U.S. Senator Uses Bogus Photos to Make the Case For Arming Ukraine

Despite the fragile ceasefire that emerged from the peace talks between leaders of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine there is still an ongoing push by defense industry pimps to supply weapons to Kiev backed forces.  The top two proponents – as well as the most noisy – are of course the dynamic duo of John McCain and Lindsey Graham which comes as no surprise. Since it is Sunday at least one them will be appearing on the morning propaganda shows today to howl for pissing away American tax dollars in a civil war that we have no business meddling in. Neither one of the two - who have never met a foreign conflict that they would not send Americans off to die for - has ever done anything remotely as shameless as what Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe just did.

Inhofe, who sits elbow to elbow with McCain and Graham on the Senate Armed Services Committee has been doing his damned level best to poke the nuclear armed bear. This gaggle, and a multitude of supporting propagandists, State Department figures and Obama administration hacks seem to believe that it is in the best interests of America to get into a proxy war halfway across the planet over events in Ukraine. We can’t even secure our own freaking borders and it is largely thanks to the likes of Inhofe and his ilk who only seem to be interested in waging Cold War era ideological battles and shilling for the defense industrial complex.

The senator is taking heavy flak now for making his case to arm the Ukrainian regime against Russian backed insurgents and using phony photos to back his claims about a Russian invasion.  As reported by Michael Krieger of the website Liberty Blitzkrieg in the piece “In His Thirst for War, Senator Jim Inhofe Releases Fake Photos of Russian Troops in the Ukraine”:

Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee first viewed the graphic pictures in December. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.) then obtained the photos and worked to independently verify and confirm the authenticity of the photos, before providing them exclusively to the Free Beacon.

Inhofe said he hopes the images act as a wake up call to the Obama administration and American people, who largely have been spared from seeing the graphic violence inflicted upon Ukraine by the Russian-backed separatists…

Following publication of this story, serious questions have been raised about the authenticity of some of the photographs provided by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.). Several images of the Russian convoys appear to have been taken in 2008, during Russia’s conflict with Georgia. Given the similarities between the earlier images and those provided by the senator’s office, the Washington Free Beacon is investigating further and will update as necessary.

The providing of the pics to the Washington Free Beacon is a tried and true tactic for the establishment propaganda machine. First a fake story is put out by a lesser known website and then breathlessly hyped until one of the mainstream McNews outlets picks it up and then it becomes a talking point. Call me a cynic but it would be very advantageous to have "proof" of a massive Russian invasion that could be cited by McCain on Meet the Press. Inhofe is frantically backing away from the photos now and blaming the whole mess on the members of parliament in Kiev who provided him with the material.

Even conservative websites can see through this transparent bullshit, the Daily Caller provides an update on the pictures in a story entitled "Sen. Inhofe Blames Ukrainian Parliament For Falsified Photo":

Washington Free Beacon published a story Thursday that included several photographs offered to the publication exclusively by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.). Well, “exclusive” was a bit of a stretch. Both the publication and the senator soon learned that at least one of the gruesome pictures came from the AP in 2008. Two others were easily spotted elsewhere online.

Washington Free Beacon walked back its story with a severe update as well as a second update up top.

Inhofe issued a statement late Thursday saying he was furious. But he claimed one falsified photo doesn’t change the gist of the story, which is that pro-Russia separatists have been murdering Ukranians and the U.S. government, in his view, needs to step in and militarily aid the Ukraine.

“The Ukrainian parliament members who gave us these photos in print form as if it came directly from a camera really did themselves a disservice,” Inhofe said in a statement sent to The Mirror by his office. “We felt confident to release these photos because the images match the reporting of what is going on in the region. I was furious to learn one of the photos provided now appears to be falsified from an AP photo taken in 2008. This doesn’t change the fact that there is plenty of evidence Russia has made advances into the country with T-72 tanks and that pro-Russian separatists have been killing Ukrainians in cold blood.”

But lying comes as naturally to a member of congress as breathing water does to a fish and the corrupt media never calls any of these swine out for their bullshit. Inhofe can huff and puff and blame it all on being suckered but it rings hollow because he is not walking back his statements on a Russian invasion of Ukraine one bit. This line of hogwash has been invoked so often over the past year that one wonders why Putin himself isn't already sitting behind Petro "the Chocolate King" Poroshenko's desk and sipping his aged cognac from a snifter.

I don't buy it that Inhofe didn't know that the pictures were a hoax but even if he was duped would that make you feel any better as to the level of competence of our government? And this is Russia that these morons are provoking not some dipshit Middle East hellhole that doesn't possess a huge nuclear arsenal which makes Inhofe's actions recklessly stupid.

Looks like Brian Williams may just have a career in politics after all.

Brian Williams Scrutinized Over SEAL Team Six Embedded Reporter Claim

Suspended NBC News celebrity anchorman Brian Williams continues to come under scrutiny. Now that the man whose big fib about being in a military helicopter that came under enemy fire in Iraq has been exposed as a pathological liar, his entire career is being picked apart. I recently wrote that “One almost expects to see statements pop up that Williams was riding shotgun with SEAL Team Six during the raid that was alleged to have resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden” but I was only being sarcastic. Now lo and behold, an actual story has surfaced of ‘lyin Brian actually claiming that he was embedded with SEAL Team Six. You just can’t make shit like this up.

As reported by CNN’s Peter Bergen in the online piece “Did Brian Williams embed with SEAL Team 6?”:

Embattled NBC News anchor Brian Williams may have some more explaining to do.

On May 3, 2011, just two days after the daring U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, Williams said on his NBC News show, "Now, people might be hearing about SEAL Team 6. I happen to have the great honor of flying into Baghdad with them at the start of the war."

With this statement Williams asserted that he was embedded with one of the most covert units in the U.S. military and flew with the SEALs into Iraq in March 2003 as the war there began.

When asked about this claim, a Special Operations Command spokesman Ken McGraw told CNN: "We do not embed journalists with that unit or any other unit that conducts counterterrorism missions. Bottom line -- no."

Could Williams have simply hitched a ride into Iraq with SEAL Team 6 outside of the formal embedding process? This seems quite unlikely. A SEAL officer told CNN, "That early in the conflict, there were only missions taking place, not bouncing between outstations."

With another whopper now on his resume Williams may have no choice other than to seek a job in national party politics. There are also inquires being made into whether ‘lyin Brian personally witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall as he has claimed and whether he actually met Pope John Paul II when he was in college.

In the story “NBC investigating Brian Williams' claims that he witnessed fall of Berlin Wall and met Pope John Paul II” the New York Daily News reports that:

NBC is expanding its inquiry into the alleged tall tales of suspended “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams, CNN reported Thursday.
The network’s internal fact-checking is “nowhere near done,” a senior NBC source told the cable news channel.
The look into Williams’ exaggerated exploits has expanded beyond the anchor’s claims about being in a helicopter that was struck by an RPG during the 2003 Iraq War.
The new focus will examine Williams’ claims that he, not his predecessor Tom Brokaw, was in Germany the day the Berlin Wall fell and a story about meeting Pope John Paul II while a college student at Catholic University in 1979.

Despite efforts by the NBC News damage control team to contain the category five storm surge of bullshit it now appears that their defenses will be completely overwhelmed.

Chopper Whopper: NBC Anchor Brian Williams Exposed as Professional Liar

According to Greek mythology Icarus plunged to his death after his waxen wings melted when he flew too close to the sun. It is a fitting metaphor for millionaire celebrity NBC News anchor Brian Williams who had to retract and publicly apologize for a career burnishing fib that he told. Williams had regaled people with the tale that he had been on a helicopter that was forced down under fire in Iraq back when battle raged in 2003. But the pride of NBC Nightly News repeated his fairy tale one time too many and was called out for it.

As reported by Reuters in the story “NBC's Brian Williams apologizes for Iraq story after soldiers protest”:

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams said on Wednesday he was sorry for "making a mistake" when he said he was on a helicopter that was hit and forced down by rocket fire during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after soldiers complained it was not true.

Williams made the claim on his broadcast last Friday while reporting a tribute at a New York Rangers hockey game for a retired soldier who provided ground security during the incident. Williams said he and his news crew were protected by a mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry after their Chinook helicopter was crippled by enemy fire.

That prompted crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment's Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire to tell the Stars and Stripes military newspaper that the journalist had arrived on a different helicopter an hour later.

In a statement responding to the soldiers, Williams said they were absolutely right and he was wrong.

"In fact, I spent much of the weekend thinking I'd gone crazy. I feel terrible about making this mistake, especially since I found my OWN WRITING about the incident from back in '08, and I was indeed on the Chinook behind the bird that took the RPG in the tail housing," Williams wrote.

He said he supposed that repeatedly watching a video of himself inspecting the impact damage, plus "the fog of memory over 12 years," made him conflate and misremember events, some of which took place in a thick "Orange Crush" sandstorm.

The “fog of memory” that Williams uses as an excuse is more like the fog of bullshit and an obvious and shameful effort to deceive the American public. But that is why a guy like him makes the big bucks and the temptation was just too much to mix a lie of his own in with the big government propaganda that he recites. It is even worse than Dan Rather’s similar fall from grace after his sloppy work on a story about George W. Bush’s National Guard Service. Mr. Rather, long hated by conservatives for perceived bias was arrogant to the core and his blunder resulted in his unceremonious exit from CBS and Bush's reelection. Williams also should surrender his anchorman throne for this lie because how can he possibly have any credibility going forward?

A story from the BBC provides a bit more detail on the exposure of Brian Williams as a pompous liar:

His apology came after veterans who were on the helicopter that was hit posted comments on the broadcaster's Facebook page.

Flight engineer Lance Reynolds, who was on the helicopter that was hit, wrote: "Sorry dude, I don't remember you being on my aircraft. I do remember you walking up about an hour after we had landed to ask me what had happened.

In a later posting he wrote: "The place we were shot at was a long ways away from where we even saw him and his crew. "

Replying to the criticism, Mr Williams said that "constant viewing of the video showing us inspecting the impact area - and the fog of memory over 12 years - made me conflate the two".

Mr Reynolds told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes: "It was something personal for us that was kind of life-changing for me. I know how lucky I was to survive it."

"It felt like a personal experience that someone else wanted to participate in and didn't deserve to participate in."

The hashtag #chopperwhopper has now appeared on Twitter, with many contributors criticising Mr Williams and questioning whether he should stay in his job.

The quote from Lance Reynolds is priceless, “sorry dude” though will not be enough from Williams who should do the right thing and resign. Not that NBC, much higher up the totem pole than Democrat party propaganda arm MSNBC should be spared from criticism over Williams’ whopper about the chopper. If anything this validates what conservatives have long been saying about the network’s credibility.

There is a line of celebrities with less baggage than Brian Williams who would work for less money and jump through flaming hoops to get a shot at his gig. Americans will adjust quickly because as they have proven time and again, they will just gobble down the bullshit biscuits no matter who it is that is feeding them the precious morsels.

Shameless Biden Allegedly Cried During American Sniper

Vice President Joe “Foghorn Leghorn” Biden remains a very dark horse candidate for the 2016 Democratic party presidential nod and being a canny career politician with no shame he is prone to histrionics. Whether it be emotional outbursts or the proclivity for putting his foot in his mouth old Joe can always be counted on to grab attention. In the unlikely event that Hillary Clinton’s inevitable coronation is derailed – perhaps by another Bubba sex scandal – Biden will be the only viable replacement. Liberal hero Elizabeth Warren? Forget it, she is just the newer version of the phony “hope and change” peddled by Advertising Age’s "2008 Marketer of the Year" Barack Obama. Bernie Sanders? The man is an admitted socialist and a borderline cadaver. Biden will be the only option if Queen Hillary for some reason decides not to run.

So it is incumbent upon blabbering Joe to grab some positive media attention while branding himself as an all-American guy. As a part of this imaging strategy the story has come out that he wept at the end of Clint Eastwood’s new movie American Sniper. According to The Daily Beast in a piece entitled “Oscar-Nominated ‘American Sniper’ Made Joe Biden Cry”:

While attending the Washington, DC, premiere of American Sniper held at the Burke Theatre at the U.S. Navy Memorial on Tuesday night, the Vice President of the United States offered his three-word review of the film. “It’s intense, man,” Joe Biden said, before adding that veterans still need our help and deserve our deepest respect.

In fact, the vice president enjoyed the film enough that, according to three separate people seated near him, Biden was moved to tears during the film's final sequence. Biden's is one of many positive reviews that American Sniper has earned.

Biden is just the type of cheesy bastard who would intentionally turn on the waterworks if he knew it would grab him some positive media coverage. Launching into phony crying jags is pretty simple if you stand to gain politically from it – look at how often that Speaker of the House John Boehner engages in displays of choking and sobbing. With the 2016 election meme well on the way towards becoming an orgy of flag-draped, apple pie authoritarianism and American exceptionalism (there is nothing exceptional about mass surveillance and a domestic police state) American Sniper is an early litmus test. The focus groups will be carefully watching the reaction to the movie which is already steeped in controversy over being too pro-war and drawing scorn from liberals.

Clint Eastwood has redeemed himself with many conservatives after his infamous appearance at the 2012 Republican National Convention by making this movie. Eastwood horrified Mitt Romney staffers with his bizarre, rambling conversation with an empty chair that stole the nominee’s thunder and sucked up media attention. The film is a dramatization of the life of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sniper who racked up over 150 kills while serving in Iraq. Kyle was decorated for his service and became a national hero but met an unexpected and tragic end when he was shot and killed by a PTSD afflicted Marine Corps veteran at a Texas shooting range.

I have always been a fan of Eastwood, ever since the early days when the epic western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly headed up a four-movie spaghetti western marathon at the local drive-in theatre. The first two Dirty Harry movies are classics and my other favorites during my formative years were Kelly’s Heroes and Where Eagles Dare. Later in his career Eastwood – who has identified his politics as being libertarian – became more settled in as an acclaimed director and less of an actor. American Sniper is not the first movie to be politicized nor will it be the last and Eastwood has seen his work glommed onto by politicians in the past. Don’t forget that Super Bowl Chrysler commercial “Halftime in America” that was immediately turned into a political football.

Such is the case with American Sniper with the reaction being typically divisive in a rapidly fracturing America (the establishment likes it that way) with the exchanges already pretty heated. With his films as a director often being more steeped in ambiguity and shades of gray – Letters from Iwo Jima, Gran Torino, Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby to name a few – it is probably a lot more difficult to pigeon-hole American Sniper as an ideological statement. Eastwood has made statements that he opposed going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq so the film may be far more nuanced than the professional yappers in the media are portraying it.

That will not stop the political travelers from trying though, especially a guy like Joe Biden who brings to mind the H.L. Mencken quote "Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not".

While I have not seen the movie myself - and don't plan to given my loathing for anything that even remotely promotes the endless neocon wars of aggression - the politics of it all make me want to vomit. There will never be an end to war in The Homeland as long as there are people who insist on worshipping the professional killers of Empire like Chris Kyle. When he came back from the war and then became a celebrity he pretty much abandoned the pretense of a professional soldier for that of just another mercenary. 

Another Suspicious Beheading by the ISIS Bogeyman

Beheading is certainly in vogue these days as the convenient and mysterious Islamist bogeyman army of ISIS has allegedly chopped off the dome of another American journalist. The victim this time is Steven Sotloff who found himself on the wrong end of the sword in a video released yesterday. Sotloff's beheading follows that of James Foley whose fate has been milked by all of the usual fear-mongers to preserve the permanent state of war and domestic mass surveillance that has been enforced upon Americans since September 11, 2001 aka the day that changed everything.

There is much money to be made in the business of selling fear and there are no better consumers than the star-spangled sheep in the USA! USA! USA! There would be no bigger bonanza to the scum running the American war machine than an event - such as that domestic terrorist attack allegedly being planned by ISIS - to forever banish criticism of the NSA, the militarized police and the eternal wars of Oceania. ISIS serves the Empire very, very nicely in this manner and is allowing for the weasel in chief to become the latest in a line of war criminal presidents to commit U.S. troops to Iraq.

There is something that smells like a rat behind those black masks and robes and that the Sotloff video was provided by the intelligence firm SITE. According to an article at the Wayne Madsen Report:

For the second time in a little over two weeks, a video of the beheading by a British-accented Islamic State jihadist of a U.S. journalist captured in Syria was distributed by the same organization. The most recent video images of orange jump suit-clad U.S. journalist Steven Sotloff being beheaded were released by the Search for International Terrorist Entities or "SITE," which also initially discovered and released the video beheading of U.S. journalist James Foley of GlobalPost.com.

As with the Foley video, U.S. intelligence initially refrained from validating the authenticity of the Sotloff video until it completed an examination of the Sotloff video. Obviously, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies are well-versed on SITE's Israeli pedigree. As previously revealed by WMR, SITE is a Washington, DC-based research institute with links to Israeli right-wing Likud elements and Mossad. SITE is operated by Israeli intelligence asset Rita Katz and was also the source for a number of dubious videos of Osama Bin Laden, including one that only showed the Al Qaeda's lips moving but the rest of his body inanimate. In 2008, SITE released a video purportedly of Al Qaeda's number two, Ayman al Zawahiri. A number of experts determined the video was a fake.

WMR reported on September 9, 2007 that Katz is "an Iraq-born Jew who moved to Israel after her father was executed by Saddam Hussein's government for spying for the Mossad. She emigrated to the United States from Israel in 1997. Katz worked for the U.S. Treasury Department in its pursuit of Muslim charity funds in the United States in Operation Green Quest and as a consultant for the FBI. The main coordinator for Green Quest was the then-head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, Michael Chertoff."

Support Wayne Madsen's work by subscribing, it is a very reasonable deal for the information provided and as a truly independent muckraker in these days of wall-to-wall propaganda and lies serves as an invaluable resource. I am not shilling for Madsen, I have to cough up the coin too but independent media that is outside the sphere of state propaganda needs to get it's funding to remain independent.

An additional story on SITE that isn't behind a pay wall comes courtesy of the website International Business Times, written by Ellen Killoran and is entitled "Inside SITE Intelligence Group: Steven Sotloff Beheading Discovered By Little-Known Research Organization" from which I excerpt:

The video was first obtained by SITE Intelligence Group (Search for International Terrorist Entities), also known as SITE Intel Group, a relatively under-the-radar yet apparently very powerful research body that monitors jihadist movements. The Bethesda, Maryland, organization has published a shortened version of the beheading video and published a transcript on its news site, which has been largely inaccessible since news of the beheading broke, likely due to an uptick in Web traffic.

A description of SITE Intelligence Group on its Facebook page says its blog, INSITE, focuses on “all dimensions of extremism in the 21st century:  jihadism, white supremacy movements, hacker threats and everything in between. … All articles posted to the blog are intended to elevate the discussion regarding extremist threats -- transcending the conversational buzz and shining light on the greater factors at stake.” Among its products for sale is SITE Monitoring Service, which provides its subscribers -- government and commercial entities -- “immediate and timely translations of the most important jihadist material published.”

SITE made the decision to publish the video of Sotloff’s beheading when numerous mainstream news outlets in possession of it declined to do so, likely influenced by the overwhelming negative public reaction to the sharing of video and still images of Foley’s beheading, which quickly and inescapably proliferated on social media before YouTube and Twitter removed them.  The authenticity of the video obtained by SITE Intel Group has yet to be explicitly confirmed, but the White House released a statement Tuesday afternoon expressing “deepest condolences” for the “brutal murder of an innocent American journalist.”

One of the critical unasked questions by the corrupt U.S. state-corporate media is why in the fuck isn't this group pissed off at Israel like the others are?

Is Obama Regime Covering Up the Truth of MH17 Shootdown?

The pile of official lies about what really happened in Benghazi and what the NSA is really up to stacked up by the Obama administration and the State Department have already firmly established that this latest regime absolutely cannot be trusted to tell the truth and this is especially so when it comes to the disastrous foreign policy of the warfare state. What grows ever more apparent is that the Obama gangsters, in particular the warmongers over at the State Department are engaged in a serious cover-up over what really happened in regards to Malaysian Airlines MH17 that was shot down over Ukraine two weeks ago. The initial rush to pin the blame on reviled Obama nemesis Vladimir Putin sans any actual proof of Russian involvement was the greatest propaganda explosion that the world has seen since George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were "fixing the facts around the policy" in order to attack and invade Iraq under false pretenses back in 2003.  From the minute that I heard the news that the plane went down I knew that it would be used by Obama and his asinine embarrassment of a Secretary of State John "Skull and Bones" Kerry to trump up more of a case for their lunatic outburst of aggression at Putin and I was not disappointed.

It seemed as though the narrative had already been established while MH17 was still falling from the air with the blame already being flushed throughout the electronic sewer system of the western media that it was indeed "Putin's Missile" that was responsible for the deaths of 298 civilians onboard the ill-fated flight. Media hysteria stoked world outrage in reckless rush to judgment in which it just seemed like the US leadership knew something that nobody else did - such as who was really behind it.We have seen this movie before with a lying, corrupt administration with the whoppers that were floated late last summer making a similar case for when Barry and the boys were itching to bomb Damascus over that sarin gas attack on those civilians in Ghouta.

To this day the culprits behind that sad incident remains unknown with the best bet being that it was a false flag event perpetrated by the Islamist extremists that the US and our partners the Saudis were funding (including cannibals) in order to justify a full scale war. A war that was preempted when Kerry had an outburst of his chronic diarrhea of the mouth and left an opening for Putin to sweep in to save the day by practicing the diplomacy that Uncle Scam can't be bothered with. This, along with the saving of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden from a lifetime stay at a US torture facility were both humiliating blows to the egos of the petulant narcissist Obama and as we now are being dragged into what could be World War III based on nothing but bullshit and distortion and the spreading of hate and fear by the pocket media it stuck in their craws.

But I digress.....

Probably my first thought about MH17 was - what in the hell was it doing flying over a war zone? After all, the anti-fascist, anti-austerity federalist fighters in the primarily Russian speaking east had shot down a number of Kiev junta planes already so why would a civilian airliner embark upon such an obviously risky flight path? There are stories that it was diverted and that the US backed coup regime in Kiev had been sending military planes to strike civilian areas hiding behind commercial aircraft for cover and then breaking off. I believed that the shootdown was highly likely the result of one of those battlefield accidents that so often occur during the fog of war. Or was it something much darker?

By Friday afternoon when I went to lunch at a local sports pub every television in the place (well over twenty of varying sizes) was broadcasting footage of the smoking ruins of MH17 and the search for bodies - it was all similar if not exactly the same feed although the TVs were all tuned to different networks. The propaganda effect of those early hours was nothing short of devastating, it reminded me of that looped CNN exclusive footage of the gas victims at Ghouta last summer that was shown over and over and over again to prep Americans for war. It was Saddam's soldiers pulling Kuwaiti babies out of incubators, it was the Tonkin Gulf Incident and the USS Maine and the Lusitania and the American war machine was revving up anew. John Kerry was a whirling dervish of bullshit appearing on all five major Sunday morning network "news" shows, hitting for the cycle for the first time since pushing the lies to justify the aborted war on Syria. Kerry touted indisputable proof that it was Putin who was behind it all, just as he did with Bashar al Assad yet the US government had nothing to offer up as actual evidence, no satellite imagery or smoking gun intercepted conversations from our global surveillance grid, only conjecture, hearsay and unconfirmed social media clips that were later proved to be doctored.

By the Monday after MH17 went down, the story was already falling apart despite Kerry's latest indisputable proof and the admission came out that "Senior U.S. intelligence officials say they have no evidence of direct Russian government involvement in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17" and that the plane was likely shot down as the result of a "mistake". However the continued provocation of Russia and Putin will continue as the corrupt state-corporate media is now selling the line that Russia "created the conditions" for the shootdown. But didn't the original coup d'etat run by Kerry's Assistant Secretary of State Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland (which obviously had to be signed off on by Obama) create "the conditions" by backing the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Ukraine in favor of an rancid assortment of US backed lickspittles the likes of former central banker Arseniy "Yats" Yatsenyuk and full-blown fascists and neo-Nazis, many of whom revered the former Nazi collaborator and mass murderer Stepan Bandera? Were it not for the coup there would have been no eastern rebellion to put down and more importantly no war zone for MH17 to be flying over in the first place.

To paraphrase Apocalypse Now's Captain Willard "the bullshit piles up so high in this place that you need wings to stay above it" and after State Department flacks Jen Psaki and the bumbling Marie Harf continued to provide nothing but the same lack of proof and "trust us" references to social media there were suddenly satellite images released showing Russian rocket fire into Ukraine. The question now is that if US satellites were able to pick up these images (which conjure up Saddam's mobile chemical weapons labs) then WHY are there no satellite images available of the direction of the missile that shot down MH17?

Yesterday, the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) Posed the same question among others in an open letter to President Barack Obama. I excerpt from the letter at length which contaisn the questions that you can damned sure bet will never be asked by the corrupt state-corporate media that is covering Obama's ass on his latest pack of lies to start a war:

Russian tensions are building in a precarious way over Ukraine, and we are far from certain that your advisers fully appreciate the danger of escalation. The New York Times and other media outlets are treating sensitive issues in dispute as flat-fact, taking their cue from U.S. government sources.

Twelve days after the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, your administration still has issued no coordinated intelligence assessment summarizing what evidence exists to determine who was responsible – much less to convincingly support repeated claims that the plane was downed by a Russian-supplied missile in the hands of Ukrainian separatists.

Your administration has not provided any satellite imagery showing that the separatists had such weaponry, and there are several other “dogs that have not barked.” Washington’s credibility, and your own, will continue to erode, should you be unwilling – or unable – to present more tangible evidence behind administration claims. In what follows, we put this in the perspective of former intelligence professionals with a cumulative total of 260 years in various parts of U.S. intelligence.

AND

We have always taken pride in not shooting from the hip, but rather in doing intelligence analysis that is evidence-based. The evidence released to date does not bear close scrutiny; it does not permit a judgment as to which side is lying about the shoot-down of Flight 17. Our entire professional experience would incline us to suspect the Russians – almost instinctively. Our more recent experience, particularly observing Secretary Kerry injudiciousness in latching onto one spurious report after another as “evidence,” has gone a long way toward balancing our earlier predispositions.

It seems that whenever Kerry does cite supposed “evidence” that can be checked – like the forged anti-Semitic fliers distributed in eastern Ukraine or the photos of alleged Russian special forces soldiers who allegedly slipped into Ukraine – the “proof” goes “poof” as Kerry once said in a different context. Still, these misrepresentations seem small peccadillos compared with bigger whoppers like the claim Kerry made on August 30, 2013, no fewer than 35 times, that “we know” the government of Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical incidents near Damascus nine days before.

On September 3, 2013 – following your decision to call off the attack on Syria in order to await Congressional authorization – Kerry was still pushing for an attack in testimony before a thoroughly sympathetic Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. On the following day Kerry drew highly unusual personal criticism from President Putin, who said: “He is lying, and he knows he is lying. It is sad.”

Equally serious, during the first week of September 2013, as you and President Vladimir Putin were putting the final touches to the deal whereby Syrian chemical weapons would be given up for destruction, John Kerry said something that puzzles us to this day. On September 9, 2013, Kerry was in London, still promoting a U.S. attack on Syria for having crossed the “Red Line” you had set against Syria’s using chemical weapons.

At a formal press conference, Kerry abruptly dismissed the possibility that Bashar al-Assad would ever give up his chemical weapons, saying, “He isn’t about to do that; it can’t be done.” Just a few hours later, the Russians and Syrians announced Syria’s agreement to do precisely what Kerry had ruled out as impossible. You sent him back to Geneva to sign the agreement, and it was formally concluded on September 14.

Regarding the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down of July 17, we believe Kerry has typically rushed to judgment and that his incredible record for credibility poses a huge disadvantage in the diplomatic and propaganda maneuvering vis-a-vis Russia. We suggest you call a halt to this misbegotten “public diplomacy” offensive. If, however, you decide to press on anyway, we suggest you try to find a less tarnished statesman or woman.

AND

If the U.S. has more convincing evidence than what has so far been adduced concerning responsibility for shooting down Flight 17, we believe it would be best to find a way to make that intelligence public – even at the risk of compromising “sources and methods.” Moreover, we suggest you instruct your subordinates not to cheapen U.S. credibility by releasing key information via social media like Twitter and Facebook.

The reputation of the messenger for credibility is also key in this area of “public diplomacy.” As is by now clear to you, in our view Secretary Kerry is more liability than asset in this regard. Similarly, with regard to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, his March 12, 2013 Congressional testimony under oath to what he later admitted were “clearly erroneous” things regarding NSA collection should disqualify him. Clapper should be kept at far remove from the Flight 17 affair.

What is needed, if you’ve got the goods, is an Interagency Intelligence Assessment – the genre used in the past to lay out the intelligence. We are hearing indirectly from some of our former colleagues that what Secretary Kerry is peddling does not square with the real intelligence. Such was the case late last August, when Kerry created a unique vehicle he called a “Government (not Intelligence) Assessment” blaming, with no verifiable evidence, Bashar al-Assad for the chemical attacks near Damascus, as honest intelligence analysts refused to go along and, instead, held their noses.

We believe you need to seek out honest intelligence analysts now and hear them out. Then, you may be persuaded to take steps to curb the risk that relations with Russia might escalate from “Cold War II” into an armed confrontation. In all candor, we see little reason to believe that Secretary Kerry and your other advisers appreciate the enormity of that danger.

The VIPS letter justifiably rips Kerry, quite possibly the worst US Secretary of State in the modern era but leaves Mr. Obama with some undeserved wiggle-room, what happened to Harry Truman's famous motto "the buck stops here" when it comes to the Commander in Chief?  Obama is responsible for this as much as he was responsible for Benghazi because it went down on his watch. Hell, if there actually was proof outside of the social media that the spokespeople for administration keep trying to sell there would have been an immediate mega-media event to present that very evidence of Putin's culpability to the entire world. There would have been satellite images and more yet Obama and his minions have absolutely nothing which not only strongly indicates some level of a cover-up but also knowledge that it was in fact the actions of the Ukraine junta in Kiev that was responsible for this heinous crime. For a man who only months ago was the golden boy of global finance mafia of the Empire "Yats" sure tendered his resignation in a hurry after MH17 and the current puppet leader of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko aka The Chocolate King would surely not even fart before clearing it with the US regime's permission. Can anyone say Operation Northwoods?

The Kiev junta had the motive and means to shoot down MH17 and the US establishment led by Kerry, Obama and Nuland had the ability to control the narrative through their propaganda machine lie factory. A propaganda machine that on a daily basis churns out proclamations by the post coup, US puppet government in Kiev as if they were holy writ. To believe the lies of the Obama government the devious Russian as are now using their rebel proxies to plant landmines around the crash site. This is very convenient for the US backed Nazis and the Poroshenko junta to prevent any sort of unbiased, independent investigation. Who benefits from this? I'll give you a hint, his initials are BHO.

It is also notable that the MH17 flight recorders were spirited away last week to the UK where the Norsefire government of the dastardly fascist David Cameron rules and will ensure that the actual content of the recordings will be cooked to a fine fricassee of bullshit by the time that they are officially released. The Brits are the willing lapdogs and co-conspirators of the US warfare state, we saw it when Tony Blair lied his ass off to provide cover for Bush's "Shock and Awe" attack on Iraq and with the integral role of GCHQ in the NSA Stasi's surveillance activities. And they will lie their asses off for Obama too.

Come on Mr. President, where are the satellite images of the missile that hit MH17 and the coordinates of where it came from? The world awaits and answer, just like they still are cooling their heels for a legitimate explanation of what really went down in Benghazi the night that Ambassador Stevens and those other Americans were murdered and really, would you really believe anything that a pathological liar like Obama would say anyway? Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in his piece "The Red Line and the Ratline" wrote that what really was going on at the consulate an annex was an Iran-Contra style operation, the sleazy Darrell Issa won't touch this with a ten foot pole but that is why he is the chief inquisitor isn't it?

At the very least the Obama regime is covering up the ugly truth that their pet neo-Nazis in Ukraine went rogue and were responsible for the shooting down of MH17 which would put the blood on Obama's hands. But the bastard has become used to bathing in it so the truth may be far worse if there was US foreknowledge and those 298 people were sacrificed in the pursuit of a personal vendetta that dear leader has been nurturing against Putin over being punked last year. 

Blame Obama for the Shooting Down of MH17

As one of the heroes of the neocons, President Harry Truman famously put it: "the buck stops here" and in the frenzy to blame the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over a freaking war zone on Thursday (what the hell was it doing there?) on the reviled and demonized Vladimir Putin our pathetic excuse for a media is blaming the wrong president. The responsibility for the loss of the lives of the passengers of that ill-fated jetliner can be parked directly at the foot of US President Barack H. Obama for it was he who signed off on the series of events that culminated in the disaster in the first place. Were the prince of petulance not so intent at avenging his wounded pride over Russia's saving Edward Snowden from being waterboarded more times than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Putin's pissing on the parade of bombing Damascus last September there would be no civil war in Ukraine in the first place.

Libertarian icon Ron Paul sums it up very nicely in his piece "What the Media Won’t Report About Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17" that is available at Antiwar.com and I excerpt from the good doctor:

While western media outlets rush to repeat government propaganda on the event, there are a few things they will not report.

They will not report that the crisis in Ukraine started late last year, when EU and US-supported protesters plotted the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Without US-sponsored “regime change,” it is unlikely that hundreds would have been killed in the unrest that followed. Nor would the Malaysian Airlines crash have happened.

The media has reported that the plane must have been shot down by Russian forces or Russian-backed separatists, because the missile that reportedly brought down the plane was Russian made. But they will not report that the Ukrainian government also uses the exact same Russian-made weapons.

They will not report that the post-coup government in Kiev has, according to OSCE monitors, killed 250 people in the breakaway Lugansk region since June, including 20 killed as government forces bombed the city center the day after the plane crash! Most of these are civilians and together they roughly equal the number killed in the plane crash. By contrast, Russia has killed no one in Ukraine, and the separatists have struck largely military, not civilian, targets.

They will not report that the US has strongly backed the Ukrainian government in these attacks on civilians, which a State Department spokeswoman called “measured and moderate.”

They will not report that neither Russia nor the separatists in eastern Ukraine have anything to gain but everything to lose by shooting down a passenger liner full of civilians.

They will not report that the Ukrainian government has much to gain by pinning the attack on Russia, and that the Ukrainian prime minister has already expressed his pleasure that Russia is being blamed for the attack.

I have admired the former Congressman for his principled stance against the evils of the warfare state and his set of stones for daring to speak out against Bush and Cheney's wars of aggression back when critics were branded as "traitors", "terrorist sympathizers" and worse and would face the equivalent of being "necklaced" for daring to stand up and be counted when it mattered the most. I will never forget Ron Paul's brutal smackdown of Mr. 9/11 himself, Rudy Giuliani in that Republican debate and then assigning the fascist former Big Apple mayor, a neocon favorite a reading list. Congressman Paul was vilified by the same scum-infested, corrupt, warmongering media types that are busily selling the latest load of Obama's horse manure about Ukraine - all the while covering up the war crimes of the US backed Israeli despot Bibi Netanyahu and his wanton slaughter of civilians in Gaza.

The propaganda is shameless, from the loud-mouthed lout of a Vice President Joe Biden - a fucking embarrassment to decent Americans - and his juvenile attacks on Putin as "not having a soul" to the endless proclamations of the pope of hope and change and his evidence-deficient charges that Russia's president was personally responsible for the attack despite the unspeakable fact that Obama is the one backing ruthless neo-Nazi death squad filth engaged in ethnic cleansing while the Kiev junta uses the military against civilians. 

This is what it is to be an American during a time of rampant corruption, imperial hubris, national blindness (as well as stupidity) and an addiction to the drug of American exceptionalism that is as potent as black tar heroin. It is sick and shameful to watch these scumbags in the Obama regime and the neocon rats nest at Foggy Bottom continue to lie with zero regard to the long-term consequences even if those consequences end up leading willfully ignorant and brainwashed Americans into the flaming abyss of World War III and imminent nuclear catastrophe.

Obama is a punk but the office of the presidency seems to attract that type like flies to a pile of rotting corpses these days and unlike when Harry Truman took responsibility the serpentine, conniving, Teflon coated bullshit salesman Obama does anything but adhere to the "buck stops here" principle.

Two and a half years left until we can be rid of this most loathsome of leaders, that is if he doesn't succeed in getting us all incinerated in a nuclear apocalypse first.

Ministry of Propaganda Spins Shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17

“It’s an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the regime carried out this attack.”

-President Barack Obama – Speech to United Nations on Syria gas attack

“I will be voting to give the president of the United States the authority to use force – if necessary – to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.”

- Senator John Kerry

The notorious and legendary Nazi propagandist Paul Joseph Goebbels would be in sheer awe of the crackerjack information warfare capabilities of the US state-corporate media seventy years after he committed suicide in the bowels of  Der Fuhrer’s bunker as the allies roared into Berlin. Goebbels, like all of the historic greats at a particular profession often build their life’s work upon others who inspired them, in his case it was the famous American father of the public relations industry Edward Bernays and as the fine art of manufacturing consent was honed and meshed with technology it is apparent that Goebbels is the inspiration and model for the modern US media.

The post September 11, 2001 era of The Homeland has brought many things to America including the unchaining of the government from the US Constitution under the pretenses of safety, the forced imposition upon the citizenry of a massive surveillance apparatus, the militarization of law enforcement personnel and the very real possibility that children born since that day will never know a life without perpetual war. None of it would have been possible were the domestic media not fully complicit with their cheerleading for attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan and later Iran, Syria, Ukraine and now in what could end up being a mass national suicide - a war with nuclear power Russia.

With the state-corporate propaganda machine fully mobilized for a week of withering, anti-Russian demagoguery from the political class - Orwell's "Two Minutes Hate" broadcast 24/7 by a legion of corrupt operatives Secretary of State John Kerry embarked upon a saturation bombing campaign, hitting all five major Sunday morning "news" shows to spew the lies of the warfare state. The last time that the Skull and Bones alumni who holds the position of Obama's top diplomat hit for the Sunday morning cycle was during a similar dishonest expulsion of fibs after that mysterious sarin gas attack on civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. The attack that both Kerry and Obama definitively claimed to have proof of but as chronicled by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh - in his two pieces that are censored in the obscenity that is The Homeland,  "Whose Sarin?" and the "The Red Line and the Rat Line" - was total bullshit.

In feeding the lie machine, Goebbels’ ideological descendants in Kiev continue to generate the lurid tales that are then fed into the US ministry of propaganda that is the state-corporate media, popping up in brand name outlets like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post and then cemented into the narrative on Sunday morning television which then disseminates them to low-information types and brainwashed sheep here on the great star-spangled lemming farm.  To anyone who has been paying attention to the US backed coup d'etat, subsequent campaign of ethnic cleansing, the bogus election of Petro "Porky" Poroschenko aka "the chocolate king" and the pulverizing of civilian areas by the US backed Ukranian military everything and I mean everything that comes out of the junta in Kiev is horseshit and the immediate rush to pin the downing of MH17 on Putin was so transparently choreographed that it reeks of a false flag operation.

While Kerry was selling his tale of Russian responsibility for the downed jetliner (what the fuck was it doing flying over a war zone in the first place is the question that I can't stop asking myself but the media never bothers asking it) there was much support from the most consistently dishonest, bloodthirsty, shrill, venal and contemptible gaggle of traitors in the US Congress in providing support for his allegations minus any real evidence. Today's circuit featured a who's who of American political scum and vermin such as Senators Robert Menendez, Ted Cruz, Dianne Feinstein, Lindsey Graham, Bob Corker and extremist House committee bosses Mike Rogers, Micheal McCaul and Peter King all of whom like Obama and Kerry belong in the dock at The Hague.

One of the most prolific critics of the radical transformation of the United States of America into the decidedly un-American "Homeland" post 9/11 is former Reagan administration Assistant Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Wall Street Journal editor and economist Dr .Paul Craig Roberts. Roberts' most recent column on the truth in regards to MH 17 is entitled " What Happened to the Malaysian Airliner?" and I excerpt the following from his piece:

Washington’s propaganda machine is in such high gear that we are in danger of losing

the facts that we do have.

One fact is that the separatists do not have the expensive Buk anti-aircraft missile system or the trained personnel to operate it.

Another fact is that the separatists have no incentive to shoot down an airliner and neither does Russia. Anyone can tell the difference between low-flying attack aircraft and an airliner at 33,000 feet.

The Ukrainians do have Buk anti-aircraft missile systems, and a Buk battery was operational in the region and deployed at a site from which it could have fired a missile at the airliner.

Just as the separatists and the Russian government have no incentive to shoot down an airliner, neither does the Ukrainian government nor, one would think, even the crazed extreme Ukrainian nationalists who have formed militias to take the fight against the separatists that the Ukrainian army is not keen to undertake–unless there was a plan to frame Russia.

One Russian general familiar with the weapon system offered his opinion that it was a mistake made by the Ukrainian military untrained in the weapon’s use. The general said that although Ukraine has a few of the weapons, Ukrainians have had no training in their use in the 23 years since Ukraine separated from Russia. The general thinks it was an accident due to incompetence.

This explanation makes a certain amount of sense and far more sense than Washington’s propaganda. The problem with the general’s explanation is that it does not explain why the Buk anti-aircraft missile system was deployed near or in a separatist territory. The separatists have no aircraft. It seems odd for Ukraine to have an expensive missile system in an area in which it is of no military use and where the position could be overrun and captured by separatists.

As Washington, Kiev, and the presstitute media are committed to the propaganda that Putin did it, we are not going to get any reliable information from the US media. We will have to figure it out for ourselves.

Just as the man says - there will be no "reliable information from the US media", there never is anymore as the state has been weaponized against the people who theoretically - at least according to that now obsolete concept of "democracy" are able to exercise self-determination in choosing their leaders and by extension the course of their nation. Only the schmucks actually buy into that anymore and it is far easier to live in a sense of blissful ignorance and denial than to look at the horror of what the fully run amok US government has now become in the waning days of semi-normalcy before the shit completely hits the fan.