤكد إصابة 15 شخصا في الهجوم المسلح.

– وزير الداخلية: سقوط عدد من القتلى في هجوم فيينا.

– وزير الداخلية: واحد على الأقل من المهاجمين لا يزال طليقا

– وزير الداخلية: الأطفال غير مطالبين بالذهاب للمدارس يوم الثلاثاء.

– مسؤول في وزارة الداخلية: مقتل مهاجم في إطلاق الرصاص في فيينا.

– تعزيز عمليات الفحص والتفتيش على الحدود.

– المتحدث باسم وزارة الداخلية النمساوية، هارالد سوروس، يعلن مقتل 3 أشخاص وإصابة 15 آخرين، في الهجوم.

– صحيفة “فالتر” النمساوية تقول إن منفذ هجوم فيينا من أصل ألباني وعمره 20 عاما.

– مستشار النمسا: منفذو هجوم فيينا مجهزون جيدا بالأسلحة وتلقوا تدريبات على مستوى عال.

– وزير داخلية النمسا: “إرهابي إسلامي” نفذ هجوم فيينا.

– وزير الداخلية النمساوي: مقتل 4 أشخاص جراء الهجوم في فيينا

دروس التاريخ التي يجب أن نستخلصها من أجل المستقبل العادل

ألكسندر زاسبكين

في 22 حزيران 1941 بدأت الحرب الوطنية العظمى للاتحاد السوفياتي ضدّ ألمانيا الفاشية وحلفائها. واليوم نتذكر هذا التاريخ لنحيي بطولة الشعب السوفياتي الذي وقف صفاً واحداً ضدّ العدوان، مؤمناً بحتمية هزيمة المعتدي الذي كان يسعى إلى إبادة شعوب الاتحاد السوفياتي على اختلاف قومياتها والاستيلاء على أراضيها. كما نتمسك بالحفاظ على صدق الرواية والوقائع التاريخية لتطورات الأوضاع ما قبل الحرب وأثناءها وبعدها ولا نسمح بتزوير الحقيقة الذي يجري خلال الفترة الأخيرة في أميركا ودول أوروبية.

يحاول هؤلاء وضع ألمانيا الهتلرية والاتحاد السوفياتي في كفة واحدة لجهة تحميلهما معاً وعلى حدّ سواء المسؤولية عن الحرب. وفي الواقع إذ يشوّهون صورة الاتحاد السوفياتي التاريخية فهم يقصدون استهداف روسيا حالياً. والعودة إلى التاريخ تفيدنا أنه في عام 1932 وافقت الولايات المتحدة وإنكلترا وفرنسا على إعادة تسليح ألمانيا وفي عام 1938 تمّ «توحيد» ألمانيا والنمسا ووقعت بريطانيا وفرنسا معاهدة ميونخ مع ألمانيا التي أدّت إلى تقسيم تشيكوسلوفاكيا بمشاركة بولندا وتعزيز القطاع الصناعي العسكري الألماني، وكانت الفكرة الأساسية لكلّ هذه المناورات تشجيع ألمانيا الهتلرية للهجوم على الاتحاد السوفياتي. وتؤكد ذلك حالة «الحرب الزائفة» أيّ عدم تحرك قوات فرنسا وبريطانيا في بداية الحرب العالمية الثانية حتى شنّت ألمانيا هجوماً واسعاً على بلجيكا وهولندا وفرنسا في أيار 1940. أما الاتحاد السوفياتي فخلال سنوات بقي يطرح مبادرات خاصة بالأمن المشترك في أوروبا وتشكيل التحالف ضدّ هتلر، حتى وقع مضطراً في آب 1939 معاهدة عدم الاعتداء مع ألمانيا بعدما فشلت كلّ المبادرات لتحصين المواجهة بموقف موحد. وفرضت عقد هذه المعاهدة ظروف اندلاع الأعمال العسكرية بين الاتحاد السوفياتي واليابان وكانت بذلك خطوة ذكية حمت المصالح الوطنية للاتحاد السوفياتي بتأجيل الحرب مع ألمانيا.

لذلك كله كان من المهمّ جداً نشر الرئيس فلاديمير بوتين لمقال بعنوان «75 عاماً من النصر العظيم: مسؤولية مشتركة تجاه التاريخ والمستقبل» الذي يكشف معلومات عن مرحلة قبل الحرب ودروس يجب أن نستخلصها منها. وورد في المقال: «لم تحدث الحرب العالمية الثانية بين عشية وضحاها، ولم تبدأ بشكل غير متوقع أو فجأة. ولم يكن العدوان الألماني على بولندا من العدم. كانت نتيجة عدد من الميول والعوامل للسياسة العالمية في ذلك الوقت. وقعت جميع أحداث ما قبل الحرب في مكانها لتشكل سلسلة قاتلة واحدة. لكن، بلا شك، كانت العوامل الرئيسية التي حدّدت مسبقاً أكبر مأساة في تاريخ البشرية هي أنانية الدول والجبن واسترضاء المعتدي الذي كان يكتسب القوة وعدم استعداد النخب السياسية للبحث عن حلّ وسط».

نعتبر توضيح وقائع الأجواء السياسية وتصرفات الدول التي أدّت إلى اشتعال الحرب العالمية الثانية حاجة ملحّة لأننا نرى سلوكاً متشابهاً في الظروف الدولية الراهنة عندما تحاول الأوساط الغربية الحاكمة أن تفرض إرادتها على شعوب العالم وتحاول إسقاط الأنظمة الشرعية بذريعة «حماية حقوق الإنسان» أو «تأييد الثوار». وتستخدم هذه الأوساط استفزازات ودعاية كاذبة يشارك فيها السياسيون والخبراء والصحافيون الذين يخلقون عالماً افتراضياً موازياً لتضليل الرأي العام العالمي وذلك للحفاظ على الهيمنة بكلّ الطرق الممكنة بما في ذلك عدوان مباشر وتأييد مجموعات إرهابية ومراهنة على فتن طائفية وفوضى وتفكيك الدول وفرض العقوبات الاقتصادية التي تسفر عن تجويع الناس المدنيين.

في عصر أسلحة الدمار الشامل يحتاج العالم إلى تعزيز الاستقرار الاستراتيجي على أساس مبدأ عدم تجزئة الأمن ومشاركة الجميع على قدم المساواة. لكن الولايات المتحدة تنسحب من المعاهدات الرئيسيّة التي تشكل إطاراً قانونياً دولياً في هذا المجال. علاوة على ذلك يجري العمل التخريبي في المنظمات الدولية لوضع «نظام القواعد» التي يخترعها الغرب لمصلحته بديلاً للشرعية الدولية.

اليوم يكرّر الغرب أخطاء الماضي التي أدّت إلى الكارثة العالمية وما أشبه اليوم بالأمس، وقد شهدنا كيف كرّر الغرب خطأ الرهان على النازية مع ألمانيا الهتلرية بالرهان على الإرهاب، خصوصاً في ما شهدناه خلال الأزمة والحرب في سورية، معتقداً أنه سيبقى بمنأى عن الخطر، عندما يترك النيران تشتعل بثوب مَن يصنفهم خصوماً، وفي المرتين النتيجة ذاتها. فالنوم مع الشيطان في السرير ذاته لا يمكن أن يجلب الأمن ولا أن يحقق السلام .

اليوم وقد تزايدت مشاكل العالم وزاد تعقيدها، لا يمكن تجاهل مخاطر انزلاق إلى نهاية تاريخ البشرية نتيجة للنزاع العالمي بسبب تصرّفات غير مسؤولة للمغامرين والمهووسين بأوهام العظمة والتفوق والجشع وأشكال الفوبيا القديمة.

من المطلوب تكثيف الجهود لمواجهة هذا النهج الذي يهدّد مستقبل البشرية. وبهذا الصدد نشير إلى ضرورة توسيع دائرة الدول والقوى السياسية التي تسعى إلى نضج النظام العالمي المتعدّد والمتوازن الذي يؤمن الحقوق المتساوية لأعضاء المجتمع الدولي والالتزام بميثاق الأمم المتحدة. وإذ نتذكر تحالفاً معادياً لهتلر فتطرح روسيا مبادرات بناءة بخصوص جميع مواضيع الأجندة العالمية ابتداء من الاستقرار الاستراتيجي والتعاون في الفضاء والفضاء السيبراني وصولاً إلى تسوية النزاعات الإقليمية ومكافحة الإرهاب. من المعروف أنّ الرئيس فلاديمير بوتين وجه الدعوة لعقد لقاء لرؤساء الدول الخمس الدائمة العضوية في مجلس الأمن الدولي لمناقشة أهم القضايا الراهنة. ونأمل أن تمثل هذه الخطوة نقطة انطلاق لعملية تنقية الأجواء وانتقالاً إلى مرحلة الحوار والتعاون لأن ذلك حاجة ماسة للبشرية كلها التي تعاني من تراكم المشاكل.

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*سفير روسيا الاتحاديّة لدى الجمهورية اللبنانيّة.

US Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 “Victim Nations” Since World War II

By James A. Lucas

Global Research, May 28, 2020

Popular Resistance and Global Research 27 November 2015

First published in November 2015

GR Editor’s Note

Let us put this in historical perspective: the commemoration of the War to End All Wars  acknowledges that 15 million lives were lost in the course of World War I (1914-18).

The loss of life in the second World War (1939-1945) was on a much large scale, when compared to World War I: 60 million lives both military and civilian were lost during World War II. (Four times those killed during World War I).

The largest WWII casualties  were China and the Soviet Union, 26 million in the Soviet Union,  China estimates its losses at approximately 20,000,000 deaths. Ironically, these two countries (allies of the US during WWII) which lost a large share of their population during WWII are now categorized as enemies of America, which are threatening the Western World.  A so-called preemptive war against China and Russia is currently contemplated. 

Germany and Austria lost approximately 8 million people during WWII, Japan lost more than 2.5 million people. The US and Britain respectively lost more than 400,000 lives. 

This carefully researched article by James A. Lucas  documents the more than 20 million lives lost resulting from US led wars, military coups and intelligence ops carried out in the wake of what is euphemistically called the “post-war era” (1945- ). The extensive loss of life in Lebanon,  Syria, Yemen and Libya is not included in this study.

Continuous US led warfare (1945- ): there was no “post-war era“.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 20 2019, November 2019, December 31, 2019

***

After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by an accelerated “war on terrorism.”

But we must continue our efforts to develop understanding and compassion in the world. Hopefully, this article will assist in doing that by addressing the question “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” This theme is developed in this report which contains an estimated numbers of such deaths in 37 nations as well as brief explanations of why the U.S. is considered culpable.

The causes of wars are complex. In some instances nations other than the U.S. may have been responsible for more deaths, but if the involvement of our nation appeared to have been a necessary cause of a war or conflict it was considered responsible for the deaths in it. In other words they probably would not have taken place if the U.S. had not used the heavy hand of its power. The military and economic power of the United States was crucial.

This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.

The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.

But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.

The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.

To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions about other things such as finding lost loved ones, whether to become refugees, and how to survive.

And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.

It is essential that Americans learn more about this topic so that they can begin to understand the pain that others feel. Someone once observed that the Germans during WWII “chose not to know.” We cannot allow history to say this about our country. The question posed above was “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” The answer is: possibly 10,000.

Comments on Gathering These Numbers

Generally speaking, the much smaller number of Americans who have died is not included in this study, not because they are not important, but because this report focuses on the impact of U.S. actions on its adversaries.

An accurate count of the number of deaths is not easy to achieve, and this collection of data was undertaken with full realization of this fact. These estimates will probably be revised later either upward or downward by the reader and the author. But undoubtedly the total will remain in the millions.

The difficulty of gathering reliable information is shown by two estimates in this context. For several years I heard statements on radio that three million Cambodians had been killed under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. However, in recent years the figure I heard was one million. Another example is that the number of persons estimated to have died in Iraq due to sanctions after the first U.S. Iraq War was over 1 million, but in more recent years, based on a more recent study, a lower estimate of around a half a million has emerged.

Often information about wars is revealed only much later when someone decides to speak out, when more secret information is revealed due to persistent efforts of a few, or after special congressional committees make reports

Both victorious and defeated nations may have their own reasons for underreporting the number of deaths. Further, in recent wars involving the United States it was not uncommon to hear statements like “we do not do body counts” and references to “collateral damage” as a euphemism for dead and wounded. Life is cheap for some, especially those who manipulate people on the battlefield as if it were a chessboard.

To say that it is difficult to get exact figures is not to say that we should not try. Effort was needed to arrive at the figures of six million Jews killed during WWII, but knowledge of that number now is widespread and it has fueled the determination to prevent future holocausts. That struggle continues.

The author can be contacted at jlucas511@woh.rr.com

37 VICTIM NATIONS

Afghanistan

The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation. (1,2,3,4)

The Soviet Union had friendly relations its neighbor, Afghanistan, which had a secular government. The Soviets feared that if that government became fundamentalist this change could spill over into the Soviet Union.

In 1998, in an interview with the Parisian publication Le Novel Observateur, Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to President Carter, admitted that he had been responsible for instigating aid to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan which caused the Soviets to invade. In his own words:

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on 24 December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the President in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. (5,1,6)

Brzezinski justified laying this trap, since he said it gave the Soviet Union its Vietnam and caused the breakup of the Soviet Union. “Regret what?” he said. “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?” (7)

The CIA spent 5 to 6 billion dollars on its operation in Afghanistan in order to bleed the Soviet Union. (1,2,3) When that 10-year war ended over a million people were dead and Afghan heroin had captured 60% of the U.S. market. (4)

The U.S. has been responsible directly for about 12,000 deaths in Afghanistan many of which resulted from bombing in retaliation for the attacks on U.S. property on September 11, 2001. Subsequently U.S. troops invaded that country. (4)

Angola

An indigenous armed struggle against Portuguese rule in Angola began in 1961. In 1977 an Angolan government was recognized by the U.N., although the U.S. was one of the few nations that opposed this action. In 1986 Uncle Sam approved material assistance to UNITA, a group that was trying to overthrow the government. Even today this struggle, which has involved many nations at times, continues.

U.S. intervention was justified to the U.S. public as a reaction to the intervention of 50,000 Cuban troops in Angola. However, according to Piero Gleijeses, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University the reverse was true. The Cuban intervention came as a result of a CIA – financed covert invasion via neighboring Zaire and a drive on the Angolan capital by the U.S. ally, South Africa1,2,3). (Three estimates of deaths range from 300,000 to 750,000 (4,5,6)

Argentina: See South America: Operation Condor

Bangladesh: See Pakistan

Bolivia

Hugo Banzer was the leader of a repressive regime in Bolivia in the 1970s. The U.S. had been disturbed when a previous leader nationalized the tin mines and distributed land to Indian peasants. Later that action to benefit the poor was reversed.

Banzer, who was trained at the U.S.-operated School of the Americas in Panama and later at Fort Hood, Texas, came back from exile frequently to confer with U.S. Air Force Major Robert Lundin. In 1971 he staged a successful coup with the help of the U.S. Air Force radio system. In the first years of his dictatorship he received twice as military assistance from the U.S. as in the previous dozen years together.

A few years later the Catholic Church denounced an army massacre of striking tin workers in 1975, Banzer, assisted by information provided by the CIA, was able to target and locate leftist priests and nuns. His anti-clergy strategy, known as the Banzer Plan, was adopted by nine other Latin American dictatorships in 1977. (2) He has been accused of being responsible for 400 deaths during his tenure. (1)

Also see: See South America: Operation Condor

Brazil: See South America: Operation Condor

Cambodia

U.S. bombing of Cambodia had already been underway for several years in secret under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, but when President Nixon openly began bombing in preparation for a land assault on Cambodia it caused major protests in the U.S. against the Vietnam War.

There is little awareness today of the scope of these bombings and the human suffering involved.

Immense damage was done to the villages and cities of Cambodia, causing refugees and internal displacement of the population. This unstable situation enabled the Khmer Rouge, a small political party led by Pol Pot, to assume power. Over the years we have repeatedly heard about the Khmer Rouge’s role in the deaths of millions in Cambodia without any acknowledgement being made this mass killing was made possible by the the U.S. bombing of that nation which destabilized it by death , injuries, hunger and dislocation of its people.

So the U.S. bears responsibility not only for the deaths from the bombings but also for those resulting from the activities of the Khmer Rouge – a total of about 2.5 million people. Even when Vietnam latrer invaded Cambodia in 1979 the CIA was still supporting the Khmer Rouge. (1,2,3)

Also see Vietnam

Chad

An estimated 40,000 people in Chad were killed and as many as 200,000 tortured by a government, headed by Hissen Habre who was brought to power in June, 1982 with the help of CIA money and arms. He remained in power for eight years. (1,2)

Human Rights Watch claimed that Habre was responsible for thousands of killings. In 2001, while living in Senegal, he was almost tried for crimes committed by him in Chad. However, a court there blocked these proceedings. Then human rights people decided to pursue the case in Belgium, because some of Habre’s torture victims lived there. The U.S., in June 2003, told Belgium that it risked losing its status as host to NATO’s headquarters if it allowed such a legal proceeding to happen. So the result was that the law that allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad was repealed. However, two months later a new law was passed which made special provision for the continuation of the case against Habre.

Chile

The CIA intervened in Chile’s 1958 and 1964 elections. In 1970 a socialist candidate, Salvador Allende, was elected president. The CIA wanted to incite a military coup to prevent his inauguration, but the Chilean army’s chief of staff, General Rene Schneider, opposed this action. The CIA then planned, along with some people in the Chilean military, to assassinate Schneider. This plot failed and Allende took office. President Nixon was not to be dissuaded and he ordered the CIA to create a coup climate: “Make the economy scream,” he said.

What followed were guerilla warfare, arson, bombing, sabotage and terror. ITT and other U.S. corporations with Chilean holdings sponsored demonstrations and strikes. Finally, on September 11, 1973 Allende died either by suicide or by assassination. At that time Henry Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State, said the following regarding Chile: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” (1)

During 17 years of terror under Allende’s successor, General Augusto Pinochet, an estimated 3,000 Chileans were killed and many others were tortured or “disappeared.” (2,3,4,5)

Also see South America: Operation Condor

China An estimated 900,000 Chinese died during the Korean War.

For more information, See: Korea.

Colombia

One estimate is that 67,000 deaths have occurred from the 1960s to recent years due to support by the U.S. of Colombian state terrorism. (1)

According to a 1994 Amnesty International report, more than 20,000 people were killed for political reasons in Colombia since 1986, mainly by the military and its paramilitary allies. Amnesty alleged that “U.S.- supplied military equipment, ostensibly delivered for use against narcotics traffickers, was being used by the Colombian military to commit abuses in the name of “counter-insurgency.” (2) In 2002 another estimate was made that 3,500 people die each year in a U.S. funded civilian war in Colombia. (3)

In 1996 Human Rights Watch issued a report “Assassination Squads in Colombia” which revealed that CIA agents went to Colombia in 1991 to help the military to train undercover agents in anti-subversive activity. (4,5)

In recent years the U.S. government has provided assistance under Plan Colombia. The Colombian government has been charged with using most of the funds for destruction of crops and support of the paramilitary group.

Cuba

In the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on April 18, 1961 which ended after 3 days, 114 of the invading force were killed, 1,189 were taken prisoners and a few escaped to waiting U.S. ships. (1) The captured exiles were quickly tried, a few executed and the rest sentenced to thirty years in prison for treason. These exiles were released after 20 months in exchange for $53 million in food and medicine.

Some people estimate that the number of Cuban forces killed range from 2,000, to 4,000. Another estimate is that 1,800 Cuban forces were killed on an open highway by napalm. This appears to have been a precursor of the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991 when U.S. forces mercilessly annihilated large numbers of Iraqis on a highway. (2)

Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire)

The beginning of massive violence was instigated in this country in 1879 by its colonizer King Leopold of Belgium. The Congo’s population was reduced by 10 million people over a period of 20 years which some have referred to as “Leopold’s Genocide.” (1) The U.S. has been responsible for about a third of that many deaths in that nation in the more recent past. (2)

In 1960 the Congo became an independent state with Patrice Lumumba being its first prime minister. He was assassinated with the CIA being implicated, although some say that his murder was actually the responsibility of Belgium. (3) But nevertheless, the CIA was planning to kill him. (4) Before his assassination the CIA sent one of its scientists, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo carrying “lethal biological material” intended for use in Lumumba’s assassination. This virus would have been able to produce a fatal disease indigenous to the Congo area of Africa and was transported in a diplomatic pouch.

Much of the time in recent years there has been a civil war within the Democratic Republic of Congo, fomented often by the U.S. and other nations, including neighboring nations. (5)

In April 1977, Newsday reported that the CIA was secretly supporting efforts to recruit several hundred mercenaries in the U.S. and Great Britain to serve alongside Zaire’s army. In that same year the U.S. provided $15 million of military supplies to the Zairian President Mobutu to fend off an invasion by a rival group operating in Angola. (6)

In May 1979, the U.S. sent several million dollars of aid to Mobutu who had been condemned 3 months earlier by the U.S. State Department for human rights violations. (7) During the Cold War the U.S. funneled over 300 million dollars in weapons into Zaire (8,9) $100 million in military training was provided to him. (2) In 2001 it was reported to a U.S. congressional committee that American companies, including one linked to former President George Bush Sr., were stoking the Congo for monetary gains. There is an international battle over resources in that country with over 125 companies and individuals being implicated. One of these substances is coltan, which is used in the manufacture of cell phones. (2)

Dominican Republic

In 1962, Juan Bosch became president of the Dominican Republic. He advocated such programs as land reform and public works programs. This did not bode well for his future relationship with the U.S., and after only 7 months in office, he was deposed by a CIA coup. In 1965 when a group was trying to reinstall him to his office President Johnson said, “This Bosch is no good.” Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann replied “He’s no good at all. If we don’t get a decent government in there, Mr. President, we get another Bosch. It’s just going to be another sinkhole.” Two days later a U.S. invasion started and 22,000 soldiers and marines entered the Dominican Republic and about 3,000 Dominicans died during the fighting. The cover excuse for doing this was that this was done to protect foreigners there. (1,2,3,4)

East Timor

In December 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor. This incursion was launched the day after U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia where they had given President Suharto permission to use American arms, which under U.S. law, could not be used for aggression. Daniel Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN. said that the U.S. wanted “things to turn out as they did.” (1,2) The result was an estimated 200,000 dead out of a population of 700,000. (1,2)

Sixteen years later, on November 12, 1991, two hundred and seventeen East Timorese protesters in Dili, many of them children, marching from a memorial service, were gunned down by Indonesian Kopassus shock troops who were headed by U.S.- trained commanders Prabowo Subianto (son in law of General Suharto) and Kiki Syahnakri. Trucks were seen dumping bodies into the sea. (5)

El Salvador

The civil war from 1981 to1992 in El Salvador was financed by $6 billion in U.S. aid given to support the government in its efforts to crush a movement to bring social justice to the people in that nation of about 8 million people. (1)
During that time U.S. military advisers demonstrated methods of torture on teenage prisoners, according to an interview with a deserter from the Salvadoran army published in the New York Times. This former member of the Salvadoran National Guard testified that he was a member of a squad of twelve who found people who they were told were guerillas and tortured them. Part of the training he received was in torture at a U.S. location somewhere in Panama. (2)

About 900 villagers were massacred in the village of El Mozote in 1981. Ten of the twelve El Salvadoran government soldiers cited as participating in this act were graduates of the School of the Americas operated by the U.S. (2) They were only a small part of about 75,000 people killed during that civil war. (1)

According to a 1993 United Nations’ Truth Commission report, over 96 % of the human rights violations carried out during the war were committed by the Salvadoran army or the paramilitary deaths squads associated with the Salvadoran army. (3)

That commission linked graduates of the School of the Americas to many notorious killings. The New York Times and the Washington Post followed with scathing articles. In 1996, the White House Oversight Board issued a report that supported many of the charges against that school made by Rev. Roy Bourgeois, head of the School of the Americas Watch. That same year the Pentagon released formerly classified reports indicating that graduates were trained in killing, extortion, and physical abuse for interrogations, false imprisonment and other methods of control. (4)

Grenada

The CIA began to destabilize Grenada in 1979 after Maurice Bishop became president, partially because he refused to join the quarantine of Cuba. The campaign against him resulted in his overthrow and the invasion by the U.S. of Grenada on October 25, 1983, with about 277 people dying. (1,2) It was fallaciously charged that an airport was being built in Grenada that could be used to attack the U.S. and it was also erroneously claimed that the lives of American medical students on that island were in danger.

Guatemala

In 1951 Jacobo Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala. He appropriated some unused land operated by the United Fruit Company and compensated the company. (1,2) That company then started a campaign to paint Arbenz as a tool of an international conspiracy and hired about 300 mercenaries who sabotaged oil supplies and trains. (3) In 1954 a CIA-orchestrated coup put him out of office and he left the country. During the next 40 years various regimes killed thousands of people.

In 1999 the Washington Post reported that an Historical Clarification Commission concluded that over 200,000 people had been killed during the civil war and that there had been 42,000 individual human rights violations, 29,000 of them fatal, 92% of which were committed by the army. The commission further reported that the U.S. government and the CIA had pressured the Guatemalan government into suppressing the guerilla movement by ruthless means. (4,5)

According to the Commission between 1981 and 1983 the military government of Guatemala – financed and supported by the U.S. government – destroyed some four hundred Mayan villages in a campaign of genocide. (4)
One of the documents made available to the commission was a 1966 memo from a U.S. State Department official, which described how a “safe house” was set up in the palace for use by Guatemalan security agents and their U.S. contacts. This was the headquarters for the Guatemalan “dirty war” against leftist insurgents and suspected allies. (2)

Haiti

From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was ruled by Papa Doc Duvalier and later by his son. During that time their private terrorist force killed between 30,000 and 100,000 people. (1) Millions of dollars in CIA subsidies flowed into Haiti during that time, mainly to suppress popular movements, (2) although most American military aid to the country, according to William Blum, was covertly channeled through Israel.

Reportedly, governments after the second Duvalier reign were responsible for an even larger number of fatalities, and the influence on Haiti by the U.S., particularly through the CIA, has continued. The U.S. later forced out of the presidential office a black Catholic priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide, even though he was elected with 67% of the vote in the early 1990s. The wealthy white class in Haiti opposed him in this predominantly black nation, because of his social programs designed to help the poor and end corruption. (3) Later he returned to office, but that did not last long. He was forced by the U.S. to leave office and now lives in South Africa.

Honduras

In the 1980s the CIA supported Battalion 316 in Honduras, which kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of its citizens. Torture equipment and manuals were provided by CIA Argentinean personnel who worked with U.S. agents in the training of the Hondurans. Approximately 400 people lost their lives. (1,2) This is another instance of torture in the world sponsored by the U.S. (3)

Battalion 316 used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations in the 1980s. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves. Declassified documents and other sources show that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy knew of numerous crimes, including murder and torture, yet continued to support Battalion 316 and collaborate with its leaders.” (4)

Honduras was a staging ground in the early 1980s for the Contras who were trying to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. John D. Negroponte, currently Deputy Secretary of State, was our embassador when our military aid to Honduras rose from $4 million to $77.4 million per year. Negroponte denies having had any knowledge of these atrocities during his tenure. However, his predecessor in that position, Jack R. Binns, had reported in 1981 that he was deeply concerned at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations. (5)

Hungary

In 1956 Hungary, a Soviet satellite nation, revolted against the Soviet Union. During the uprising broadcasts by the U.S. Radio Free Europe into Hungary sometimes took on an aggressive tone, encouraging the rebels to believe that Western support was imminent, and even giving tactical advice on how to fight the Soviets. Their hopes were raised then dashed by these broadcasts which cast an even darker shadow over the Hungarian tragedy.“ (1) The Hungarian and Soviet death toll was about 3,000 and the revolution was crushed. (2)

Indonesia

In 1965, in Indonesia, a coup replaced General Sukarno with General Suharto as leader. The U.S. played a role in that change of government. Robert Martens,a former officer in the U.S. embassy in Indonesia, described how U.S. diplomats and CIA officers provided up to 5,000 names to Indonesian Army death squads in 1965 and checked them off as they were killed or captured. Martens admitted that “I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.” (1,2,3) Estimates of the number of deaths range from 500,000 to 3 million. (4,5,6)
From 1993 to 1997 the U.S. provided Jakarta with almost $400 million in economic aid and sold tens of million of dollars of weaponry to that nation. U.S. Green Berets provided training for the Indonesia’s elite force which was responsible for many of atrocities in East Timor. (3)

Iran

Iran lost about 262,000 people in the war against Iraq from 1980 to 1988. (1) See Iraq for more information about that war.

On July 3, 1988 the U.S. Navy ship, the Vincennes, was operating withing Iranian waters providing military support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. During a battle against Iranian gunboats it fired two missiles at an Iranian Airbus, which was on a routine civilian flight. All 290 civilian on board were killed. (2,3)

Iraq

A. The Iraq-Iran War lasted from 1980 to 1988 and during that time there were about 105,000 Iraqi deaths according to the Washington Post. (1,2)

According to Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official, the U.S. provided the Iraqis with billions of dollars in credits and helped Iraq in other ways such as making sure that Iraq had military equipment including biological agents This surge of help for Iraq came as Iran seemed to be winning the war and was close to Basra. (1) The U.S. was not adverse to both countries weakening themselves as a result of the war, but it did not appear to want either side to win.

B: The U.S.-Iraq War and the Sanctions Against Iraq extended from 1990 to 2003.

Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990 and the U.S. responded by demanding that Iraq withdraw, and four days later the U.N. levied international sanctions.

Iraq had reason to believe that the U.S. would not object to its invasion of Kuwait, since U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had told Saddam Hussein that the U.S. had no position on the dispute that his country had with Kuwait. So the green light was given, but it seemed to be more of a trap.

As a part of the public relations strategy to energize the American public into supporting an attack against Iraq the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. falsely testified before Congress that Iraqi troops were pulling the plugs on incubators in Iraqi hospitals. (1) This contributed to a war frenzy in the U.S.

The U.S. air assault started on January 17, 1991 and it lasted for 42 days. On February 23 President H.W. Bush ordered the U.S. ground assault to begin. The invasion took place with much needless killing of Iraqi military personnel. Only about 150 American military personnel died compared to about 200,000 Iraqis. Some of the Iraqis were mercilessly killed on the Highway of Death and about 400 tons of depleted uranium were left in that nation by the U.S. (2,3)

Other deaths later were from delayed deaths due to wounds, civilians killed, those killed by effects of damage of the Iraqi water treatment facilities and other aspects of its damaged infrastructure and by the sanctions.

In 1995 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. reported that U.N sanctions against on Iraq had been responsible for the deaths of more than 560,000 children since 1990. (5)

Leslie Stahl on the TV Program 60 Minutes in 1996 mentioned to Madeleine Albright, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And – and you know, is the price worth it?” Albright replied “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think is worth it.” (4)

In 1999 UNICEF reported that 5,000 children died each month as a result of the sanction and the War with the U.S. (6)

Richard Garfield later estimated that the more likely number of excess deaths among children under five years of age from 1990 through March 1998 to be 227,000 – double those of the previous decade. Garfield estimated that the numbers to be 350,000 through 2000 (based in part on result of another study). (7)

However, there are limitations to his study. His figures were not updated for the remaining three years of the sanctions. Also, two other somewhat vulnerable age groups were not studied: young children above the age of five and the elderly.

All of these reports were considerable indicators of massive numbers of deaths which the U.S. was aware of and which was a part of its strategy to cause enough pain and terror among Iraqis to cause them to revolt against their government.

C: Iraq-U.S. War started in 2003 and has not been concluded

Just as the end of the Cold War emboldened the U.S. to attack Iraq in 1991 so the attacks of September 11, 2001 laid the groundwork for the U.S. to launch the current war against Iraq. While in some other wars we learned much later about the lies that were used to deceive us, some of the deceptions that were used to get us into this war became known almost as soon as they were uttered. There were no weapons of mass destruction, we were not trying to promote democracy, we were not trying to save the Iraqi people from a dictator.

The total number of Iraqi deaths that are a result of our current Iraq against Iraq War is 654,000, of which 600,000 are attributed to acts of violence, according to Johns Hopkins researchers. (1,2)

Since these deaths are a result of the U.S. invasion, our leaders must accept responsibility for them.

Israeli-Palestinian War

About 100,000 to 200,000 Israelis and Palestinians, but mostly the latter, have been killed in the struggle between those two groups. The U.S. has been a strong supporter of Israel, providing billions of dollars in aid and supporting its possession of nuclear weapons. (1,2)

Korea, North and South

The Korean War started in 1950 when, according to the Truman administration, North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25th. However, since then another explanation has emerged which maintains that the attack by North Korea came during a time of many border incursions by both sides. South Korea initiated most of the border clashes with North Korea beginning in 1948. The North Korea government claimed that by 1949 the South Korean army committed 2,617 armed incursions. It was a myth that the Soviet Union ordered North Korea to attack South Korea. (1,2)

The U.S. started its attack before a U.N. resolution was passed supporting our nation’s intervention, and our military forces added to the mayhem in the war by introducing the use of napalm. (1)

During the war the bulk of the deaths were South Koreans, North Koreans and Chinese. Four sources give deaths counts ranging from 1.8 to 4.5 million. (3,4,5,6) Another source gives a total of 4 million but does not identify to which nation they belonged. (7)

John H. Kim, a U.S. Army veteran and the Chair of the Korea Committee of Veterans for Peace, stated in an article that during the Korean War “the U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy were directly involved in the killing of about three million civilians – both South and North Koreans – at many locations throughout Korea…It is reported that the U.S. dropped some 650,000 tons of bombs, including 43,000 tons of napalm bombs, during the Korean War.” It is presumed that this total does not include Chinese casualties.

Another source states a total of about 500,000 who were Koreans and presumably only military. (8,9)

Laos

From 1965 to 1973 during the Vietnam War the U.S. dropped over two million tons of bombs on Laos – more than was dropped in WWII by both sides. Over a quarter of the population became refugees. This was later called a “secret war,” since it occurred at the same time as the Vietnam War, but got little press. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Branfman make the only estimate that I am aware of , stating that hundreds of thousands died. This can be interpeted to mean that at least 200,000 died. (1,2,3)

U.S. military intervention in Laos actually began much earlier. A civil war started in the 1950s when the U.S. recruited a force of 40,000 Laotians to oppose the Pathet Lao, a leftist political party that ultimately took power in 1975.

Also See Vietnam

Nepal

Between 8,000 and 12,000 Nepalese have died since a civil war broke out in 1996. The death rate, according to Foreign Policy in Focus, sharply increased with the arrival of almost 8,400 American M-16 submachine guns (950 rpm) and U.S. advisers. Nepal is 85 percent rural and badly in need of land reform. Not surprisingly 42 % of its people live below the poverty level. (1,2)

In 2002, after another civil war erupted, President George W. Bush pushed a bill through Congress authorizing $20 million in military aid to the Nepalese government. (3)

Nicaragua

In 1981 the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza government in Nicaragua, (1) and until 1990 about 25,000 Nicaraguans were killed in an armed struggle between the Sandinista government and Contra rebels who were formed from the remnants of Somoza’s national government. The use of assassination manuals by the Contras surfaced in 1984. (2,3)

The U.S. supported the victorious government regime by providing covert military aid to the Contras (anti-communist guerillas) starting in November, 1981. But when Congress discovered that the CIA had supervised acts of sabotage in Nicaragua without notifying Congress, it passed the Boland Amendment in 1983 which prohibited the CIA, Defense Department and any other government agency from providing any further covert military assistance. (4)

But ways were found to get around this prohibition. The National Security Council, which was not explicitly covered by the law, raised private and foreign funds for the Contras. In addition, arms were sold to Iran and the proceeds were diverted from those sales to the Contras engaged in the insurgency against the Sandinista government. (5) Finally, the Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990 by voters who thought that a change in leadership would placate the U.S., which was causing misery to Nicaragua’s citizenry by it support of the Contras.

Pakistan

In 1971 West Pakistan, an authoritarian state supported by the U.S., brutally invaded East Pakistan. The war ended after India, whose economy was staggering after admitting about 10 million refugees, invaded East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and defeated the West Pakistani forces. (1)

Millions of people died during that brutal struggle, referred to by some as genocide committed by West Pakistan. That country had long been an ally of the U.S., starting with $411 million provided to establish its armed forces which spent 80% of its budget on its military. $15 million in arms flowed into W. Pakistan during the war. (2,3,4)

Three sources estimate that 3 million people died and (5,2,6) one source estimates 1.5 million. (3)

Panama

In December, 1989 U.S. troops invaded Panama, ostensibly to arrest Manuel Noriega, that nation’s president. This was an example of the U.S. view that it is the master of the world and can arrest anyone it wants to. For a number of years before that he had worked for the CIA, but fell out of favor partially because he was not an opponent of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. (1) It has been estimated that between 500 and 4,000 people died. (2,3,4)

Paraguay: See South America: Operation Condor

Philippines

The Philippines were under the control of the U.S. for over a hundred years. In about the last 50 to 60 years the U.S. has funded and otherwise helped various Philippine governments which sought to suppress the activities of groups working for the welfare of its people. In 1969 the Symington Committee in the U.S. Congress revealed how war material was sent there for a counter-insurgency campaign. U.S. Special Forces and Marines were active in some combat operations. The estimated number of persons that were executed and disappeared under President Fernando Marcos was over 100,000. (1,2)

South America: Operation Condor

This was a joint operation of 6 despotic South American governments (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) to share information about their political opponents. An estimated 13,000 people were killed under this plan. (1)

It was established on November 25, 1975 in Chile by an act of the Interamerican Reunion on Military Intelligence. According to U.S. embassy political officer, John Tipton, the CIA and the Chilean Secret Police were working together, although the CIA did not set up the operation to make this collaboration work. Reportedly, it ended in 1983. (2)

On March 6, 2001 the New York Times reported the existence of a recently declassified State Department document revealing that the United States facilitated communications for Operation Condor. (3)

Sudan

Since 1955, when it gained its independence, Sudan has been involved most of the time in a civil war. Until about 2003 approximately 2 million people had been killed. It not known if the death toll in Darfur is part of that total.

Human rights groups have complained that U.S. policies have helped to prolong the Sudanese civil war by supporting efforts to overthrow the central government in Khartoum. In 1999 U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) who said that she offered him food supplies if he would reject a peace plan sponsored by Egypt and Libya.

In 1978 the vastness of Sudan’s oil reservers was discovered and within two years it became the sixth largest recipient of U.S, military aid. It’s reasonable to assume that if the U.S. aid a government to come to power it will feel obligated to give the U.S. part of the oil pie.

A British group, Christian Aid, has accused foreign oil companies of complicity in the depopulation of villages. These companies – not American – receive government protection and in turn allow the government use of its airstrips and roads.

In August 1998 the U.S. bombed Khartoum, Sudan with 75 cruise míssiles. Our government said that the target was a chemical weapons factory owned by Osama bin Laden. Actually, bin Laden was no longer the owner, and the plant had been the sole supplier of pharmaceutical supplies for that poor nation. As a result of the bombing tens of thousands may have died because of the lack of medicines to treat malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases. The U.S. settled a lawsuit filed by the factory’s owner. (1,2)

Uruguay: See South America: Operation Condor

Vietnam

In Vietnam, under an agreement several decades ago, there was supposed to be an election for a unified North and South Vietnam. The U.S. opposed this and supported the Diem government in South Vietnam. In August, 1964 the CIA and others helped fabricate a phony Vietnamese attack on a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin and this was used as a pretext for greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam. (1)

During that war an American assassination operation,called Operation Phoenix, terrorized the South Vietnamese people, and during the war American troops were responsible in 1968 for the mass slaughter of the people in the village of My Lai.

According to a Vietnamese government statement in 1995 the number of deaths of civilians and military personnel during the Vietnam War was 5.1 million. (2)

Since deaths in Cambodia and Laos were about 2.7 million (See Cambodia and Laos) the estimated total for the Vietnam War is 7.8 million.

The Virtual Truth Commission provides a total for the war of 5 million, (3) and Robert McNamara, former Secretary Defense, according to the New York Times Magazine says that the number of Vietnamese dead is 3.4 million. (4,5)

Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of several republics. Since it refused to be closely tied to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it gained some suport from the U.S. But when the Soviet Union dissolved, Yugoslavia’s usefulness to the U.S. ended, and the U.S and Germany worked to convert its socialist economy to a capitalist one by a process primarily of dividing and conquering. There were ethnic and religious differences between various parts of Yugoslavia which were manipulated by the U.S. to cause several wars which resulted in the dissolution of that country.

From the early 1990s until now Yugoslavia split into several independent nations whose lowered income, along with CIA connivance, has made it a pawn in the hands of capitalist countries. (1) The dissolution of Yugoslavia was caused primarily by the U.S. (2)

Here are estimates of some, if not all, of the internal wars in Yugoslavia. All wars: 107,000; (3,4)

Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000; (5) Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000; (5) Croatia: 15,000; (6) and

Kosovo: 500 to 5,000. (7)

NOTES

Afghanistan

1.Mark Zepezauer, Boomerang (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003), p.135.

2.Chronology of American State Terrorism
http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_
terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html

3.Soviet War in Afghanistan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan

4.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.76

5.U.S Involvement in Afghanistan, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in Afghanistan)

6.The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan, Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

7.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p.5

8.Unknown News, http://www.unknownnews.net/casualtiesw.html

Angola

1.Howard W. French “From Old Files, a New Story of the U.S. Role in the Angolan War” New York Times 3/31/02

2.Angolan Update, American Friends Service Committee FS, 11/1/99 flyer.

3.Norman Solomon, War Made Easy, (John Wiley & Sons, 2005) p. 82-83.

4.Lance Selfa, U.S. Imperialism, A Century of Slaughter, International Socialist Review Issue 7, Spring 1999 (as appears in Third world Traveler www. thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Century_Imperialism.html)

5. Jeffress Ramsay, Africa , (Dushkin/McGraw Hill Guilford Connecticut), 1997, p. 144-145.

6.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.54.

Argentina : See South America: Operation Condor

Bolivia

1. Phil Gunson, Guardian, 5/6/02,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/archive /article/0,4273,41-07884,00.html

2.Jerry Meldon, Return of Bolilvia’s Drug – Stained Dictator, Consortium,www.consortiumnews.com/archives/story40.html.

Brazil See South America: Operation Condor

Cambodia

1.Virtual Truth Commissiion http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/ .

2.David Model, President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Bombing of Cambodia excerpted from the book Lying for Empire How to Commit War Crimes With A Straight Face, Common Courage Press, 2005, paperhttp://thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Nixon_Cambodia_LFE.html.

3.Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Cambodia under Pol Pot, etc.,http//zmag.org/forums/chomcambodforum.htm.

Chad

1.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p. 151-152 .

2.Richard Keeble, Crimes Against Humanity in Chad, Znet/Activism 12/4/06http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=11560&sectionID=1).

Chile

1.Parenti, Michael, The Sword and the Dollar (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1989) p. 56.

2.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p. 142-143.

3.Moreorless: Heroes and Killers of the 20th Century, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte,

http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/pinochet.html

4.Associated Press,Pincohet on 91st Birthday, Takes Responsibility for Regimes’s Abuses, Dayton Daily News 11/26/06

5.Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), p. 18.

China: See Korea

Colombia

1.Chronology of American State Terrorism, p.2

http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html).

2.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p. 163.

3.Millions Killed by Imperialism Washington Post May 6, 2002)http://www.etext.org./Politics/MIM/rail/impkills.html

4.Gabriella Gamini, CIA Set Up Death Squads in Colombia Times Newspapers Limited, Dec. 5, 1996,www.edu/CommunicationsStudies/ben/news/cia/961205.death.html).

5.Virtual Truth Commission, 1991

Human Rights Watch Report: Colombia’s Killer Networks–The Military-Paramilitary Partnership).

Cuba

1.St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture – on Bay of Pigs Invasionhttp://bookrags.com/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion.

2.Wikipedia http://bookrags.com/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion#Casualties.

Democratic Republic of Congo (Formerly Zaire)

1.F. Jeffress Ramsey, Africa (Guilford Connecticut, 1997), p. 85

2. Anup Shaw The Democratic Republic of Congo, 10/31/2003)http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/DRC.asp)

3.Kevin Whitelaw, A Killing in Congo, U. S. News and World Reporthttp://www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/mysteries/patrice.htm

4.William Blum, Killing Hope (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), p 158-159.

5.Ibid.,p. 260

6.Ibid.,p. 259

7.Ibid.,p.262

8.David Pickering, “World War in Africa, 6/26/02,
www.9-11peace.org/bulletin.php3

9.William D. Hartung and Bridget Moix, Deadly Legacy; U.S. Arms to Africa and the Congo War, Arms Trade Resource Center, January , 2000www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/congo.htm

Dominican Republic

1.Norman Solomon, (untitled) Baltimore Sun April 26, 2005
http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/2005/0426spincycle.htm
Intervention Spin Cycle

2.Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Power_Pack

3.William Blum, Killing Hope (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 175.

4.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.26-27.

East Timor

1.Virtual Truth Commission, http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/date4.htm

2.Matthew Jardine, Unraveling Indonesia, Nonviolent Activist, 1997)

3.Chronology of American State Terrorismhttp://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html

4.William Blum, Killing Hope (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 197.

5.US trained butchers of Timor, The Guardian, London. Cited by The Drudge Report, September 19, 1999. http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/indon.htm

El Salvador

1.Robert T. Buckman, Latin America 2003, (Stryker-Post Publications Baltimore 2003) p. 152-153.

2.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p. 54-55.

3.El Salvador, Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Salvador#The_20th_century_and_beyond)

4.Virtual Truth Commissiion http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/.

Grenada

1.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p. 66-67.

2.Stephen Zunes, The U.S. Invasion of Grenada,http://wwwfpif.org/papers/grenada2003.html .

Guatemala

1.Virtual Truth Commissiion http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/

2.Ibid.

3.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.2-13.

4.Robert T. Buckman, Latin America 2003 (Stryker-Post Publications Baltimore 2003) p. 162.

5.Douglas Farah, Papers Show U.S. Role in Guatemalan Abuses, Washington Post Foreign Service, March 11, 1999, A 26

Haiti

1.Francois Duvalier,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Duvalier#Reign_of_terror).

2.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p 87.

3.William Blum, Haiti 1986-1994: Who Will Rid Me of This Turbulent Priest,http://www.doublestandards.org/blum8.html

Honduras

1.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p. 55.

2.Reports by Country: Honduras, Virtual Truth Commissionhttp://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/honduras.htm

3.James A. Lucas, Torture Gets The Silence Treatment, Countercurrents, July 26, 2004.

4.Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson, Unearthed: Fatal Secrets, Baltimore Sun, reprint of a series that appeared June 11-18, 1995 in Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, School of Assassins, p. 46 Orbis Books 2001.

5.Michael Dobbs, Negroponte’s Time in Honduras at Issue, Washington Post, March 21, 2005

Hungary

1.Edited by Malcolm Byrne, The 1956 Hungarian Revoluiton: A history in Documents November 4, 2002http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB76/index2.htm

2.Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia,
http://www.answers.com/topic/hungarian-revolution-of-1956

Indonesia

1.Virtual Truth Commission http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/.

2.Editorial, Indonesia’s Killers, The Nation, March 30, 1998.

3.Matthew Jardine, Indonesia Unraveling, Non Violent Activist Sept–Oct, 1997 (Amnesty) 2/7/07.

4.Sison, Jose Maria, Reflections on the 1965 Massacre in Indonesia, p. 5.http://qc.indymedia.org/mail.php?id=5602;

5.Annie Pohlman, Women and the Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966: Gender Variables and Possible Direction for Research, p.4,http://coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/ASAA/biennial-conference/2004/Pohlman-A-ASAA.pdf

6.Peter Dale Scott, The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967, Pacific Affairs, 58, Summer 1985, pages 239-264.http://www.namebase.org/scott.

7.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.30.

Iran

1.Geoff Simons, Iraq from Sumer to Saddam, 1996, St. Martins Press, NY p. 317.

2.Chronology of American State Terrorismhttp://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html.

3.BBC 1988: US Warship Shoots Down Iranian Airlinerhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/default.stm )

Iraq

Iran-Iraq War

1.Michael Dobbs, U.S. Had Key role in Iraq Buildup, Washington Post December 30, 2002, p A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52241-2002Dec29?language=printer

2.Global Security.Org , Iran Iraq War (1980-1980)globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/iran-iraq.htm.

U.S. Iraq War and Sanctions

1.Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time (New York, Thunder’s Mouth), 1994, p.31-32

2.Ibid., p. 52-54

3.Ibid., p. 43

4.Anthony Arnove, Iraq Under Siege, (South End Press Cambridge MA 2000). p. 175.

5.Food and Agricultural Organizaiton, The Children are Dying, 1995 World View Forum, Internationa Action Center, International Relief Association, p. 78

6.Anthony Arnove, Iraq Under Siege, South End Press Cambridge MA 2000. p. 61.

7.David Cortright, A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions December 3, 2001, The Nation.

U.S-Iraq War 2003-?

1.Jonathan Bor 654,000 Deaths Tied to Iraq War Baltimore Sun , October 11,2006

2.News http://www.unknownnews.net/casualties.html

Israeli-Palestinian War

1.Post-1967 Palestinian & Israeli Deaths from Occupation & Violence May 16, 2006 http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/2006/05/post-1967-palestinian-israeli-deaths.html)

2.Chronology of American State Terrorism

http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html

Korea

1.James I. Matray Revisiting Korea: Exposing Myths of the Forgotten War, Korean War Teachers Conference: The Korean War, February 9, 2001http://www.truman/library.org/Korea/matray1.htm

2.William Blum, Killing Hope (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 46

3.Kanako Tokuno, Chinese Winter Offensive in Korean War – the Debacle of American Strategy, ICE Case Studies Number 186, May, 2006http://www.american.edu/ted/ice/chosin.htm.

4.John G. Stroessinger, Why Nations go to War, (New York; St. Martin’s Press), p. 99)

5.Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, as reported in Answers.comhttp://www.answers.com/topic/Korean-war

6.Exploring the Environment: Korean Enigmawww.cet.edu/ete/modules/korea/kwar.html)

7.S. Brian Wilson, Who are the Real Terrorists? Virtual Truth Commissonhttp://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/

8.Korean War Casualty Statistics www.century china.com/history/krwarcost.html)

9.S. Brian Wilson, Documenting U.S. War Crimes in North Korea (Veterans for Peace Newsletter) Spring, 2002) http://www.veteransforpeace.org/

Laos

1.William Blum Rogue State (Maine, Common Cause Press) p. 136

2.Chronology of American State Terrorismhttp://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html

3.Fred Branfman, War Crimes in Indochina and our Troubled National Soul

www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2004/08/00_branfman_us-warcrimes-indochina.htm).

Nepal

1.Conn Hallinan, Nepal & the Bush Administration: Into Thin Air, February 3, 2004

fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402nepal.html.

2.Human Rights Watch, Nepal’s Civil War: the Conflict Resumes, March 2006 )

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/03/28/nepal13078.htm.

3.Wayne Madsen, Possible CIA Hand in the Murder of the Nepal Royal Family, India Independent Media Center, September 25, 2001http://india.indymedia.org/en/2002/09/2190.shtml.

Nicaragua

1.Virtual Truth Commission
http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/.

2.Timeline Nicaragua
www.stanford.edu/group/arts/nicaragua/discovery_eng/timeline/).

3.Chronology of American State Terrorism,
http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html.

4.William Blum, Nicaragua 1981-1990 Destabilization in Slow Motion

www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Nicaragua_KH.html.

5.Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_Affair.

Pakistan

1.John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War, (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 1974 pp 157-172.

2.Asad Ismi, A U.S. – Financed Military Dictatorship, The CCPA Monitor, June 2002, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives http://www.policyaltematives.ca)www.ckln.fm/~asadismi/pakistan.html

3.Mark Zepezauer, Boomerang (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003), p.123, 124.

4.Arjum Niaz ,When America Look the Other Way by,

www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=2821&sectionID=1

5.Leo Kuper, Genocide (Yale University Press, 1981), p. 79.

6.Bangladesh Liberation War , Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War#USA_and_USSR)

Panama

1.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’s Greatest Hits, (Odonian Press 1998) p. 83.

2.William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000), p.154.

3.U.S. Military Charged with Mass Murder, The Winds 9/96,www.apfn.org/thewinds/archive/war/a102896b.html

4.Mark Zepezauer, CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), p.83.

Paraguay See South America: Operation Condor

Philippines

1.Romeo T. Capulong, A Century of Crimes Against the Filipino People, Presentation, Public Interest Law Center, World Tribunal for Iraq Trial in New York City on August 25,2004.
http://www.peoplejudgebush.org/files/RomeoCapulong.pdf).

2.Roland B. Simbulan The CIA in Manila – Covert Operations and the CIA’s Hidden Hisotry in the Philippines Equipo Nizkor Information – Derechos, derechos.org/nizkor/filipinas/doc/cia.

South America: Operation Condor

1.John Dinges, Pulling Back the Veil on Condor, The Nation, July 24, 2000.

2.Virtual Truth Commission, Telling the Truth for a Better Americawww.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/condor.htm)

3.Operation Condorhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor#US_involvement).

Sudan

1.Mark Zepezauer, Boomerang, (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003), p. 30, 32,34,36.

2.The Black Commentator, Africa Action The Tale of Two Genocides: The Failed US Response to Rwanda and Darfur, 11 August 2006http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091706X.shtml.

Uruguay See South America: Operation Condor

Vietnam

1.Mark Zepezauer, The CIA’S Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine:Common Courage Press,1994), p 24

2.Casualties – US vs NVA/VC,
http://www.rjsmith.com/kia_tbl.html.

3.Brian Wilson, Virtual Truth Commission
http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/

4.Fred Branfman, U.S. War Crimes in Indochiona and our Duty to Truth August 26, 2004

www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=6105&sectionID=1

5.David K Shipler, Robert McNamara and the Ghosts of Vietnamnytimes.com/library/world/asia/081097vietnam-mcnamara.html

Yugoslavia

1.Sara Flounders, Bosnia Tragedy:The Unknown Role of the Pentagon in NATO in the Balkans (New York: International Action Center) p. 47-75

2.James A. Lucas, Media Disinformation on the War in Yugoslavia: The Dayton Peace Accords Revisited, Global Research, September 7, 2005 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=
viewArticle&code=LUC20050907&articleId=899

3.Yugoslav Wars in 1990s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_wars.

4.George Kenney, The Bosnia Calculation: How Many Have Died? Not nearly as many as some would have you think., NY Times Magazine, April 23, 1995

http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/politics/war_crimes/srebrenica/bosnia_numbers.html)

5.Chronology of American State Terrorism

http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html.

6.Croatian War of Independence, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_War_of_Independence

7.Human Rights Watch, New Figures on Civilian Deaths in Kosovo War, (February 7, 2000) http://www.hrw.org/press/2000/02/nato207.htm.

 

The original source of this article is Popular Resistance and Global ResearchCopyright © James A. LucasPopular Resistance and Global Research, 2020

Austria president will not relocate Israel embassy to Jerusalem —

Rebel Voice

Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen yesterday criticised the relocation of US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, stressing his country would never follow suite, the Anadolu Agency reported.Der Bellen made the remarks during a press conference held with his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.“Austria is sad about the relocation…

via Austria president will not relocate Israel embassy to Jerusalem —

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Syria a victim of wars fought in the name of oil – Austrian Foreign Minister (along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya etc)

Syria a victim of wars fought in the name of oil – Austrian Foreign Minister 

Syria a victim of wars fought in the name of oil – Austrian Foreign Minister

Is the next US aggression on Syria already scheduled?

The Saker

August 31, 2018

[This article was written for the Unz Review]

The things that please are those that are asked for again and again
Horace

Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran
John McCain

President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price…
Donald Trump

It is difficult to have a dialogue with people who confuse Austria and Australia
Vladimir Putin

Bis repetita

It appears that we are coming back full circle: the AngloZionists are again, apparently, preparing to use the very same White Helmets (aka “good terrorists”) to execute yet another chemical false flag attack in Syria and againblame the government forces for it. The Russians are, againwarning the world in advance and, just as last time, (almost) nobody gives a damn.  And there are even reports that the US is, yet again, considering imposing a (totally illegal) no-fly zone over Syria (I have not heard this once since Hillary’s presidential campaign).  And just like last time, it appears that the goal of the US is  to save the “good terrorists” from a major governmental victory.

It appears that my prediction that each “click” brings us one step closer to the “bang!” is, unfortunately, coming true and while the Empire seems to have given up on the notion of a full-scale reconquest of Syria, the Neocons are clearly pushing for what might turn out to be a major missile strike on Syria.  The fact that firing a large number of missiles near/over/at Russian forces might result in Russian counter-attack which, in turn, could lead to an major, possibly nuclear, war does not seem to factor at all in the calculations of the Neocons.  True, the Neocons are mostly rather stupid (as in “short-term focused”) people, with a strong sense of superiority and a messianic outlook on our world.  However, it baffles me that so few people in the USA and the EU are worried about this.  Somehow, a nuclear war has become so unthinkable that many have concluded that it can never happen.

The other thing which the Neocons seem to be oblivious to is that the situation on the ground in Syria cannot be changed by means of missile strikes or bombs.  For one thing, the last US attack has conclusively shown that US Tomahawks are an easy target for the Syrian (mostly antiquated) air defenses.  Of course, the US could rely on more AGM-158 JASSM which are much harder to intercept, but no matter what missiles are used, they will not effectively degrade the Syrian military capabilities simply because there are so few lucrative targets for cruise missile strikes in Syria to begin with.  Considering that the US knows full well that no chemical attack will take place (or even couldtake place, for that matter, since even the USA have declared Syria chemical weapons free in 2013) the White House might decide to blow up a few empty buildings and declare that “the animal Assad” has been punished I suppose.  But even if completely unopposed a US missile attack will make no military sense whatsoever.  So this begs the question of what would be the point of any attack on Syria?  Sadly, the rather evident answer to that is that the upcoming missile strike has less to do with the war in Syria and much more to do with internal US politics.

Russian and Syrian options

There are a few differences too.  The biggest difference is that this time around the Russian naval task force in the eastern Mediterranean is much bigger than last time: 15 ships including two advanced frigates, the Admiral Grigorovich and the Admiral Essen (see a detailed report here: https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/russia-sends-largest-naval-fleet-ever-to-syrian-waters/) and two 636.3-class advanced diesel-attack submarines.  That is a lot of anti-ship, anti-air and anti-submarine firepower and, even more crucially, a lot of advanced early warning capabilities.  Since the Russian and Syria air defense networks have been integrated by single automated fire system this means that the Syrians will very accurately “see” what is taking place in and around the Syrian airspace (this is especially true with the Russians keeping their A-50U AWACs on 24/7 patrol).

What has me most worried are the various reports (such as this one) which says that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last week that “Moscow would be held responsible” if any chemical attack occurs.  If by “Moscow will be responsible” the crazies in Washington DC mean “morally responsible”, then this is just the usual nonsense.  But I am afraid that with certified nutcases like Bolton and Pompeo in charge, the US might be considering attacking Russian personnel in Syria (not necessarily at the well defended Khmeimin or Tartus bases).  These guys could easily target various installations or Syrian military units where Russian personnel are known to be deployed and declare that they were not deliberately targeting Russians and that the Russians hit were “clearly involved” with the Syrian chemical weapon forces.  The US has already targeted Russian nationals for kidnapping and detention, they might start killing Russian nationals next and then place the responsibility for these deaths on the Kremlin.  You don’t think so? Just think “Skripal” and you will see that this notion is no so far fetched.

The Russians do have options, by the way.  One thing they could do is place 6 (modernized) MiG-31s on quick alert in southern Russia (or, even better, in Iran) and keep a pair of them on combat air patrol over Syria (or over Iran).  Combined with the “eyes” of the A-50U, these MiG-31s could provide the Russians with a formidable capability, especially against the US B-1B deployed in Qatar or Diego Garcia.  So far, the MiG-31s have not seen action in Syria, but if intercepting a large number of cruise missiles becomes the mission then they would offer a much more flexible and capable force than the very small amount of Su-35 and Su-30 currently based in Khmeimim.

But the key to protecting Syria is to beef-up the Syrian air defenses and early warning capabilities, especially with advanced mobile air defense systems, especially many short-to-medium range systems like the Tor-M2 and the Pantsir-S2.  Until this goal is achieved, the USA and Russia will remain in a most dangerous “Mexican standoff” in which both parties are engaged in what I call a “nuclear game of chicken” with each party threatening the other side while counting on its own nuclear capability to deter a meaningful counter-attack or retaliation.  This is extremely dangerous but there is very little Russia can do to stop the US leaders from coming back to that same strategy over and over again.  So far the Russians have shown a truly remarkable level of restraint, but if pushed too far, they next step for them will be to retaliate against the US in a manner which would provide them with what the CIA calls “plausible deniability” (I discussed this option over a year ago in this article).  If attacked directly and openly the Russians will, of course, have no other option left than to hit back.  And while it is true that the Russian forces in and near Syria are vastly outnumbered by US/NATO/CENTOM forces, the Russians have a massive advantage over the USA in terms of long range cruise missiles (see Andrei Martyanov’s analysis “Russia’s Stand-Off Capability: The 800 Pound Gorilla in Syria” for a detailed discussion of this topic).

None of the above is new, the world has been been stuck in this situation for well over a year now and there still appears to be no end in sight.  Unfortunately, I can only agree with Ruslan Ostashko: only a massive military defeat or a no less massive economic collapse will stop the folks who “who confuse Austria and Australia” to give up their insane quest for world hegemony by violence.

The Saker

No need for Europe to buy US gas at triple the price, will continue imports from Russia – Austria

Source

SEE ALSO

Another reason for the U.S. induced fascist takeover in Ukraine becomes apparent. They want Europe to buy far more expensive gas from them rather than Russia

Europe needs to fend off 50% more expensive American gas – German energy major

Our American “friends” want us to buy their gas instead of Russian, even though it’s 50% more expensive

One of the USA’s motives in installing the Kiev fascist regime was to open market for expensive American Shale Gas

U.S. oil exports, now you see one of their motives for the chaos in the Middle East & Ukraine, not to mention fact it would be twice as expensive

On the back of their induced regime change in Kiev, the USA is hoping to sell expensive gas to EU

USA’s motive for destabilising Ukraine is to sell Europe expensive energy supplies

Condoleezza Rice wants Europe to use USA gas & oil, never mind it will be 50% more expensive

No need for Europe to buy US gas at triple the price, will continue imports from Russia – Austria

That Figures: Austria’s neo-Nazis find friends in israel

Austria’s neo-Nazis find friends in Israel

Ali Abunimah

Austria’s ambassador in Tel Aviv sees nothing wrong with Arab parties being excluded from Israel’s government.

As his own country looks set to put neo-Nazis in power in Vienna, this is yet another remarkable demonstration of the racist values shared by European and Israeli elites.

Just as in Germany, there are clear indications of ties between Austria’s neo-Nazi far right and Israel’s right wing.

Ambassador backs exclusion

Last week Avi Gabbay, the leader of Israel’s ostensibly dovish Labor Party, declared that he would not join a coalition along with members of the Joint List, a grouping of parties made up predominantly of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

“We will not share a government with the Joint List, period,” Gabbay said. “Let that be clear.”

Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, condemned Gabbay’s racism. “Someone who doesn’t view Arab citizens and their elected representatives as a legitimate group, doesn’t present a real alternative to the right,” Odeh said.

At the same time, Gabbay indicated he could team up with Yisrael Beiteinu, the far-right party led by Israel’s notoriously anti-Arab defense minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Lieberman believes Palestinians like Odeh should eventually be stripped of their Israeli citizenship altogether.

Gabbay’s racism is unremarkable in the Israeli context. It has long been a consensus among Zionist parties that the fifth of the country’s citizens who are Palestinians should have no real role in decision-making.

Gabbay followed up with more belligerent comments on Sunday, declaring that “the Arabs have to be afraid of us” and that Israel need never evacuate any of its settlements built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law.

But what has also sadly become unsurprising is to see European diplomats, who frequently pretend to represent an enlightened “human rights” perspective, rationalizing this racism.

On Friday, Martin Weiss, the Austrian ambassador in Tel Aviv had lunch with Gabbay, and appeared to offer a warm endorsement of the Israeli Labor leader on Twitter:

Weiss and Gabbay were joined for lunch by several other European diplomats.

I asked on Twitter if the Europeans had raised the issue of Gabbay’s open anti-Arab racism during the lunch.

Weiss responded, pointing out fairly enough that the lunch had taken place the day before Gabbay’s remarks refusing to let Arab parties join a coalition were reported.

Weiss added, “But do you think members of the Joint List would really want to join a Labor government?”

The Austrian ambassador appeared to be deflecting attention from Gabbay’s racism by pointing out that citizens who are discriminated against might not want inclusion in the first place.

I wanted to give Weiss an opportunity to back away from this, so I challenged him to publicly condemn Gabbay’s racism.

“Thanks but no thanks,” the ambassador replied. “Seems to me that every political party has the right to declare with which other party they would cooperate – or not.”

This could not be a clearer endorsement of the longstanding racist exclusion of Palestinian citizens of Israel on the grounds of their ethnicity.

Apartheid politics

It’s worth recalling that the landmark UN report on Israeli apartheid, suppressed last March by the UN secretary-general on American orders, found that while Israel’s political system gives nominal rights to the roughly 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, these add up to little in practice.

“Voting rights lose their significance in terms of equal rights when a racial group is legally banned from challenging laws that perpetuate inequality,” the report states. “Israeli law bans organized Palestinian opposition to Jewish domination, rendering it illegal and even seditious.”

These formal restrictions on advocating for an end to state-sponsored racism are supplemented by the informal consensus among party leaders – from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning that Arabs were voting “in droves” to Gabbay vowing not to include the Joint List in a coalition – that government is an exclusively Jewish matter.

Neo-Nazis embrace Israeli right

Ambassador Weiss’ defense of Israeli racism was perhaps a warm-up for the work he’ll have to do defending his own country’s government in coming months.

Following Sunday’s Austrian general election, a new right-wing government led by the youthful foreign minister Sebastian Kurz is set to take power.

It’s widely expected that Kurz’s conservative People’s Party will form a coalition with the far-right, anti-Muslim Freedom Party, headed by neo-Nazi Heinz-Christian Strache.

The Freedom Party’s success comes just weeks after the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany – known by its initials AfD – took about 100 seats in the Bundestag.

And just like AfD, Austria’s Freedom Party has discovered a recent affinity for Israel.

Last year, Strache, who used to march with a group imitating the Hitler Youth, visited Israel at the invitation of lawmakers from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party.

Just like other assorted anti-Semites and far-right extremists, Strache apparently saw Israel providing a laundering service. As media reports in Austria put it, the intention of Strache’s visit – complete with a pilgrimage to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial – was “to make himself kosher in Israel” in the hope that this would give him respectability elsewhere.

Europe’s new fascists and Israel’s right have also found an alliance in their common hatred of Muslims.

In June, Strache welcomed to Vienna Likud lawmaker Yehuda Glick, a leader in the so-called Temple Movement, which aims to destroy Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque and replace it with a Jewish temple.

A photo posted on Strache’s Facebook page shows the pair in a friendly meeting.

European Jewish organizations have condemned Israeli outreach to Europe’s far right, including the Freedom Party. Last November, the leader of the Vienna Jewish community published a letter calling on Israeli politicians to shun such meetings and “to draw a very clear red line between us and those who represent hate, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism.”

Recall that while Germany’s Jewish community expressed horror at AfD’s recent electoral success, Yehuda Glick defended the party.

There’s no mystery why: AfD leaders have given strong backing to Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Austria’s Strache is following a similar line, supporting the settlements and becoming a champion of Israel’s claims to Jerusalem that are rejected by the rest of the world.

Strache handed Glick a letter to be delivered to Netanyahu vowing to do all he could to push for Austria’s embassy in Tel Aviv to be moved to Jerusalem.

With his party set to join the government, Strache will have his chance.

Once again, Israel is showing that its closest allies in Europe are the worst enemies of Jewish people.

 

They wanted to stop me from playing music, now they can hear me instead

July 09, 2017  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Gilad Atzmon

On 8 July I was scheduled to play at The Vienna Jazz Festival with the Jordanian Palestinian oud virtuoso Kamal Musallam and the musical ambassador of Indonesia, Dwiki Dharmawan. Our band is called World Peace Trio and it is dedicated to spreading the message of reconciliation and human harmony. It seemsthat the Austrian Zionist lobby opposed this message. They used every trick from the Israeli Hasbara playbook to push Vienna city into compliance. The Vienna Jazz Festival was told by its prime funder (Vienna City) that Gilad Atzmon must be expelled.

Of course, the Jewish lobby managed to shoot itself yet again. They stopped me from playing music so instead, I was invited by the Society for Austro-Arab Relations to deliver my message of dissent that night (video will be released soon).

I should probably be cheered by the fact that my invitation to play music tormentedsome ardent Zionists enough that they successfully endeavoured to push the city of Vienna to act as their anti cultural saboteur. Despite their actions, no one was able to tell me or the other members of the World Peace Trio what is it about me that they object to. What is it that I shouldn’t say?

  • Is it the publication of my new book Being in Time that frightens my detractors?
  • Is it the fact that in the book I re-articulate the Jerusalem/Athens dichotomy?
  • Is it that I analyse the systematic failure of the political? Or maybe the problem is that I managed to clarify the meaning of Jewish Lobby domination of the west?

In the old days, when Jazz was an exciting revolutionary and vibrant adventure, it was the music of resistance: the voice of the oppressed. But for Fritz Thom, the head of the Vienna Jazz festival, Jazz is a token of compliance.  Thom acquiesced to his paymasters’ demands. But the story didn’t end there.  Porgy and Bess, one of the best jazz clubs in Europe, was happy to sustain our concert in their program but they also became subject to threats and some enormous political pressure from the Austrian Green Party, the Lobby and the Vienna Jazz Festival.

As usual, not a single accusation against me was substantiated or supported by anything I have ever said or written. As my followers as well as my detractors know, despite Europe’s strict legislation on hate speech and hate crimes, I have never been accused or even questioned by any law enforcement authority anywhere about any of my writings or my public statements. My record, in that regard, is unblemished. And yet, as demonstrated in Austria, political institutions are keen to serve the Zionist lobby and neglect the most precious and fundamental rights that made the West into an open society.

It is now clear that Austria has been occupied once again. It is subservient to foreign interests that are crude, anti intellectual, anti cultural and rely upon hooliganism. Cancelling a concert because your paymasters don’t agree with the saxophonist? What’s next?

More troubling, the political institutions that so easily succumbed to the Lobby’s demands clearly managed to draw the wrong message from the holocaust.  You would expect Austrian politicians to understand that silencing dissent has some disastrous consequences.

Worse for the Jewish lobby are the consequences of its actions in this incident and others. If Jewish financiers believe that abusing their power will make Jews loved and protected I suggest that they need to spend some time reviewing Jewish history. The Jewish past proves that it is the effects of Jewish political omnipotence and power games that invokes Jew hatred.

Jewish power, as I define it, is the power to silence criticism of Jewish power; my detractors should know by now that I do not surrender to this power. In fact, I insist upon disproving my own definition: despite the endless efforts to destroy my career, I have managed to survive. I am playing my music and giving talks night after night. The more vindictive they are, the more harmonious and peaceful my message becomes. This operational mode is something I borrowed from Jesus Christ. I vow to give it back once peace prevails.

If you want to understand how they made us all into Palestinians, Being in Time is the book for you: Amazon.co.ukAmazon.com and gilad.co.uk.   

PS – we are in a process of rescheduling our return to Porgy and Bess in early 2018.

The Reason Behind the US Government’s Secret Hatred of Europeans

The Reason Behind the US Government’s Secret Hatred of Europeans

ERIC ZUESSE | 21.06.2017 | WORLD

The Reason Behind the US Government’s Secret Hatred of Europeans

The reason for the US government’s hostility — at least since 4 February 2014 —toward Europeans, has been a mystery, until now.

This hostility wasn’t even publicly recognized at all, until it leaked out, on that date, from a tapped phone-line of arguably the most powerful person at the US State Department, the person whom American President Barack Obama had personally entrusted with running his Administration’s most geostrategically sensitive secret foreign operations (and she did it actually throughout almost the entirety of Obama’s eight years in office, regardless of whom the official US Secretary of State happened to be at the time): Victoria Nuland.

Her official title was «Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs» and she was appointed to that post by the President himself, but nominally she reported to him through the Deputy Secretary of State William Joseph Burns, who reported to the Secretary of State, who, in turn, reported to the President.

She ran policies specifically on Ukraine (and, more broadly, against Russia). In the famous leaked phone call that she made on 4 February 2014 to the US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, she instructed him to place in charge of Ukraine’s government, once America’s coup in Ukraine would be completed (which then occurred 18 days later and overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, entirely in violation of Ukraine’s own Constitution), «Yats» or Arseniy Yatsenyuk. He did, immediately after the coup was completed, receive this crucial appointment — basically, the power to control all other top appointments in the new Ukrainian government. With this appointment, the coup, which had started by no later than 2011 to be planned inside the US State Department, was effectively completed.

In this phone call, Nuland said «F—k the EU!» and no one, at the time, paid much attention to what this outburst was all about, but only that it sounded shockingly undiplomatic. Finally, however, clear evidence has now emerged, concerning what it was actually about.

This crucial evidence consists of a refusal (at long last) by both Germany and Austria, to ratchet-up further, as the US regime now demands, economic sanctions against Russia, sanctions that are a key part of America’s plan ultimately to conquer Russia — a plan that’s been carried out consistently by all US federal governments since the moment, on the night of 24 February 1990, when US President George Herbert Walker Bush himself secretly announced it to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and afterward to other US vassal-heads-of-state — that, though the Soviet Union was already irrevocably in the process of ending the Cold War against the US and its allies, the US and its allies would secretly continue that war, henceforth, against Russia, until Russia itself would be conquered. He was implicitly informing them, there, that the Cold War, on the US side, wasn’t really about ideology (capitalist versus communist), but instead, was actually a long war for conquest, of the entire world (now it would be to strip Russia of its allies, and then to go in for the kill), by the US aristocracy and its vassal aristocracies (whom those European leaders represented).

On 15 June 2017, the Associated Press headlined «Germany, Austria slam US sanctions against Russia», and reported that both of those US vassal-nations, while paying obeisance to the imperial master, were not going to proceed further all the way to destruction of their own major oil and gas companies, in order to please that master:

In a joint statement, Austria’s Chancellor Christian Kern and Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said it was important for Europe and the United States to form a united front on the issue of Ukraine, where Russian-based separatists have been fighting government forces since 2014.

«However, we can’t accept the threat of illegal and extraterritorial sanctions against European companies», the two officials said, citing a section of the bill that calls for the United States to continue to oppose the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would pump Russian gas to Germany beneath the Baltic Sea. Half of the cost of the new pipeline is being paid for by Russian gas giant Gazprom, while the other half is being shouldered by a group including Anglo-Dutch group Royal Dutch Shell, French provider Engie, OMV of Austria and Germany’s Uniper and Wintershall. Some Eastern European countries, including Poland and Ukraine, fear the loss of transit revenue if Russian gas supplies don’t pass through their territory anymore once the new pipeline is built.

Gabriel and Kern accuse the US of trying to help American natural gas suppliers at the expense of their Russian rivals. They said the possibility of fining European companies participating in the Nord Stream 2 project «introduces a completely new, very negative dimension into European-American relations».

Currently, and for a very long time, the leading energy-supplier to the EU has been Russia, in the forms of oil and, especially, natural gas, both of which are transported into the EU via an extensive network of pipelines, most of which travel through Ukraine, which is a major reason why the US rulers wanted to take over Ukraine — in order to stop that, or at least to cause a necessity for Russia to build alternative pipelines (which the US regime would likewise do everything to block from happening) — but now both Germany and Austria are saying no to this US effort.

The US regime wants fracked US natural gas to fill an increasing portion of Europe’s needs, and for natural gas from US-allied fundamentalist Sunni royal regimes to fill as much of the rest as possible, so as to squeeze-out the existing top supplier, Russia. (Until recently, the plan was for US ally Qatar, owned by the Thani royal family, to become Europe’s main supplier, via pipelines which would traverse through Syria, for which reason Syria needs to be conquered (so that those pipelines through Syria can be built, perhaps even by American firms). However, the Sauds, who usually run US foreign relations — often with assistance from the Israeli regime, which is far more popular in the United States and also in Europe (and thus serves as the Sauds’ agents in the US and Europe) — have now blockaded Qatar because of Qatar’s insufficient compliance with the Sauds’ demand for total international isolation of Iran and of any other nation where Shia are or might become dominant. (For example, the Sauds bomb Yemen to impose fundamentalist Sunni leadership there and kill the Shia population.) And, so, now, after the break between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, even more than before, the main beneficiaries of cutting off Russian gas-supplies to the EU would be US fracking companies.

However, the big European oil and gas corporations would then play a smaller role in the European market, because those firms have mutual commitments with Gazprom and other Russian giants. The only big winners, now, of increased sanctions against Russia, would thus be US firms.

«Europe’s energy supply is a matter for Europe, and not for the United States of America», Kern and Gabriel said.

Europe already has suffered considerable economic harm from complying with the US on taking over Ukraine, and from absorbing millions of destitute and alien refugees from Syria, Libya, and other countries where the US CIA, and other agencies, fomented the «Arab Spring» to unlock, in those countries, the oil and gas pipeline potential, which, if controlled by the US, would go to US oilfield-services firms such as Halliburton, and not to European ones such as Schlumberger.

Kern and Gabriel — and the local national aristocracies (respectively Austrian, and German) whom they represent — are now speaking publicly about the limits beyond which they will not go in order to obey their US masters.

Consequently, back in February 2014, when the European aristocracies complied with the US aristocracy’s coup in Ukraine even though knowing full well that it was a barbaric and very bloody coup and nothing ‘democratic’ such as the US-manufactured story-line alleged it to have been, those aristocracies accepted the heist because they thought and expected to be cut in on enough of the looting of Ukraine so as to come out ahead on it. But that’s no longer the case. Because of the Sauds’ campaign against the Thanis (the owners of Qatar), the gang are starting to break up. The US gangsters are no longer clearly in control, but are being forced to choose between the Sauds and the Thanis, and have apparently chosen the Sauds. The Sauds financed the 9/11 attacks in the United States, but are the largest foreign purchasers of US-made weapons.

The US aristocracy hate Europeans because the US aristocracy are determined to conquer Russia, and because Europeans aren’t fully cooperating with that overriding US government goal — many EU billionaires want deals with Russia, but America’s billionaires are determined instead to take over Russia, and so the US (and the Sauds) might be losing its traditional support from the EU.

International affairs — US, Russia, Sauds, Thanis, Iran, Germany, UK, etc. — are in unpredictable flux. But Europe seems gradually to be drifting away from the US

And resistant European aristocrats seem to be digging in their heels on this. Here is a translation of a report dated June 17th from the most reliable source of news regarding international relations, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or «German Economic News»:

Eastern Committee: US sanctions against Russia are a threat to Europe

German Economic News | Released:17.06.17 00:36 Clock

The Eastern Committee of the German economy is indignant at the new US sanctions against Russia.

The German companies have sharply criticized the US sanctions against Russia. «The sanctions plans of the US Senate are deeply alarming and, in principle, a threat to the European and German economy», said Klaus Schäfer, Deputy Chairman of the Eastern Committee of the German Economy, on Friday evening in Berlin. «America first is a new dimension to open up international markets to US providers at the expense of European jobs. Furthermore, we consider an extraterritorial application of economic initiatives generally wrong, «he said. In the Eastern Committee, the German companies active in Eastern Europe are organized. The federal government had also clearly criticized the sanction decision.

«Every further turn at the sanctioning screw increases the danger of new trade wars and the uncertainty of the world economy», warned Schäfer. The solution of the Ukraine conflict is not a step closer. A de-escalation on all sides was necessary. He pointed out that the US-Russia trade represented only one-tenth of the EU-Russia trade. «We pay the price of sanctions to Europeans», he criticized. «Implementation of the planned sanctions would make Europe more difficult to provide with favorable energy and inevitably lead to higher prices».

The most remarkable thing about this intensification of economic aggression by the US aristocracy against some of the European aristocracies, is that instead of the aggression being spearheaded this time by the US President, it’s being spearheaded by an almost unanimous US Senate: 97 out of the 100 US Senators voted for this bill. One cannot, this time around, reasonably blame «Donald Trump» for this ‘nationalism’ — it is instead clearly a Cold War, this time, by the US aristocracy (who are represented by the US government), against some European aristocracies, which are paying insufficient obeisance to the demands by the imperial aristocracy: the US gang.

Whereas, at the time of the US coup in Ukraine, the EU swallowed in silence their shock at how brutal and bloody it had been, and stayed with the Americans because the Americans claimed that the takeover would benefit European aristocracies too (‘expand the EU’), the lie about that is now clear to all (and Ukraine has been too wrecked by America, to be of much use to anyone but the Americans as a staging base for their missiles against Moscow), and therefore «the Western Alliance» might finally be breaking up.

The vassal-governments have put up with a lot from the US aristocracy, such as when German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone was revealed to be tapped by America’s NSA, and the case was quietly dropped because, «Prosecutors say they can find no actionable evidence to support claims German chancellor’s mobile phone was tapped by US National Security Agency» even though everyone knew that the refusal by Germany’s prosecutors was based upon a lie, and that Germany «remains heavily reliant on the US», and that the US government’s knowing everything that German politicians do, provides against those politicians a blackmail-potential against themselves, that cannot be taken lightly. On the other hand, perhaps there now exists a countervailing force that can outweigh even considerations such as that. Maybe Germany’s billionaires have, somehow, finally become able to turn the tide on this.

Akhmed Chataev: An inconvenient “fighter against Russia”

July 02, 2016

14673072528640

 Original by Boris Rozhin (Colonel Cassad); abridged translation by J.Hawk
submitted by SouthFront: https://southfront.org/akhmed-chataev-an-inconvenient-fighter-against-russia/
It’s like it’s a holiday of some sort.
The main suspect in organizing the Ataturk Airport attack is a Chechen militant by the name of Akhmed Chataev whose biography will simply knock your socks off.
The fact that some particularly stubborn types hurried to find a “Russian trail” happened largely because they did not bother to acquaint themselves with Chataev’s life story.
“Akhmed Chataev was born on July 4 (or 14), 1980, in Vedeno, currently located in Chechnya. He lost an arm above the elbow during the Second Chechen War. Russian authorities believed Chataev was Doku Umarov’s representative in Western Europe and accused him of either financing and recruiting terrorists, or membership in a militant groups. A warrant has existed for his arrest since 2003. It is in that year that he received a refugee status in Austria. According to Kommersant, he might have testified he lost his arm due to torture. The paper adds his nickname is “One-Armed.”In 2008, Chataev and several other Chechens were arrested in Trelleborg, Sweden. Police found weapons in his car; Chataev spent over a year in a local jail.
In January 2010 Chataev was arrested in Uzhgorod, Ukraine. Ukraine MVD head Yuriy Lutsenko said his mobile phone contained instructions on rigging explosives, and also photographs of dead bodies, including bombing victims. According to Lutsenko, the police questioned Chataev’s documents’ originality, including his refugee documents issued in Austria.The European Court of Justice forbade his extradition to Russia, therefore Ukraine sent him to Georgia where he was also accused of a crime he committed in ’00s. No information is available about that case.
Chataev spent some time in Georgian prison, but then he came out, got married, and stayed in Georgia. Nevertheless, on May 19, 2011 he was once again arrested on the border between Turkey and Bulgaria. Bulgarian court initially wanted to extradite him to Russia, but an appeals court overturned it.

Chataev in a Bulgarian court http://www.newsru.com/world/02jul2011/terrorist.html
 
In late August 2012, there was a gunfight between Georgian police and militants in the Lopota Gorge in Georgia, close to the border with Dagestan. On September 8, MVD announced that a wounded Akhmed Chataev was arrested in the gorge as one of the militants. His foot had to be amputated due to the wound. At the time of his arrest, Chataev had two F-1 grenades, and was accused of unlawful weapons possession. At that time he already had Georgian citizenship. It was earlier reported he lived in the Duisi village in the Pankissi Gorge, the same area where Umar ash-Shsishani, an Islamic State leader, had also resided. Chataev was ultimately found not guilty.
 
 It became known in April 2015 that Chataev went off to fight in Syria. According to a Caucasian Knot source in the power agencies, he left there in February 2015. By October, US listed him as a terrorist on suspicion of recruiting for ISIS. Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee (NAC) believes Chataev to be the main ISIS recruiter involved in searching for individuals to carry out attacks in Russia and Western Europe. It was also reported that he used to be in the Interpol database, though not any more.
https://meduza.io/feature/2016/06/30/verbovschik-odnorukiy

It’s a remarkable personality, but even more remarkable is the touching tolerance of European countries which could have extradited him to Russia on many occasions, where he would have been safely locked up, but he was a “Chechen freedom fighter”, which they did not hold against him.Chataev spent 13 years freely moving about Europe and CIS. According to LifeNews, he benefited from Ukrainian nationalists’ support. “The bottom line is that Chataev freely moved about Europe and CIS, often with weapons in his possession, while several countries’ governments chose to ignore his dangerous and illegal activities in order to make life harder for Russia. In January 2016, the NAC warned that Chataev was the commander of a special unit within ISIS, focusing on preparing attacks in Russia and Europe.Moreover, Chataev was arrested more than once. In 2010 he was arrested in Ukraine. Russia was not able to have him extradited because of the intervention of SBU head Valentin Nalivaichenko and the European Court of Human Rights, both of whom claimed Chataev could not get a fair trial in Russia. Ukrainian nationalists also interceded on behalf of Chataev. The Ukrainian “Tryzub” organization bearing the name of Stepan Bandera (whose members would form the core of the Right Sector during the Maidan) held a picket in front of the Procuracy office demanding his immediate liberation as a “Chechen refugee.” And he was released.https://lenta.ru/news/2016/06/30/terraktstambul/As far as Ukraine is concerned, let’s remind ourselves of the refined examples of how the future organizer of Stambul airport attack fought for freedom.

To the President of Ukraine Yushchenko,
To the Prime Minister Timoshenko
To SBU Head Nalivaichenko

An Address by the International Anti-Imperialist Front

According to media reports, Ukrainian law enforcement in Uzhgorod arrested a Chechen political refugee Akhmed Chataev, who also suffers from Category 2 disability.

Chataev has the official refugee status issued by Austria, where he has lived for years. He was in Ukraine on personal business, has not violated any Ukrainian laws, and intended to return to Austria before being snatched.

According to recent information, Chataev was arrested at the request of Russian special services. Moscow wants Kiev to extradite him as soon as possible because he “is a participant of combat operations against Russian forces in Chechnya. It was reported that Russian officials have already flown to Ukraine with an extradition dossier to pressure Ukraine’s government. Such actions by Ukraine’s authorities contradict not only national interests, but also common sense because the Kremlin puppet who has only recently received Putin’s approval to govern Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has openly called for Ukraine’s statehood to be annulled. Shortly after that, Kremlin agents in Ukraine have arrested a Chechen patriot who at one time fought against Russian aggressors and Kadyrov’s lackeys, weapon in hand. The International Anti-Imperialist Front is lodging a firm protest against sneaky actions by Fifth Column members in Ukrainian law enforcement and demands the immediate release of the unlawfully arrested Chechen freedom fighter Akhmed Chataev. If these demands are not fulfilled, the Front and other organizations may launch mass protest actions. 

Down with Kremlin agents in Ukraine security structures!
For your freedom and ours!
Anti-Imperialist Commitee Executive Committee Chahirman
Dmytro Yarosh

http://zugunder.com/index.php?topic=164443.0

Nalivaichenko himself considered the arrest unwarranted and scandalous. He was liberated thanks to personal intervention by Nalivaichenko and Ukrainian nationalist protests.

http://www.yaplakal.com/forum3/topic1405968.html

Now about Georgia. Saakashvili is blaming everything on his successor Ivanishvili.

“The Russian citizen Akhmed Chataev appears to be the main organizer of the Istanbul attacks. He was arrested by my government in Georgia during an operation headed by General Georgiy Lordkipanidze who is currently the head of Odessa police. Three of our police officers died in that operation,” Saakashvili wrote.

He also said that the Ivanishvili-led government which assumed power in 2012 released Chataev as a political prisoner.

“I was still the president at the time and was outspoken against his release, but the verdict was annulled by the Prosecutor’s Office. He is now free even though he killed many innocent people. My 10-year-old son traveled through that terminal shortly before the attack, therefore I feel full solidarity with the victims’ relatives. Does Georgia’s government feel the same?”, Saakashvili summed up.
http://www.dialog.ua/news/90370_1467314674

The question why the “pro-Russian” Ivanishvili government did not extradite Chataev to Russia should be posed before Georgia’s government.

“At present time, the relatives of Akhmed Chataev are holding a meeting in front of the Ministry of Justice demanding his release.

Ministry officials invited the protesters to meet with the minister. The meeting will be attended by the advisor to the State Minister for Integration Issues, Meka Khangoshvili.

“The population is demanding the operation to be investigated. It is very important for us that Akhmed Chataev, who is innocent, to be released. The entire Pankissi Gorge is vouching for this man,” Meka Khankoshvili said, adding that the Prosecutor’s Office had all the legal basis to release Chataev.”

http://news.ge/ru/news/story/38952-vozle-ministerstva-justicii-prohodit-akcija-s-trebovaniem-osvobodit-ahmeda-chataeva

I’d like to add that in 2012, when this statement was made, Saakashvili was still president.
Georgia’s Minister of Justice at the time explains this clash as follows.

“Akhmed Chataev’s name made news after the Lopota Gorga operation. Chataev was the only one taken alive. He was accused of illegal acquisition and possession of explosives. After the government changed, the Tbilisi City Court replaced imprisonment with a conditional release under a $3000 bond. Minister of Justice Teya Tsulukyani said that she was against releasing Chataev. “I was in favor of Prosecutor’s Office paying even greater attention to such individuals following their release,” adding that it was impossible “because the Office released people only because of politics or pressure” by the former Chief Prosecutor Zurab Adeshvili.

http://www.apsny.ge/2016/pol/1467353450.php


Chataev after release, 2012

And here’s the article from Le Monde describing his arrest in Georgia, where it’s apparent that Georgia’s leaders, past and present, were trying to shift responsibility on to one another.

The confusing operation in Lopoto Gorge

On August 29, 2012, Georgian special units carried out a bloody operation in the foothills. This was the most serious incident in Russia-Georgia relations since the 2008 war. Police engaged an Islamist group which held hostage five Lapankuri inhabitants for two days. Negotiations failed, making fighting inevitable. TV showed corpses of people in camouflage and the sizable captured arsenal: Kalashnikovs, Makarov pistols with silencers, a sniper rifle, grenade launchers, most modern binoculars.

The militants wanted to penetrate into Dagestan

Seven militants were killed, as well as 3 cops. 10 militants escaped into the forest. The government immediately said it could have been a provocation which was in Russia’s interests.Georgian leaders believed these people came from Dagestan, but it turned out to be incorrect. Several militants spoke Georgian. Two of them were Kistintsy, a Chechen group living in Georgia. Freed hostages helped clarify the intent of the militants: they wanted to go to Dagestan, not the other way around. This raised the specter of 2000’s. Was Georgia once again becoming a Chechen Islamist base? That’s what Moscow had always said. The Putin-Saakashvili enmity only broadened the chasm separating Russia and Georgia. Paranoia, conspiracy theories, and espionage accusations blossomed on both sides.
Lopoto Gorge events raise many questions. The Ivanishvili camp openly voiced its suspicions that the former parliamentary majority could have sponsored the Islamists. He promised to disclose evidence in June. “Everyone knows that the militants used Georgia as a transit point for many years prior to the 2008 war. We have stopped it, it will never happen again. There are suspicions that the government collaborated with them, or at least knew they were present.These suspicions were launched by the newly appointed ombudsman Ucha Nanuashvili. His annual report was published on February one, where the Lopoto Gorge operation had its own chapter. Nanuashvili blamed former government in transferring almost 120 Chechen terrorists from Europe to Georgia, arming and housing them, and training them on two military bases. But with what puprose? And why did it then attack the militants? “I don’t know–said Nanuashvili–but they believed the government would open a corridor into Russia. They were all very young, 18-25. Maybe they were going to be used against Russia. Or to settle internal scores.” Nanuashvili cited anonymous “witnesses” when asked for evidence. “I am not a journalist, I have the right to ask questions. Those aren’t final conclusions.” Saakashvili rejected the accusations. “We were not interested in destabilizing the situation before the elections. We wanted to improve the population’s conditions, not stage a bloodbath in a forest. But what if this group entered Russia and killed people? How would Moscow react? They would have gone after the militants, entering Georgia’s territory in pursuit.”
During the operation, Georgia’s Minister of Defense was Bacho Akhalaya who was arrested in November 2012 for abuse of authority and mistreatment of soldiers. Both political camps note that one of the reasons for the tragic outcome of the clash was the competition between Akhalaya and then-Prime Minister Vano Merabishvili, who now heads the “United National Movement” party.

Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Pankissi GorgeSaakashvili claims the government knew of the militants only after they kidnapped five Georgians, on August 26. We were able to meet with three of them, however, they did not want to talk to us. Their relatives said they were forced to act as guides on the way toward the border with Dagestan. After two days they were exchanged for a border guard. “When we saw they have satellite phones, we asked the Americans to intercept their communications, but it was no use,” Saakashvili said. “We told the CIA rep about it. In addition, we warned the Swiss in order to show we had nothing to hide.”Before the battle, the authorities began negotiations, demanding the militants turn back. Georgian government was represented by Zelimkhan Khangoshvili. He commanded a unit of 100 militants between 2000 and 2005. FSB considers him a terrorist, but Georgia’s special services often used his help due to his familiarity with local conditions. We met with him in a restaurant on the outskirts of Tbilisi, where he told us about the militants’ final hours:“The detachment was in a forest, high in the mountains. They were waiting for us. All they had to do is cross the mountain. I said it was a mistake, Georgia would not let them pass. They were told that if they lay down their arms, those who came from Europe will have to leave, while others will be able to return home. They were very aggressive, and did not want to make any concessions. It was a dead end.”But who were these 17 militants in Lopoto Gorge? Many were from the Chechen diaspora in Europe, particularly Austria. All told, 14 came from abroad. Two entered Georgia illegally from Russia, through Dagestan. 12 others entered the country legally: the first half in April-May 2012, the second in August. Some took a direct flight from Europe, others through Istanbul, yet others crossed the border from. Turkey at Sarpi. 11 had Russian passports which gave them to remain in Georgia without a visa. 7 had entry permits due to their status as Chechen refugees: three were issued in Austria, two in France, and one each in Finland and UK. The ombudsman claims that some were able to get Georgian passports with the aid of European embassies.

Thus these individuals came to Georgia weeks and even months before the battle. “Majority of them were Islamists, but some maintained contacts with Russian special services,” says Saakashvili loyalist and Georgia National Security Council Secretary Giga Bokeria. “Not a single European country warned us they were Islamists. Georgia’s MVD claims these individuals did not conceal their arrival in Georgia, so that the previous government knew everything about them.

10 of the militants were never caught. The ombudsman supposes the previous government’s officials helped them run away. One of them, nicknamed Abu Hamza, fought for two months in Syria, then returned to Austria. He gave an interview to a Foreign Policy journalist in Pankissi Gorge, shortly before the Boston attack. He said that about 100 Chechens were fighting against the Syrian government, but did not say anything about the Lopoto Gorge group.

 A Chechen refugee in Austria

Merabi Margoshvili has no doubts his son Aslan was manipulated. In September 2011, the 22-year-old man dropped out of college. He said he was going to his friends in Finland. They were sending him money. He said he’d return in a year. But he returned in two months, saying it was too cold, and that he’ll go to Slovakia instead. I don’t know with whom.” In the end he turned up in Egypt. In March 2012 he returned to Georgia without telling his father. “Like others, he went to Egypt to study,” Merabi thinks. “He did not attend the mosque here, he hated the Wahhabites. Last summer, many Chechens from Europe came to Duisi. The government had a plan. They were manipulating the Chechens.”

Merabi believes in a conspiracy theory. He is sure he has a proof, which he already gave to the human rights defenders. It’s a license to carry weapons, specifically a Stechkin automatic pistol, issued to his son on July 23, 2012, a month before his death. Georgian MVD confirmed its authenticity, but claimed it was not difficult to obtain one. Why would a young man who just returned to the country need such a weapon? The ministry said that captured weapons were not listed in governmental inventories.

http://inosmi.ru/sngbaltia/20130516/209060736.html

And now for the logical finale of a “freedom fighter’s” career. Chataev resurfaced in the ranks of ISIS thanks to the efforts by Ukrainian fascists, European and Georgian human rights activists, a CIA agent, and the European Court of Human Rights.

February 2015. Syria. Abu-Jihad al-Shishani in the center, our hero sitting right next to him.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=039_1420585262&comments=1 – Here’s a video with these individuals, the “anti-Russian freedom fighter” Chataev appears starting at 12:20.

Here’s what attracts attention. In both cases, international terrorists were supported under the pretext of struggle against Russia. That was sufficient to justify their long-standing collaboration with terrorists. but now there is a problem, since the individual whom they helped bit the hand that fed him, moreover, the hand which was politically awkward to bite (though its also apparent that Chataev simply acquired a new boss and now he no longer serves the sponsors of Chechen militants but the Great Caliph himself). I won’t even mention the well-known cases of Chechen militants receiving treatment in Turkey, as well as Georgia or Ukraine, Turkey’s trade with ISIS, and using Turkey as a Caliphate recruiting outpost.

I will only say that the “anti-Russian fighter’s” attack against the Turkish airport places all the previous protectors of Chataev in a very difficult position, so now they will aggressively deny their direct involvement in international terrorism and instead blame Russia, even though nobody other than Russia wanted this individual arrested.

Oh, and for dessert:

May it please the High Court,
We, the members of the Independent International Human Rights Group, are petitioning the Bulgarian government to release a Chechen refugee, the father of four children, Akhmed Chataev, who is being persecuted by Russia for his political beliefs. According to available information, Akhmed Chataev had his hand cut off in a Russian concentration camp, where he was also tortured with electricity which was applied to the stump.

Given all the facts of the case, Akhmed Chataev was given the status of refugee in Austria in 2003, and is therefore under the protection of the Austrian state.

In 2010, Akhmed Chataev was arrested in Ukraine and was threatened with extradition to Russia, but the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg used Rule 39 to instruct Ukraine’s government that, due to his Austrian refugee status he could not be extradited to Russia.
<…>
We believe that Bulgarian authorities’ actions are violating human rights principles, inflict injury not only to asylum seekers but also Bulgaria’s international image by demonstrating noncompliance with voluntarily accepted obligations.

Given all the facts of the case, we petition the Appeals Court of the Republic of Bulgaria to free Akhmed Chataev.

Respectfully, the members of the Independent International Human Rights Group

Viktoria Pupko–President, Anna Politkovskaya Foundation, USA
Mairbek Taramov–Director, Chechen Human Rights Center, Sweden
Nadezhda Banchik–journalist, member of Amnesty International USA
Said-Emin Ibragimov–President, World and Human Rights International Association, France
David Kudykov–journalist and writer, PEN-Club, UK
Maio Plado–human rights movement activist, Estonia


http://bezhentsy.livejournal.com/18190.html

8 Children Found Dead at Home in Northern Australian City

Source

Eight dead children and a woman suffering from serious stab wounds were found inside a northern Australian home Friday, police said.

policePolice believe the 34-year-old woman found with chest wounds is the mother of seven children with the eighth child believed to be a relative.

Queensland state police were called to the home in the Cairns suburb of Manoora Friday after receiving a report of  a woman with serious injuries. When police entered the house, they found the bodies of the children, ranging in age from 18 months to 15 years.

The Guardian reports the children were all stabbed to death.

Detective Inspector Bruno Asincar said he didn’t believe there was a multiple murderer still at large and that police were talking to the woman. Asked if she was a suspect, he said officials have not yet identified any suspects and were questioning everyone who had contact with the family in the past 2-3 days.

“As it stands at the moment, there’s no need for the public to be concerned about this other than the fact that it’s a tragic, tragic event,” Asnicar said. “The situation is well controlled at the moment. There shouldn’t be any concern for anyone else out of this environment.”

Lisa Thaiday, who said she was the woman’s cousin, said another sibling, a 20-year-old man, came home and found his brothers and sisters dead inside the house.

Detective Inspector Bruno Asnicar said the police who reported the incident were initially ‘distressed.’

“These events are extremely distressing for everyone, of course, and police officers aren’t immune to that, we’re human beings as well,” Ansicar said. “But the police we have here are very highly trained and professional.. I’m very happy with the response.”

Source: Websites

19-12-2014 – 14:50 Last updated 19-12-2014 – 14:50

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US and Europe Conceal Their Bankruptcy with Hostility to Russia

Finian CUNNINGHAM | 18.11.2014

US President Obama was joined by European leaders last weekend in trying to turn the G20 summit in Australia into a forum for baiting Russia, rather than dealing with the more onerous problem of a failing world economy.

The annual meetings of the world’s top economies are by definition supposed to be aimed at addressing problems in the global economy. And those problems are increasingly onerous, with poverty in North America and Europe reaching record levels. Recent data from the EU, put the level of poverty in the bloc at an all-time high of some 122 million people – affecting around one-in-four citizens.

Similar plummeting social conditions are haunting the United States, where economic recovery is anaemic at best despite official government statistics claiming that unemployment there is declining. As American commentator Paul Craig Roberts points out the official jobless figures in the US are meaningless when millions of long-term unemployed workers are excluded from the records.

Worldwide, the economic outlook is grim, according to even the pro-Western International Monetary Fund’s latest assessment.

So, you would think that top of the agenda for the G20 summit last weekend should be how governments are coordinating recovery efforts to get people back into work, relaunch economies with massive public investment, boost social welfare to mitigate rising poverty, and rebalance the explosion of inequality between capital and labour.

No. Obama and European leaders sought instead to shift the focus from economics to «security» and in particular to add more international pressure on Russia over the Ukraine crisis.

The American president told delegates in Brisbane that the US was leading the world in the fight against the Islamic State terror network, the Ebola disease (affecting a minuscule number of the world’s population), and «in opposing Russian aggression in Ukraine». Obama claimed that Russia presented a «threat to the world» and tendentiously reiterated the baseless claim that Russia was guilty in the downing of the Malaysia civilian airliner over Ukraine in July, with the loss of 298 lives.

Obama’s «blame Russia» trope was supported by Hermann Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, who was also at the G20 summit. Van Rompuy – an unelected bureaucrat and the highest paid politician in the world on a salary of over $500,000 – said that EU foreign ministers were to meet in the coming days to slap more economic sanctions on Russia.

«Russia must stop the inflow of weapons and troops from its territory into Ukraine and Russia must withdraw those already present,» said the former Belgian prime minister, without providing the slightest evidence to support this inflammatory assertion.

Indeed three previous rounds of EU sanctions against Russia have been based on wholly unfounded accusations against Moscow, including the alleged downing of the Malaysian airliner, always on the basis of politicised innuendo bereft of any facts.

Russia has consistently refuted that it is involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. It says it is not supplying weapons or troops and has continually demanded for evidence to be presented – a demand that has not been met by its accusers who simply pile on more baseless innuendo. Russian delegates at the G20 conference rebutted latest Western claims that it has deployed military convoys into eastern Ukraine as groundless «horror stories» that are not supported with verifiable proof. Moscow rightly points out that the conflict in eastern Ukraine has stemmed from Washington and its European allies illegally helping to overthrow the elected government last February and installing a deeply hostile regime in Kiev, which has proceeded to wage a murderous offensive on the Russian-speaking population in the east of the country simply because these people have refused to recognise the Western-backed coup.

Russia has also provided information from satellite, radar and air traffic control communications that strongly implicate the Western-backed regime forces in the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner. Russia’s Channel One last week broadcast a satellite image showing the airliner being accompanied suspiciously by a fighter jet. That finding backs up previous claims that the passenger plane was shot down by a Kiev-commanded fighter jet, not hit with an anti-aircraft missile under the control of pro-Russian self-defence militia in Donetsk as the Western governments and media have continually alleged – and continue to allege as per Obama at the G20 last weekend.

It should be evident from the complete dearth of evidence that the US-led hostility toward Russia has other ulterior motives. The expansion of NATO as an instrument of American global hegemony in a post Cold War world, the encirclement and attempted enfeebling of Russia as a global economic rival, the thwarting of a multipolar world that threatens to undermine American power and its declining dollar supremacy are all part of this agenda.

Ironically, this desperate clinging to waning American hegemony, supported by European vassals, is serving to drive the world economy into deeper malaise and poverty.

The truth is Washington and its European allies have no real alternative to resurrect their economies or that of the world. Their neoliberal capitalist dead-end policies of enriching a financial oligarchy while clobbering the mass of citizens with relentless austerity is a major reason why the world economy is irreversibly in demise.

Meanwhile Russia with its ambitious new trade and financial partnerships with Eurasian partners, China in particular and other BRICS nations, is providing a bright potential way out of the global stagnation. This new geo-strategic direction also provides a more secure and law-based international order between nations.

This explains why Obama and the European establishment were doing everything to keep the focus of the G20 summit away from «economics» and to scapegoat Russia for the mess that they have created. Western governments are bankrupt of new ideas to salvage the economic problems of the world. How could they be otherwise when it is their economic ideology that has produced the crisis facing humanity in the 21st Century?

The real threat to the world is economic collapse and poverty. Without any solutions and in fact only exacerbating these problems, the US and European leaders are hiding behind a false agenda of non-issues, such as security, and in particular alleged «Russian aggression».

Foto: abcnews.go.com

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Austrian teenage girl who joined ISIS might have been killed in Syria

Samra Kesinovic, 16, and Sabina Selimovic, 15, fled Austria to join the ISIS, according to local reports.
Published Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Austrian authorities said Tuesday they were investigating reports that one of two teenage girls who travelled to Syria earlier this year to join Islamist militants has been killed.
“Rumours are circulating on the Internet and we are checking that information,” interior ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundboeck told AFP, confirming local newspaper reports.
Austrian media reported in April that two girls of Bosnian origin — Sabina Selimovic, 15 and Samra Kesinovic, 16 — had left for Syria, telling their parents in a letter than they wanted to “fight for Islam” there.
Grundboeck did not say Tuesday which of the two teenagers was believed to have been killed.
Missing persons’ reports on Interpol’s website say the two girls disappeared from Vienna on April 10. The reports show pictures of two pretty teenage girls.
Other photos found online and published in Austrian media purportedly show the two girls — who were active on social media and continued to post updates from Turkey and Syria — wearing a heavy headscarf and veil, or posing with masked armed men.
The interior ministry estimates 142 Austrians, including 12 women, have so far joined the ranks of jihadists in Syria.
Last week, the ministry said police picked up two schoolgirls aged 14 and 15 in the southern city of Graz “with full suitcases… intending to go to Syria.”
On Monday, conservative ministers in the government, including those in charge of justice and the interior, proposed a new package of measures to tackle the threat of extremism in Austria.
The package, which must still be agreed with the conservatives’ Social Democrat coalition partners, include harsher penalties for incitement to hatred, a ban on symbols linked to terrorist groups, and revoking the Austrian citizenship of dual citizens who joined a foreign paramilitary organization.
(AFP)

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