Kevin Carson pretends not to be aware that UBL had a known and acknowledged CIA history. This is evidence of a deal between libertarians and mainstream GOP, which among other things agrees not to challenge the actual veracity of the 9/11 myth, only its interpretation.

What on earth is the point of this report? Isn't it just a rather trivial piece of pro-West propaganda? I mean, descriptions of roundups during civil wars are always going to report exactly the same thing from the sympathizers of the victims, viz that they are not terrorists but legitimate civil oppositionists. And you are just stenographizing that statement from them. Why bother?

Since you seem to have a recycled Cold War professional burdening this thread with his brainwashing, I take the liberty of repeating a comment I made on the previous day's Ukraine thread:

The shelling of Gorlovka and Donetsk cities has never actually ceased during this 'truce'. It kills on average some 20 to 40 people a month. Property damage is incalculable, as whole areas of each city are abandoned. And these are not the only cities. Shelling from the Kiev side continues all along the de-facto border. It just isn't reported internationally. Jason Ditz typically falls into the false equivalence of saying: "The Minsk ceasefire has intermittently been under pressure from local fighting between rebels and military forces, but has overwhelmingly held." The reality is that Kiev forces shell the cities, the population centres, which are static, non-moving targets. The rebels have the much harder task of hitting Kiev's highly mobile firing positions, which actually are quite frequently in built-up areas, before they move to new firing points and start all over again. The rebels are forbidden by Moscow from simply advancing to take the Kiev firing positions, since Moscow is concerned that they not win outright. That's what Moscow mean when they say they support Minsk: they mean they don't want the rebels either to win outright, or to lose outright and get subjected to Nazi occupation. However, maybe, these are the only two alternatives.

Even worse than the problem of nomenclature, Thomas, is this problem of substance: the shelling of Gorlovka and Donetsk cities has never actually ceased during this 'truce'. It kills on average some 20 to 40 people a month. Property damage is incalculable, as whole areas of each city are abandoned. And these are not the only cities. Shelling from the Kiev side continues all along the de-facto border. It just isn't reported internationally. Jason typically falls into the false equivalence of "The Minsk ceasefire has intermittently been under pressure from local fighting between rebels and military forces, but has overwhelmingly held." The reality is that Kiev forces shell the cities, the population centres, which are static, non-moving targets. The rebels, however, having no wish to shell what they regard as their own, temporarily-occupied cities, have the much harder task of hitting Kiev's highly mobile firing positions before they move on. The rebels are forbidden by Moscow from simply advancing to take the Kiev firing positions, since Moscow is concerned that they not win outright. That's what Moscow mean when they say they support Minsk: they mean they don't want the rebels either to win, or to lose outright and get subjected to nazi occupation. However, maybe, these are the only two alternatives.

What he's saying is, we have the covert regime change option, it's cheap and unaccountable, we can and do use it everywhere in the world, we have compliant media almost globally, we can dismiss and ridicule anybody who puts out the truth because the global public is almost completely silenced, and the GOP know all this, so they are just saying things they know they wouldn't do, as usual. There, that wasn't hard, was it?

The agreement is in fact a surrender, because it blithely and repeatedly uses the word “illegal”: “All illegal armed groups must be disarmed; all illegally seized buildings must be returned to legitimate owners; all illegally occupied streets, squares, and other public places in Ukrainian cities and towns must be vacated.” Who defines “illegal” when one party does not recognise the legality of the government imposed by the other, or its laws? Russia is selling the people of Donbas out to the Nazis in exchange for an agreement by Ukraine to pay its gas bills in future, and an agreement that Crimea will return to the status quo ante. That's all. This is the biggest Russian sell-out since Yugoslavia.

My goodness, this is absolutely first-class. This is one of those rare essays that absolutely transcends ideology.

I don't personally consider it "silly" to refuse to refer to USAia as "America". Blum is a little tin god, at least in his own mind, and can consider it in whatever way he pleases. He is not the magisterial overviewer he seem to imagine he is.

This is all wonderful deniability, in my opinion. Deniability is a word and a concept that I am in danger of hammering into the ground, I use it so often, but I am convinced it is the keynote of modern imperial policy, and even people who are otherwise not markedly bright, like Jackass Kerry, can easily learn to drop comments to journalists indicating that they are vexed with Bandar and his global Jihadis. So then, obviously, no-one can hold the virtuous US of A responsible, which is the point.

Peter Dale Scott, to give him his full handle, is probably the most respectable of the 9/11 community, because of his distinguished past as a Canadian diplomat, and because his account of contemporary, global political reality is such a sophisticated one. His articles always appear first in the otherwise unknown 'Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Focus', but they are widely reproduced, in spite of their incredible length and voluminous scholarly footnotes. He has also written several books about what he sees as the major 'deep events' of US history, most recently "The Road To 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America." I have to admit I cannot load this page at this moment, but it is the one you want: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott