BURNING THE FAITH

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration:  This came out after the Jordanian pilot was burned alive for all to see by Daesh, or ISIS.

    It would seem that this action would discourage any reasonable person from even considering ISIS (Daesh) as a legitimate concern in the Middle East or anywhere else, but it did not.  It was very inane for anyone to deal with them when they said the releasse of one hostage was dependent on Jordan's releasing a prisoner and that the pilot would be executed if she were not released.  The point was that the pilot had already been executed before the threat were issued.  There is no government that could possibly negotiate with this organization given this lack of credibility.

     Furthermore, it led us to wonder why there has been such an increase of people drawn to join the group, especially since one reasonably sane fighter quit and returned to France because smoking was forbidden.  It come down to this:  you need to remember inner-city gangs with their colors and tattoos, people joining in order to belong and also to enjoy the suffering of those who did not belong.  The idea of joining a gang with some professed purpose and thus being able to inflict pain and feel masculine as a result is obviously too tempting to the hormone-ridden lower IQ scum that infest our planet.

    We have had little to say here in the last two weeks and, ironically, during that time readership has grown tremendously.   Perhaps this is because everything we have said in the past years and months has proven true, perhaps just as a coincidence.  Whatever the reason, there is a vast need for a powerful spraying of this planet with some chemical that will reduce the effects of testosterone, especially, by at least 95%.  Failing that, insanity will compound itself.

     In case you wonder, the Koran explicitly praises both Moses and Jesus, Judaism and Christianity, and clarifies some of their basic concepts, much like Einstein clarified Newton. 

     No more to say for now.  Freeze your balls off.

Alberto Nisman’s Death and AMIA: Who Cares About the Truth?

 We have simply heard too much nonsense about this not to see this:

 

Alberto Nisman’s Death and AMIA: Who Cares About the Truth?

By Ezequiel Adamovsky 
Source: teleSUR English 

February 4, 2015
Change text size: [ A+ ] / [ A- ]

Posted in: Argentina, Civil Liberties, Latin America, Law, Crime, & Justice, Politics/Gov. | No comments

On 18 January the Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead in his apartment in Buenos Aires. A few days before he had returned from his vacations in Europe and presented a shocking and unexpected accusation. He claimed that he had proved that President Cristina Kirchner and the Foreign Minister Hector Timerman were in the process of orchestrating a cover-up in the investigation of Iran over the 1994 bombing of AMIA (the main Jewish community center of Argentina) that left 85 dead. He presented his proofs – a lengthy 289-page report – to a federal judge, who was not able to immediately reveal its content, as it mentioned Argentine intelligence agents by name. The opposition summoned Nisman to the Congress to present his findings. The meeting, scheduled for the 19 January, was never held, as Nisman died few hours before.

In the polarized political life of Argentina, the case was immediately used for political purposes. The main newspapers and TV channels, sworn enemies of the government, sparked doubts over the circumstances of Nisman’s death, suggesting that he was either murdered or pushed to commit suicide in a last-minute attempt to prevent his presentation at the Congress. Politicians in the opposition immediately fueled similar theories. Hundreds of people set to the streets carrying placards “I am Nisman” (or “Je suis Nisman” written in French, as an echo of the Charlie Hebdo demonstrations), blaming the government for the death of an honest man who had uncovered its dirty secrets. “I am Nisman” became trending topic in social networks, while anti-Kirchner intellectuals and journalists proclaimed that the murder/induced suicide of Nisman was the symbol of the death of the Republic under Kirchner’s administration. Similar stories were soon reproduced by the international media, which used the case as yet another example of the phantasmal threat of Latin American “populism” and for other purposes (including the bashing of Obama over his Iran policy).

The government officials responded clumsily, firstly rushing to proclaim that it was an obvious case of suicide (before any forensic analysis of the evidence), and shortly afterwards claiming, without any proofs, that it was a murder ordered by an obscure alliance between rogue intelligence agents and the owners of Clarín, the main news corporation of Argentina. In this explanation, the purpose of the crime was to destabilize Cristina Kirchner’s government: the murderers firstly pushed Nisman to present an absurd accusation against the president and then killed him, so as to make it look as a political assassination. Some of the pro-government intellectuals and journalists proclaimed that Nisman’s death was part of a coup d’état attemptorchestrated by the USA.

The manipulation of the information, already epidemic in Argentina, reached bizarre proportions, as several people tried to profit from this death for political or personal purposes. Newspapers published unreliable or deliberately false information (such as Clarín’s allegationthat a source from the forensic investigation said that the gun that killed Nisman was triggered at 15cm of the head and therefore was no suicide). The Buenos Aires Herald journalist Damian Patcher left the country in a hurry and found shelter in Tel Aviv – a city he nevertheless called “home” – after claiming that his life was in danger as he had ruined the plans of the government to conceal Nisman’s death (he was the first journalist who tweeted that there were strange movements in the prosecutor’s apartment, but he did that at a time when Nisman’s mother and other people were already there). Patcher’s rather imaginative story about Argentine spies following him while he was trying to escape from the country gained him international notoriety, but was not even backed by his own newspaper, which took it with a grain of salt.

Politicians were not slower at profiting from Nisman’s fate. To give but few examples, Sergio Massa (who has good chances to become Argentina’s next president), formally requested to be regarded a plaintiff in the investigation of AMIA’s bombing and/or of Nisman’s denunciation – he was unsure of which one he was talking about –, something that is legally impossible but gave him some nice newspaper headlines. The mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri – another favorite for the next presidential elections – appeared in a press conference, saying he was deeply concerned for the future of the Republic and of the AMIA case. He conveniently forgot that he appointed Jorge “el fino” Palacios as chief of the new local police that he created in 2009. Palacios is currently under indictment in the AMIA court case, considered a participant in the crime of concealment, a role that was perfectly clear when Macri appointed him.

Macri himself is indicted in another case for having used his new police for illegal telephone hearings of, among others, Jorge Burstein, spokesperson of one of the associations of relatives of the AMIA victims, who was leading the campaign against Palacio’s appointment. Eight days after the prosecutor’s death, the versatile Patricia Bullrich – part of Menem’s troupe at the time of AMIA’s bombing, now Macri’s ally – had a sudden recollection. She told a newspaper that she had had a meeting with Nisman the day before his death, in which the prosecutor said that some spy linked to Iran had betrayed him – she cannot provide any names or additional information, though – which gained her invaluable press coverage. Strangely enough, she had not mentioned that fact in the several descriptions of that meetingthat she had offered to the media in previous days.

So what do we really know about this whole matter?

Who was Alberto Nisman?

Although he is portrayed as a man who died looking for the truth, Nisman was far from being a justice hero. He was the prosecutor in charge of the investigation of AMIA’s bombing for many years and his role there was indeed obscure.

Long time ago, some of the people who knew the details of that investigation pointed out that in 1994, from day one after the bombing, before any single piece of evidence was produced, Argentinean president Carlos Menem had agreed with the U.S. and Israel to blame Iran. For the U.S. and Israel, it was of an obvious geopolitical interest. For Menem, whose international policy was defined as one of “carnal relations” (sic) with the U.S., it was not only a matter of pleasing his friends, but also of covering up himself. Indeed, as we later knew, some of the hints of the initial investigation pointed to the Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad, who had financed Menem’s presidential campaign (Carlos Menem is from a Syrian-Lebanese family) and was by then deeply disappointed with his foreign policy and with other domestic promises that he had not kept.

We still do not have the slightest clue as to who ordered AMIA’s bombing. It could well have been Iran. But the truth is that the Syrian lead was never examined and that that was a deliberate decision. The continuity of Israel’s interest in getting Syria off the hook after the initial moments and in the past recent years is not well documented, but the U.S.’ is. More importantly, there was a conspiracy to mislead the investigation of the local complicities, in which Menem and Juan José Galeano, the first judge in charge of the case (later removed and now under trial), among others, were involved.

Alberto Nisman was instrumental in both forms of judicial manipulation. As the Wikileaks affair exposed, he was practically working for the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, which was pushing to leave the Syrian lead in oblivion and to close the local chapter of the investigation as soon as possible. Nisman would take as undeniable facts all of the “intelligence information” that the embassy gave him without further examination. He reported every single of his decisions to the embassy before informing the new judge appointed to the case. He even took at least one of his rulings to the embassy to get it corrected before presenting it. He simply ignored the judge, who urged him repeatedly to pursue other leads apart from the Iranian and to check with other sources the information that the US was giving him.

But more importantly, Nisman was instrumental in the false accusation forged against a bunch of Argentinean policemen who had supposedly helped the Iranians in the bombing, by means of which Menem and his associates were hoping to close the local chapter of the investigation. Argentina’s intelligence agency SI was in charge of that operation, which continued under the next presidents –including Fernando de la Rúa, from the Unión Cívica Radical, and Eduardo Duhalde, whose Secretary of Intelligence, Miguel Ángel Toma, is now Sergio Massa’s close ally. As Claudio Lifschitz, the man who exposed the covering-up of the local connection, said recently, Nisman endorsed the accusation against those policemen in full knowledge that they were innocent. Luckily, the court in charge of that case dismissed the whole investigation and demanded a new one.

All this information about Nisman was perfectly known (for instance, I referred to his responsibility in the failure of the investigation in a 2009 newspaper piece). Shortly before he died two of the associations of relatives of the victims of the 1994 bombing were openly saying that Nisman was “part of the old covering-up maneuvers” (APEMIA) and that he represented “the interests not of the victims, but of those who covered up” the bombing (Memoria Activa). The sad story is that none of the main political parties in Argentina was keen on questioning Nisman’s behavior before he came up with his denunciation of Cristina Kirchner.

Santiago O’Donnell, the journalist who investigated the Wikileaks concerning Argentina, included large sections and a whole chapter exposing Nisman in his books Argenleaks (2011) and Politileaks (2014). As he recently explained in his blog, no newspaper – including the pro-Kirchner Página 12, where he still works – was willing to report on this part of the Wikileaks revelations. Both the Kirchners and the opposition backed Nisman wholeheartedly, either because they did not want to confront American and Israeli interests, or because it was comforting to believe in Nisman’s claims that he had resolved AMIA’s case. Now that his death is useful for political purposes, the opposition continues to overlook his obscure behavior. Even journalists and intellectuals who are perfectly aware of Nisman’s past – including topClarín’s columnist Jorge Lanata, who once wrote that the prosecutor’s AMIA investigation was totally fictitious – prefer not to mention it these days.

How dangerous is Nisman’s accusation against the government?

In few words, Nisman’s argument is that Cristina Kirchner masterminded a secret plan to absolve Iranian officials accused of the 1994 bombing in return for deliveries of much-needed oil from Iran. Having that goal in mind, in 2013 she obtained approval from the Congress for an international treaty of cooperation with that country, known as the Memorandum of Understanding, that established a sort of international “truth commission” with the alleged purpose of interrogating the suspects in Teheran. The real purpose – the argument goes – was to get Interpol arrest warrants against the Iranian officials dropped, which Foreign Minister Timerman tried (but failed) to do. The evidence that Nisman presented in his report rely almost entirely on telephone hearings of the alleged agents of both sides: among others one representative of the Muslim community in Argentina (speaking on behalf of the Iranians), the former piquetero leader Luis D’Elía (Cristina’s man), and an agent of Argentina’s Intelligence Agency (SI). No person in office or with formal ties with the government was included in the recordings.

By now, those who made the effort of reading Nisman’s 289-page report have concluded that it is of no legal substance. Even the newspaper La Nación, a fierce enemy of the government, had to report that the denunciation made little sense in legal terms. And it’s not just a matter of proofs being unconvincing. Some of Argentina’s best-reputed jurists said that they could not even discern which law was supposedly breached. Even if such plan existed in the president’s mind, none of the steps towards implementing it were actually made (which makes the offense abstract). The only step allegedly taken was signing the Memorandum. But an international treaty approved by law of a Congress, as they explained, can never constitute a crime. A law can certainly be a bad law, it can be stupid or harmful, it can be unconstitutional; but by definition, passing such law can never be held as a criminal act.

In terms of the proofs, Nisman’s report was also weak. As the Buenos Aires Herald put it, it “fails to fan flames of conspiracy”. Immediately after the brief was released, Ronald Noble – Secretary-General of Interpol between 2000 and 2014 and mentioned by Nisman as prospective witness – issued a strong statement saying that the prosecutor’s allegations were false, and that Timerman not only had never sought to annul the warrants issued for the Iranian suspects, but that he “passionately” requested their continuity after the Memorandum was signed. On the other hand, after the name was known, the government informed that the alleged secret agent recorded in the telephone hearings was not such thing, and that the SI had filed a lawsuit against him in the past for pretending to be one.

As for Luis D’Elía, he is a notorious member of the kirchnerist movement. In 2003 Néstor Kirchner had appointed him in a minor position in his government, but D’Elía was asked to resign in 2006 after he voiced his support for Iran’s controversial president Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Since 2006 he has had no formal place in government, although it is true that he consorts with important state officials. A well-known pro-Iran speaker, in the telephone hearings he appears promoting the end of the sanctions against the Iranians, promising forthcoming results, and showing off his good connections with the government. A notorious man often accused of being an anti-Semite (even by renowned members of the government) and scorned by the press every second day, he is an unlikely choice for the role of an International Man of Mystery. Even the CIA believes, according to Clarín, that Nisman’s denunciation is inconsistent and that D’Elía should not be taken seriously.

Finally, the whole purpose of the conspiracy that Nisman denounced sounds weird. After many years actively endorsing Argentina’s case against Iran in all the international forums, in 2013 Cristina Kirchner suddenly changed her mind and started to mastermind a secret plan to leave Iran off the hook. What for? For oil, Nisman argued. But Argentina does not need or import oil in relevant quantities and it has never imported it from Iran (as, for technical reasons, Iran’s oil cannot be processed in Argentinean refineries). When the country had to import oil in the past it did it from other sources, such as Bolivia, Nigeria or Angola. Argentina does import large quantities of fuel oil and gas from other countries but not from Iran, which is not even capable of exporting such items.

So how did Nisman die?

The judicial investigation has not concluded yet, so basically nobody knows anything on solid grounds. The evidence analyzed so far has concluded that Nisman died of a gunshot triggered at less than 1cm of his head, and that it came from the gun that was found under his body, in the bathroom where he died. The rest of the evidence analyzed so far strongly suggests that Nisman killed himself: the door of the bathroom was closed and blocked by the prosecutor´s own body and there is no evidence that the corpse could have been moved there from some other place. No-one else’s DNA was found in the bathroom and no relevant hint of a murder was yet presented. If it was suicide, then the investigators will have to check if it was somehow induced or if, as some commentators have argued, it was the reaction of a desperate man who understood that the denunciation he had just presented was not going to convince anyone and that his career was sinking (Ronald Noble’s statement discrediting his allegations and the criticism of APEMIA and Memoria Activa were aired just before his death).

If it was an induced suicide, a key person to resolve the mystery seems to be Diego Lagomarsino, the man who took the killing gun to the prosecutor’s apartment few hours before the death. Lagomarsino was one of Nisman’s closest associates, and he claims that he lent the weapon at the request of the prosecutor, who told him that he needed it in case “some lunatic attacked him on the street”. Nobody knows who Lagomarsino really is, but two informants have already said that he worked in the intelligence business.

Of course, murder cannot be dismissed as a hypothesis. After all, Nisman was working in a case in which the Argentinean intelligence agency (SI) and the CIA were involved and had strong interests of their own. Suspected framed suicides are not unknown to Argentina or to other countries, including the US or the UK (take for instance the recent cases of Theodore S. Westhusing and David Kelly, both related to Middle Eastern affairs). Although assassination is a rather common practice among CIA agents, no hints indicate that the US may have been involved this time (at least not directly).

As for the SI, it has been out of control for a long time. A month before Nisman’s death, the government had decided to purge it, by removing several agents, including its chief-in-the-shadows Antonio “Jaime” Stiusso. Stiusso had been working at the SI since 1972 and was highly appreciated by the CIA and the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency). Besides, he was Nisman’s main source of information in the AMIA case for the past ten years, as the prosecutor publicly acknowledged several times, and also in his recent denunciation against the Cristina Kirchner. The government is now pointing to Stiusso as the hidden hand behind Nisman’s death, and has now decided to dissolve the SI altogether and create a wholly new intelligence agency under the supervision of the Congress. Other non-kirchnerist voices havealso pointed to Stiusso and even the CIA allegedly believes that Nisman’s death is somehow related to internal disputes within the SI.

Again in this case, politicians of all persuasions seem to have discovered now that the SI is out of control (with the exception of Miguel Angel Toma, who set out to support Stiusso, which seems to confirm earlier speculations that the agent is now working for Sergio Massa). But many of them profited from its services in all these years and turned a blind eye when Gustavo Béliz, one of Néstor Kirchner’s Ministers, denounced Stiusso in 2004 for using illegal telephone hearings to blackmail magistrates and politicians (after that Béliz was asked to quitand felt he needed to live abroad for a decade).

In the past several years the Congress special commission in charge of monitoring the activities and budget of the SI was almost inactive. That commission is composed by deputies and senators of all political parties; after 2010 it was presided by an anti-kirchnerist.

These are some of the awkward facts behind a story in which the distinction of good and evil is a lot more complicated than it first appears. Unfortunately, the majority of the local and international voices that we have heard so far seem to be primarily interested in Argentina’s coming elections and/or in the future of the Middle East. Finding the truth about the two most important issues at stake here –AMIA’s bombing and the circumstances of Nisman’s death– is not the main point in their agenda.

—

http://ezequieladamovsky.blogspot.com.ar/

Ukraine and the War Party

THE ABSURD TIMES

 

Ukraine and the War Party

            It is not clear whether we have a three party system here or if the two more traditionally named parties are morphing into one, but the War Party is becoming the most influential force in our country.  The illustration above clearly shows just how our priorities have shifted, as munitions manufacturers make a great deal of money and most citizens do not.   Anyone considering the fact above would easily see how ridiculous the idea is, yet would be helpless to do anything about it.

The American public is daily indoctrinated with jabber, (jibber-jabber as Shelley Berman used to say on Boston Legal,) about how Putin and Russia is oppressing the Ukraine, today simply called "Ukraine," is being attacked and invaded by Putin so he can maintain popularity. 

The facts are quite to the contrary: there was unrest in Ukraine.  there was a conference to hold free elections in Ukraine while the current president maintained office.  Then neo-nazi and fascists staged a bloody coup, the left-wing President sought asylum in Russia, we (especially Hillary Clinton) arranged for a replacement, and he began to terrorize the ethnic Russian citizens in the East.  The conflicts continued, Crimea voted overwhelmingly to join the Russian Federation, and the rest of the Eastern Federation would like to follow.  

There would be a great deal of money to be made if we shipped weapons to Kiev and that is what we are trying to arrange right now.  Germany remains the only force right now capable of negotiating some sort of sane arrangement, but this will not be allowed so long as America's lap-dog, Great Britain, remains in the European Union.

Saner minds here would argue that the country is not prepared for another war and that the money can be better spent otherwise.  Stephen Cohen, below, argues that there should at least be a debate, but that would be futile.  When Bush II almost lost his bid to invade Iraq, steps were taken to avoid further debates.  The argument in favor of debates, of course, are in favor of democracy, but a viable democracy requires an informed public.  In anyone is to inform the public, the powers that be in the industry point out, they will handle that part of it through their corporate owned television networks and AM radio fatheads spewing out patriotic nonsense 24/7.

We are closer to a nuclear war than we have been for decades.  We would welcome a wide-spread thermonuclear war, providing all sides went all out, as it would end human life on this planet quickly and humanely rather than through slow poisoning of the air and water and disruption of the climate.  However, the use will be of "tactical" weapons, thus defeating the one bright spot in this whole movement.  Finally, we have a voice to provide rational analysis of the situation, one that predicted months ago what would happen and that has been proved correct.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2015

Is Ukraine a Proxy Western-Russia War? U.S. Weighs Arming Kiev as Violence Soars

The United Nations has raised the death toll from fighting in eastern Ukraine to more than 5,300 people since last April following the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych one year ago this month. Another 1.5 million people have been displaced. As fighting intensifies, the Obama administration is now considering directly arming Ukrainian forces against Russian-backed rebels. Washington already supplies nonlethal military equipment to Ukraine, but top officials are reportedly leaning toward sending arms, from rifles to anti-tank weapons. The role of the U.S. and European allies in Ukraine has prompted former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to accuse the West of dragging Russia into a new Cold War. We are joined by Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: The U.N. has raised the death toll from fighting in eastern Ukraine to over 5,300 people since last April, following the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych one year ago this month. Another 1.5 million people have been displaced. According to Russian-backed rebels in Donetsk, shelling in eastern Ukraine has killed at least eight people and wounded 22 others in the past day. Ukraine says five more of its soldiers have died.

This comes as the White House now considers arming Ukraine in its fight against Russian-backed separatists. Washington already supplies nonlethal military equipment to Ukraine, but there is a growing push to send arms, from rifles to anti-tank weapons. On Monday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki was asked about U.S. policy.

MATTHEW LEE: There are a whole plethora of reports out this morning that the administration is reconsidering providing lethal assistance to the Ukrainian government. Would you care to address those?

JEN PSAKI: Well, Matt, we are constantly assessing our policies on Ukraine to ensure they’re responsive, appropriated and calibrated to achieve our objectives. We are particularly concerned about recent escalating separatist violence and separatist attempts to expand the territory they currently control further, beyond the ceasefire line agreed to in Minsk, as well as the increasing toll of civilian and military casualties.

MATTHEW LEE: OK, so it sounds like you’re not saying, no, that these reports are wrong. Is it accurate then to say that this kind of assistance is now part of the conversation?

JEN PSAKI: Well, we haven’t taken options on or off the table, Matt. It’s an ongoing discussion. Obviously we have take into account events on the ground. But I don’t have anything to lay out for you in terms of internal deliberations.

REPORTER: Why would the president want to get into a proxy war with Russia?

JEN PSAKI: Well, I don’t think anybody wants to get into a proxy war with Russia. And that is not the objective. Our objective here is to change the behavior of Russia. That’s the reason that we’ve put the sanctions in place. We certainly want to help Ukraine, a sovereign government, thrive and go through this transition period. No decisions have been made. I’m talking about the fact that we of course preserve the right to consider a range of options.

AARON MATÉ: That’s State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki. On Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Kiev to meet with Ukrainian leaders.

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev accused the West of dragging Russia into a new Cold War. He said, quote, "If we call a spade a spade, America has pulled us into a new Cold War, trying to openly implement its general idea of triumphalism. Where will it take us all? The Cold War is already on. What’s next? Unfortunately, I cannot say firmly that the Cold War will not lead to the hot one. I’m afraid that they might take the risk," he said.

On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the conflict cannot be solved militarily.

CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL: [translated] Germany will not support Ukraine with weapons. I am firmly convinced that this conflict cannot be solved militarily, and therefore we insist that, on the one hand, we will impose sanctions, if necessary—we have done that jointly in Europe—and, on the other hand, we will use all diplomatic means to resolve this conflict through talks, or at least alleviate it.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the crisis in Ukraine, we’re joined by Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. His most recent book, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, is out in paperback.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Cohen.

STEPHEN COHEN: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s happening in Ukraine?

STEPHEN COHEN: What’s happening in Ukraine? Gorbachev had it right. We’re in a new Cold War with Russia. The epicenter of the new Cold War is not in Berlin, like the last one, but it’s right on Russia’s borders, so it’s much more dangerous. You and I have talked about this since February, I think. What I foresaw in February has played out, I regret to say: A political dispute in Ukraine became a Ukrainian civil war. Russia backed one side; the United States and NATO, the other. So it’s not only a new Cold War, it’s a proxy war. We’re arming Kiev. Russians are arming the eastern fighters. And I think, though I don’t want to spoil anybody’s day—I said to you in February this had the potential to become a new Cuban missile-style confrontation with the risk of war. That’s where we are now. And I think Gorbachev was right.

AARON MATÉ: There was a ceasefire reached in September. What’s happened since then?

STEPHEN COHEN: Well, it was never honored in full. And the primary problem was—I mean, there were many provisions of the ceasefire, which was supposed to stop the fighting in the east and lead to direct negotiations between the rebel government, or fighters—we call them "separatists." They weren’t separatists when all this began, but now they’re separatists: They don’t want to live with Kiev any longer. But it was supposed to lead to negotiations. The main thing that happened was, is it required both sides to pull back their artillery, primarily Kiev, because Kiev was bombarding the capital cities of eastern Ukraine—Luhansk and Donetsk. That artillery was never pulled back. It was supposed to be 30 kilometers. How far back they pulled them, I don’t know. But as you know, in the last week, those cities have been bombarded again. So the ceasefire was honored kind of marginally in the breach for a couple months, but about a week ago, 10 days ago, the fighting escalated.

Now, there is a dispute, because it eliminated the possibility of negotiations again: Who began the escalation? The State Department, you heard Psaki say it was Russia and Russian agents. Russia and the rebels say it was Kiev. But we’re in a fog of war. That expression comes from World War I, I think, when there was so much misinformation—we didn’t have email then, and it traveled more slowly—that the perception of what was going on was distorted, corrupted by news. And it led to war. The fog of war today derives from this, and it’s worse because it moves so fast, on social media news, is that you’ve got all this misinformation coming out of Kiev, out of Moscow, out of Washington. And for the three of us to sit here and say who threw the first punch 10 days ago is almost impossible.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, three prominent U.S. think tanks—the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs—issued a joint report urging the United States to provide Ukraine $3 billion in military assistance over the next three years. Former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott co-wrote the report. He’s now president of Brookings.

STROBE TALBOTT: In the context of what is happening in Ukraine today, the right way to characterize it is an act of war on the part of the Russian Federation. This means that there is going on in Ukraine today a literal invasion, not by—it’s not a proxy war. It’s a literal invasion by the Russian armed forces. It’s a literal occupation of large parts, well beyond Crimea, of eastern Ukraine. And it is a virtual annexation of a lot of territory other than just the Crimea. And in that respect, this is a major threat to the peace of Europe, to the peace of Eurasia, and therefore a threat to the interests of the United States and, I would say, a threat to the chances of a peaceful 21st century.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, now president of Brookings. Your response?

STEPHEN COHEN: Well, he’s much more than that. People need to drop their masks and say what their personal stake in this is. Strobe Talbott, whom I’ve known for years, was the architect of the American policy that led to this crisis. He was "the Russia hand," as he called his memoir, under President Clinton, when the expansion of NATO toward Russia began.

Understand what he said—and the rollout of this report has been coming. And if you look at the signatures, these are the leaders of the American war party, the people who literally want a military showdown with Russia. Stop and think what that means. Stop and think what that means, as though Russia is going to back off. But the people who signed this report—and they’ve been bringing it out for days—are saying that the—he literally just said this—the future of the 21st century is at stake in Ukraine. Stop and think what that means. Then he went on to say things that are fundamentally untrue, that Russia has invaded and annexed eastern Ukraine. I mean, when the State Department was asked a few weeks ago, "Can you confirm the presence of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine?" the State Department, which misleads about this story all the time, said, "No, we cannot." So what are—this is what I’m talking about the fog of war, where we’re being told Russia has annexed eastern Ukraine, the stake of the world is at—the future of the world is at stake here, and basically they’re calling for war with Russia.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to continue this discussion in a minute. We’re talking with Professor Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. We’ll be back with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University, Stephen Cohen. His latest book,Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. Aaron?

AARON MATÉ: Yes, so, on this issue of Russian involvement in Ukraine, and NATO’s expansion, I presume you acknowledge that Putin is destabilizing Ukraine—he sent in weapons, he sent in tanks, he sent in some troops in some form. Is the point then that he’s acting not to revive the Soviet empire, but to stop NATO encroachment? Is that your point?

STEPHEN COHEN: That’s my short point. But let me ask you a question. Five million people, approximately, live in this area of eastern Ukraine. They’ve lived there for centuries. Their grandfathers, their parents are buried there. Their children go to school there. That is their home. Do they have no humanity or agency? We’ve taken—not I, but the main press in this country is referring to them as "Putin’s thugs." Where is the humanity of these people who are dying, now nearly 6,000 of them? A million have been turned into refugees. These are people there.

Who’s doing the fighting? Primarily, the folks, the adults, of these people. Have they had Russian assistance? Absolutely. Has Kiev had Western assistance? Billions of dollars. General Hodges—I don’t know exactly what he does, but he’s an AmericanNATO officer—publicly announces he’s in Ukraine to train the National Guard. Both sides are involved militarily. But make no mistake: If there was not an indigenous rebellion in eastern Ukraine, there would not be a Ukrainian civil war. Is Putin abetting the east? Yes. Are we abetting the west and Kiev? Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Hodges for a minute. Last month, U.S. soldiers from the 2nd Cavalry traveled to the Soviet state of Latvia for a military exercise, dubbed Atlantic Resolve, to train soldiers from Latvia, other Baltic countries and Poland. In addition, the U.S. brought more than 50 units of military equipment, including 17 armored vehicles, Stryker, that will stay in Europe. Ben Hodges, who you’re referring to, is the commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe.

GEN. BEN HODGES: The decision was made last year to leave the equipment to stay in Europe. So, more than 200 tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, the decision has not been made yet where they will stay. For sure, some will stay in Germany at an American base, but we are looking at options to put some of them in Latvia or Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Ben Hodges, the commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe. So, bringing in former Soviet state Latvia and the others, what does this mean?

STEPHEN COHEN: What? His presence in Latvia? Well, he’s in Ukraine now. What it means is we’re on the move militarily—"we," I mean NATO, but the United States runs NATO. You heard what Strobe Talbott said: We’ve got to do everything now to defend Ukraine. By the way, he doesn’t mention there are two Ukraines. What about the people in the east I just mentioned? Have they no humanity? But we are on the verge of war with Russia.

Now, you referred to me as emeritus. That means old. That means I remember things. And I remember that when we hit these kind of Cold War extremes back during the last Cold War, people spoke out in opposition in this country, not only folks like the three of us, ordinary folks, but I’m talking about senators, members of Congress—even the administration was divided—The New York Times, The Washington Post. We have the silence of the hawks now. The American war party is on the march. You can see how close we are to, literally, a military confrontation with Russia. And there is not one word of establishment, mainstream opposition in this country.

So, is this good or bad? Do we go to war? Did we have a debate before we invaded Iraq? We did. And those of us who opposed it lost the debate. But we had a debate. That "democracy now," not today, not in the United States. There is no debate whatsoever. So, the danger is great. There is no opposition. All these people you’re showing—Strobe Talbott, General Hodges, anybody else you put on the screen, because only they speak to the American people—they’re on the march.

AARON MATÉ: What is driving this policy on the part of the U.S.? Many people who took part in the Cold War are no longer in power. Are they seeking to revive that era? Is it a matter of expanding NATO, or confronting Putin because they don’t like him? What is the driving force here?

STEPHEN COHEN: All of the above, I think. I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to tell you. Historians will look back—assuming there are historians to look back, because both sides are now mobilizing their nuclear weapons, as well. Russia has already said that if it is faced with overwhelming force on its borders, it will use tactical nuclear weapons. They’re nuclear small, but they’re nuclear weapons. When is the last time you heard a great power say that? We say—Obama, our president, says, "We’re modernizing our nuclear weapons." What does that mean? We’re redeploying them, pointing them even more at Russia. Why is this happening in the United States? I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of factors mixed in, a kind of ideological hangover from the old Cold War. But the demonization of Putin has become so extreme in this country, I do not recall—and I entered this field back in the '60s—the United States ever demonizing a Soviet communist leader the way our leaders do—Obama, Mrs. Clinton referring to him as a Hitler. Look, if Putin is Hitler, clearly we have to go to war. That's the logic, is it not? Is it not? And where are the voices that say this is crazy? He may be a Russian nationalist. He may be threatening. But Hitler?

AMY GOODMAN: During an interview on CNN that aired Sunday, President Obama acknowledged the United States played a role in the ouster of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, last February.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Mr. Putin made this decision around Crimea and Ukraine, not because of some grand strategy, but essentially because he was caught off balance by the protests in the Maidan and Yanukovych then fleeing after we had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama’s comments made headlines in Russia. This is Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

SERGEY LAVROV: [translated] I have two comments which are important. There has been confirmation that the United States was directly involved, from the very beginning, in this anti-government coup d’état. And President Obama literally called it "the transition of power." Secondly, I would like to note that Obama’s rhetoric shows Washington’s intention to continue doing everything possible to unconditionally support Ukraine’s authorities, who have apparently taken a course toward a military solution to the conflict.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the Russian foreign minister and, before that, President Obama.

STEPHEN COHEN: Yeah, President Obama said something that undoubtably he was later told he shouldn’t have said, because he wasn’t clear what he was referring to. Many people have argued that the United States organized a coup in February to overthrow the president of Ukraine and bring to power of this new pro-American, pro-Western government. I do not know if that’s true. But what Obama said leads people to think that’s what he was acknowledging. He wasn’t.

Here’s what happened. And he’s right about Crimea. He just let the cat out of the bag here. An agreement was brokered in February. Everybody think back. It’s only one year ago. Foreign ministers of Europe, as violence raged in the streets of Kiev, rushed to Kiev and brokered a deal between the sitting president and the opposition leaders—Yanukovych—that he would form a coalition government and call new elections in December. And everybody thought, "Wow, violence averted. We’re back on a democratic track." And what happened? The next day, mobs took to the streets, stormed the presidential palace; Yanukovych, the president, fled to Russia.

But we now know that when that deal was struck by the European ministers, Putin and Obama spoke on the phone, and Putin said to Obama, "Are you behind this?" And Obama says, "I am. Let’s get back on peaceful track." And then he asks Putin, "Are you behind it?" And Putin said, "A hundred percent." And the next day, this happened. So, something happened overnight. Obama lost control of the situation. He didn’t know what was going on. But when he says that they negotiated a peaceful transition to power, he’s not referring to the overthrow of Yanukovych; he’s referring to the deal he signed onto to keep the Ukrainian president in office for another eight or nine months until national elections.

So, he has now confirmed the Russia dark suspicions that the CIA or somebody carried out a coup. I’m sure he regrets having said that. But it is completely unclear to me—I voted for him twice—whether President Obama understands what’s going on in Ukraine, because he said a number of things that are so divergent from the historical record that either he’s getting bad advice or he’s not paying attention. I don’t know which.

AARON MATÉ: Can you sketch out for us the fighting that has taken place since April? The U.N. now says the death toll is over 5,300. Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., has praised Kiev’s response and said that they practiced "remarkable, almost unimaginable, restraint" in their attacks on the separatists.

STEPHEN COHEN: Well, it makes me ashamed to be an American citizen. Let’s remember that when Ambassador Power was not Ambassador Power, she was the great architect and ideologue of the responsibility to protect civilians. Correct? Everybody is familiar with that.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain it briefly.

STEPHEN COHEN: Well, you explain it.

AMY GOODMAN: You explain it.

STEPHEN COHEN: You’ve done it on your show. Well, it means the United States is obliged to do everything it can to prevent a humanitarian disaster resulting either from natural or warlike measures. And that’s been American official policy since Clinton. Now, whether it’s a wise policy or not, I don’t know. But the architect of it now says what’s going on in eastern Ukraine—and there are a lot more than 5,000 dead; even the U.N. has said we really don’t know, but let’s say 5,300. There’s also a million and a half refugees, most of them to Russia, but some to other parts of Ukraine. And the United States is saying—and the State Department and the White House and in the U.N., with Samantha Power—Kiev has been restrained.

All right, back up. What has Kiev called since April its military operation in the east? An anti-terrorist operation. Literally, those are the words. If I declare that you are a terrorist—not a rebel, not a political opponent, but you are a terrorist—I don’t talk to you, I kill you. And that is what Kiev has been doing, with American support. It’s been destroying the civilian centers of eastern Ukraine. Have the rebels fought back? Have they killed Ukrainian army members? Absolutely. But what in the world are we doing supporting a government that’s bombing civilians? And, by the way, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, many other organizations have now said these are war crimes. And yet, the American government sees no evil.

AMY GOODMAN: So we just played Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, earlier. She said Germany will not support Ukraine with weapons. She supports sanctions. She says there’s only a diplomatic answer. What is the solution? And what do you feel about sanctions, as the front page of The New York Times talks about the arming of—U.S. arming Ukraine?

STEPHEN COHEN: Amy, what are you doing to me? You’re trotting out every person who has behaved unwisely in a role of leadership and asked me what I think of them.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

STEPHEN COHEN: Yeah. What I think of them, we need some leaders. Now, I thought, when I first visited you in February or January, that the solution was the chancellor of Germany, Merkel. Why? Because Germany is the powerhouse of Europe. Because Merkel speaks Russian and German, and Putin speaks Russian and German. They can talk, like you and I talk, and they understand nuances. Merkel has said, all along, this cannot be resolved by military means, there must be negotiations. And yet, politically, she supported every escalation of the crisis. Why has she done that? Because she was, and maybe she still could be, the key figure here.

AMY GOODMAN: And she’s coming to the White House Monday.

STEPHEN COHEN: Yeah, but she’s been in Ukraine. She’s been everywhere. She moves. There’s distance between the White House and Berlin, no question. Merkel could end of this, or she could go a long way. She could put her foot down: no more sanctions, no more NATO involvement. Stop and think who she is. The only solvent country in Europe. And look what’s going on in Greece. I mean, they may leave the EU. By the way, if the U.K. leaves the EU in May, when there’s the referendum, who will run Europe? Germany. And Germany’s attitudes toward Russia and China are fundamentally different than Washington’s attitude. So we may be observing here, below the radar, not only the split of Europe, but the drift of Germany, and the part of Europe that follows Germany, away from the United States. Everything is at stake in this civil war.

How to get out of it? It’s the same solution we talked about here on this broadcast months ago: a ceasefire; withdrawal of artillery so the cities of Donetsk, where the rebels are, are not being bombarded; Kiev’s willingness to sit down, at a table about this size, under the auspices of the great powers, and talk to the rebels. What home rule will they be given? Some kind of federalism, some kind of devolution of authority. The governors of the regions of Ukraine are appointed in Kiev. Our governors aren’t appointed in Washington; we elect them. There’s no federalism there. Everybody says federalism means a Russian takeover. But Germany has a federal system, Canada has a federal system, we have a federal system. They are hard, but it can be done.

But you know how you get this? You get it through leadership. Where’s the leadership? Where’s President Obama? Where’s Chancellor Merkel? And the leadership in Ukraine—I mean, Poroshenko, he’s the president of the country. He has no power. He has no power. He’s not the leader. The power is with the people in Ukraine who control the fighting battalions and what’s left of the army. So, we don’t even know what kind of regime or leadership is possible in Kiev now.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Professor Stephen Cohen, we will continue to cover this. We thank you very much for being with us, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. His most recent book,Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, is out in paperback. And we’ll link to your recent writings on Ukraine at TheNation.com.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

---

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

-->