HOW TO MAKE SENSE OF THE NEWS about Ukraine and everything else:
RULE # 1: "Assume the truth is the exact opposite of whatever Western leaders and their propaganda media tell us."
Follow this basic rule, and I believe you will be right almost all the time!
Don't believe me?
Then read this report from 'Moon of Alabama' ~
Kerry Lies, Repeats Debunked State Department Claim
The Russian President Vladimir Putin once famously called John Kerry a "liar". Kerry now again confirmed Putin's claim.
In
Remarks on Ukraine U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry yesterday
asserted:
Some of the individual special operations personnel, who were active on Russia’s behalf in Chechnya, Georgia, and Crimea have been photographed in Slovyansk, Donetsk, and Luhansk.
Pictures allegedly proving that some protesters in east-Ukraine were Russian "special operation personal" were "
reported" on on page 1 of Monday's New York Times. The pictures were distributed by the State Department but originally from the Ukrainian coup-government.
With a little open source research Internet commentators at Reddit
immediately found that some of those pictures:
- allegedly taken in Russia were actually taken in Ukraine
- showing allegedly the same person were of two different ones
- were intentionally lowered in resolution to disguise them while high resolution copies were available elsewhere
- showing "Russian equipment" were of Ukrainian weapons and U.S./EU sourced equipment.
On Wednesday the New York Times somewhat
retracted and corrected the story but now only on page 9 of its print edition.
Veteran journalist Robert Parry
compared the NYT behavior with the NYT distributed lies about "Saddam's centrifuges":
Many of the flaws in the photographic evidence were there to see before Monday’s front-page article, but the newspaper was apparently blinded by its anti-Russian bias.For instance, the article devoted much attention to the Russian skill at “masking” the presence of its troops, but that claim would seem to be contradicted by these allegedly secret warriors posing for public photos.
TIME magazine talked with one of the Russian "special operations personal" in east-Ukraine who had been depicted as having served with Russia in the war with Georgia and
found him to be a Cossack petty criminal under indictment in Russia:
His men then gathered around to laugh at the photos of Mozhaev and the man in Georgia, slapping Mozhaev on the back as he learned that he was not only famous, but a famous Russian special-forces agent. “That guy looks more like Osama bin Laden than our Babay,” one of the gunmen remarked.
Yesterday the New York Times Public Editor
criticized the paper's handling of the story:
It all feels rather familiar – the rushed publication of something exciting, often based on an executive branch leak. And then, afterward, with a kind of “morning after” feeling, here comes a more sober, less prominently displayed followup story, to deal with objections while not clarifying much of anything.
The pictures from the coup government in Ukraine distributed through the U.S. State Department are obviously fakery and purely anti-Russian propaganda.
The story of Russian "special operations personnel" in east-Ukraine is a lie. It has been debunked as such in several U.S. publications.
Despite that Kerry yesterday repeated it proving himself to be exactly what Putin had claimed, a liar.
Posted by b on April 25, 2014 at 04:55 AM Permalink
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See also:
John Kerry’s Sad Circle to Deceit
By Robert Parry
Secretary of State John Kerry is framing the Ukraine narrative to make the U.S. side – despite neo-Nazis overthrowing an elected president – the good guys and Russians the bad guys. But Kerry’s strident propaganda is a sad ending to a career that began as a truth-teller, writes Robert Parry.
"As a young man, John Kerry was thrust into the Vietnam War by old men who lied to the nation out of ideological delusions, political expediency or personal pride. Now, John Kerry has become that old man, either detached from reality or believing he has a right to mislead the American people just like those old men who sent him and so many other young Americans into the bloody jungles of Vietnam nearly a half century ago...
...what has gripped Official Washington and the U.S. news media is a full-blown “group think.” The facts and context of the Ukrainian events have been forgotten or bowdlerized to such an extent that the American people are being systematically misled. Whenever the fuller context is mentioned, it is dismissed as “the Russian narrative.”
We have seen this movie many times before – as has John Kerry – when the American people were snookered into the Vietnam War via the Gulf of Tonkin deception, when we were sold on Iraq’s non-existent WMD, and when we were told “facts” about the Syrian gas attack that have since proved false, just to name a few of the times propaganda has dominated American discourse around war or peace.
Sadly, John Kerry seems to be completing the circle of his public career by becoming as an old man what the young John Kerry bravely spoke against."
