How the U.S. Government Deceives the World
9 October 2024, by Eric Zuesse
I’ll let the documentation tell the story here, which story is about what started the war in Ukraine, taking that as the case for discussion here because the likeliest conflict to produce a world-destroying World War Three (WW3) would be further expansion of the war between Russia and America’s NATO that has been going on in the battlefields of Ukraine; and, so, what follows is documenting exactly how this war actually started:
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
https://archive.is/Kq2W3 [19 August 2013]
“US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev”
25 November 2004, Ian Traynor the Guardian's European editor. He is based in Brussels [LATEST: “Nato members could act against Syria without UN mandate: 25 Aug 2013: Kosovo-style humanitarian intervention could justify Nato military action against Assad regime after alleged chemical attacks”]
With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.
Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again.
But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.
Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.
Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.
Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.
That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade.
But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.
The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections. …
If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power from anti-democratic regimes, it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world.
The places to watch are Moldova and the authoritarian countries of central Asia.
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video:
16,127 views Dec 14, 2013, 37 Comments [as-of 9 October 2024]
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland spoke at "Ukraine in Washington 2013" conference organized by U.S.- Ukraine Foundation on December 13.
transcript:
http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/texttrans/2013/12/20131216289031.html#axzz3AYCD5nr4
https://archive.ph/9Srw5 [30 April 2016]
“Assistant Secretary Nuland at U.S.-Ukraine Foundation Conference”
16 December 2013
U.S. Department of State
Remarks by Victoria Nuland
Assistant Secretary, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs
Washington, DC
December 13, 2013
Remarks
the video:
the transcript: https://archive.ph/9Srw5#selection-461.0-469.162:
Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We’ve invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.
Today there are senior officials in the Ukrainian government, in the business community, as well as in the opposition, civil society and religious community who believe in this democratic and European future for their country and they’ve been working hard to move their country and their president in the right direction.
We urge the government, we urge the president to listen to these voices, to listen to the Ukrainian people, to listen to the Euro-Maidan and take Ukraine forward.
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https://archive.is/5HOzl [30 April 2016]
“Facebook posts stated on March 19, 2014 in a Facebook meme:”
President Barack Obama spent "$5 billion paying Ukrainians to riot and dismantle their democratically elected government."
A meme on Facebook says President Barack Obama spent “$5 billion paying Ukrainians to riot and dismantle their democratically elected government.”
March 19, 2014
The United States spent $5 billion on Ukraine anti-government riots
It’s a conspiracy with mainstream crossover: The United States bankrolled the bloody political uprising in Ukraine.
We saw the claim pop up recently in a story on RT (the Russian-funded English language cable network), and found lots of talk about it on reddit, Facebook and other websites.
The claims have the same basic structure. While President Barack Obama publicly said Ukrainians have the right to determine their own future, the U.S. government pumped $5 billion into the country to promote regime change.
In a Facebook meme, someone put it this way:
Obama "spends $5 billion paying Ukrainians to riot and dismantle their democratically elected government."
So is there any truth to this claim? PunditFact dove in.
The roots
The claim is rooted in a December 2013 speech by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, a non-governmental agency that promotes democracy in the former Soviet republic.
Nuland had returned days earlier from her third trip to Ukraine in five weeks to assess the protests over President Viktor Yanukovych’s policies to move away from the European Union, she said.
She made clear the United States supported the protesters’ fight and spoke of how she met with Yanukovych, pressing him to end the pushback from Ukrainian security forces because it is "absolutely impermissible in a European state, in a democratic state."
She described how American taxpayer money has supported Ukraine’s democratic development despite the country’s challenges.
"Since Ukraine's independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations," she said. "We have invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine."
Her eight-minute speech (video) attracted little to no media attention.
The truth
We had a feeling that folks repeating the claim missed important context from Nuland’s speech. Wasn’t Nuland talking about money given since Ukraine broke away from the Soviet Union?
The State Department said yes.
"The insinuation that the United States incited the people of Ukraine to riot or rebel is patently false," said Nicole Thompson, a State Department spokeswoman.
Since 1992, the government has spent about $5.1 billion to support democracy-building programs in Ukraine, Thompson said, with money flowing mostly from the Department of State via U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as the departments of Defense, Energy, Agriculture and others. The United States does this with hundreds of other countries.
About $2.4 billion went to programs promoting peace and security, which could include military assistance, border security, human trafficking issues, international narcotics abatement and law enforcement interdiction, Thompson said. More money went to categories with the objectives of "governing justly and democratically" ($800 million), "investing in people" ($400 million), economic growth ($1.1 billion), and humanitarian assistance ($300 million).
The descriptions are a bit vague, which could lead people to think the money was used for some clandestine purpose.
But even if it that were so, the money in question was spent over more than 20 years. Yanukovych was elected in 2010. So any connection between the protests and the $5 billion is inaccurate.
And Obama was elected in 2008, so any connection between $5 billion and Obama also is inaccurate.
The challenge
We attempted to drill down and verify the expenditures independently but found that a difficult task.
That’s a byproduct of the United States’ foreign aid investments, which rival no other country (though supporters note the spending equals only 1 percent of all federal spending). The massive check-writing across dozens of agencies to non-governmental organizations to scores of countries and regions around the world is almost impossible to untangle.
"As it stands, it is nearly impossible to find a figure," said Nicole Valentinuzzi, communications manager of Publish What You Fund, a group that pushes for aid transparency across the world. "These kinds of things would be easily verifiable if people were given timely information."
The State Department created ForeignAssistance.gov to help taxpayers, journalists and others find out where the money is going, but the data is limited in the number of years available and not reported by all agencies.
"The Foreign Assistance dashboard is not capturing this information in an up-to-date, current way," Valentinuzzi said, "so responding to a humanitarian crisis is a bit untraceable while it happens, which we argue makes it less effective, basically."
That said, the United States is working on being more transparent.
The site started under the Obama administration and is a "work in progress," Thompson said. Eight agencies, such as U.S. AID, Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Treasury Department, have begun posting planning and spending data to the site. Still, 14 agencies, including the departments of Agriculture, Energy, Transportation, and Health and Human Services, have not.
From that website, we calculated the United States spent $456.4 million in Ukraine since 2009. Again, that’s an incomplete picture based on incomplete data reporting.
Some examples? The United States spent about $20 million on Peace Corps programs in Ukraine over the past four years. It spent about $40 million through U.S. AID on health programs in the countries since 2010 -- fighting HIV/AIDs, malaria and providing for maternal and child health. The United States spent an additional $80 million or so working on projects related to weapons of mass destruction, according to ForeignAssistance.gov.
Our ruling
Contrary to claims, the United States did not spend $5 billion to incite the rebellion in Ukraine.
That’s a distorted understanding of remarks given by a State Department official. She was referring to money spent on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since it broke off from the Soviet Union in 1991.
We rate the claim Pants on Fire.
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Here’s my article about how the Poynter Institute, which owns PolitiFact, is funded by U.S.-and-allied billionaires, and fronts “policing truth” for their Governments. The same people who control Governments in the American empire control also this agency that rates a clear truth that they don’t like as being instead a “Pants on Fire” lie. And they do it by taking as Scripture that Government’s allegations (such as that to take over a targeted country’s Government by deceiving its population, is to produce a “democracy” there).
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[Sometimes Google sends a warning that the following video “may be incompatible with YouTube's Terms of Service or not appropriate for viewers under 18.”:]
“Ukraine Crisis - What You're Not Being Told”
12 March 2014
[That’s the best video documentary I’ve ever seen, and it’s central to my artiicle, so no one who hasn’t seen and listened to this ten-minute and 36 second documentary will have read my article.]
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“Larry Diamond, Global Democratic Trends (with commentary from Marc Plattner)”
21 August 2014
[At 0:32 in this video of Stanford Professor Larry Diamond’s lecture about the coup in Ukraine, he rhetorically asks “What is democracy, but my hope is that we can avoid dwelling on this,” because his lecture will show that his concept of it is American billionaires and their Government’s taxpayers fooling a foreign nation’s public to vote in those (U.S.’s) billionaires’ best interest. At 7:14 in this video of the coup, NED’s (the “Founding co-Editor of its Journal of Democracy”) Larry Diamond is shown having produced the most popular-in-Ukraine overthrow-Yanukovych ad at
.]
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In my article “How the U.S. Government Creates Violence on a Grand Scale”, I provide the broader context behind America’s coup in Ukraine against Russia.
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At least in 2014, Putin was, or pretended to be, ignorant that this was a coup created by Obama, though he did know that it had been someone’s coup. However, he still didn’t know or understand that it was done in the way that Diamond, Nuland, and others in that operation label to be “democratic” regardless of whether it was done by means of deceiving, lying to, the public. Putin’s scientific-theoretic understanding of what the U.S. Government has been doing is incomplete, at best. One interview of him is especially informative about this:
The 14 November 2014 ARD German Government TV network broadcast interview of Putin
became removed by ARD when Germany’s Government decided that it wanted to go to war against Russia, again; and so, broadcasting this interview had been a mistake. Therefore, ever since at least 12 March 2016, “This video is private.” However, up until at least 14 September 2015, it had been public, and was being archived by some of its viewers online; so, here it fortunately is, from an archived copy:
“English: Exclusive ARD interview with Russian President Putin | Günther Jauch | ARD”
Published on Nov 17, 2014,
from which interview, I here provide these two extended excerpts:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150914075634/
10:55: JAUCH: For the West, this [Russia’s annexation of Crimea] was a clear breach of international law. PUTIN: What’s the question? JAUCH: The question is, did you underestimate the reaction of the West? … We find this reaction absolutely disproportionate. … PUTIN: When we’re confronted with the accusations that Russia has violated international law, I can hardly feel anything but astonishment. What is international law? First and foremost, it’s the charter of the United Nations. … A vivid and fresh precedent was set in Kosovo. JAUCH: You mean the judgment of the International Criminal Court, with respect to Kosovo, which said that Kosovo had the right to self-determination, and that the people of Kosovo could vote on whether they wanted to have their own state or not? PUTIN: Exactly so, but there’s more to it than that. The most important thing mentioned there was that in terms of self-determination, people populating a certain area are not obliged to ask the opinion of the central authorities of the state where they are resident. There’s no need to have permission from the central governmental authorities, in order to take the necessary steps to self-determination. This is the most crucial point, and nothing that transpired in Crimea was any different from that which happened in Kosovo. I am deeply convinced that Russia has not violated any international laws. I am very open about this. It’s a fact, and we’ve never concealed it. … Besides, what is democracy? You and I know very well, what does demos mean, it means people. Democracy means the rule by the people. In our case, it’s the people’s right to be independent.
— earlier in it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150914075634/
8:32: JAUCH: There was an agreement [between the national Government and the Maidan demonstrators, on 20 February 2014] which called for national conciliation and a national government. This agreement lasted about 24 hours and then was dead. You followed the events of the 21st of February very closely. Did you talk with President Obama or Chancellor Merkel at the time? PUTIN: Yes. Indeed, on the 21st of February, it was not only the German Minister of Fofreign Affairs who came to the Ukraine, to Kiev, but also the ministers of Foreign Affairs of Poland and France. They acted as guarantors [along with the EU’s representative] for the agreement between the then President Yanukovych and the opposition. They were agreed that the process should be carried out peacefully. They signed this document, this agreement between the authorities and the oppositon as guarantors, and the authorities thought that it would be executed accordingly. And indeed, I had a phone conversation with the President of the United States on the same evening [February 21st], and we discussed this problem in exactly this manner. However, the next day, [9:46] a coup took place, despite the guarantees given by the Western powers [Obama’s Polish and French, and EU Minister of Foreign Affairs, stooges], the buildings of the Presidential Administration and the Government were taken over. In this context, I would like to stress the following: [10:00:] Either the European Minister of Foreign Affairs [Lord Catherine Ashton, who was shown conversing with Urmas Paet on 26 February 2014 at 0:35 in that masterful ten-minute and 36 second documentary of the coup] shouldn’t have signed the paper [on 20 February 2014] and guaranteed the execution of the agreement, or, having done so they should have insisted on its execution [which she never did]. Instead, they distanced themselves from it. Moreover, they seem to prefer not to remember the agreement, as-if it had never existed. I think it’s completely wrong; and even more so, it’s counterproductive. [10:38]
One might hope that Putin understands better now. However, even till this very day, he hasn’t yet blamed Obama as having been the top person in the coup, the person who ordered it to be organized and done. And, of course, Obama’s V.P., Joe Biden, as well as Jake Sullivan (both mentioned by Nuland at 4:05 in the video of the complete phone-conversation between Nuland and her Ambassador in Ukraine — of which conversation only portions were shown in that masterful 10:36 video documentary about the entire coup) were also part of the coup-operation.
In closing here, I should mention that the great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s 8 February 2023 article “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline”, about how the Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines carrying natural gas from Russia to the EU (the EU’s by-far cheapest-of-all energy-sources) were blown up on 26 September 2022 under the order of Joe Biden, received powerful confirmation, paywall-published this September 26th by a Danish newspaper, from a witness who says that until the two-year mark he was “not allowed to say a thing” about it — and who supports (as the newspaper puts it) “the theory that American star journalist Seymour Hersh, among others, has put forward without any documentation: that the US was behind the sabotage.” Hersh has many times said that his article includes not the entire story but only the parts of it that he is certain of and which won’t enable his sources to be identified (and maybe killed). Of course, Biden denies it entirely.
Yesterday I headlined “NATO has begun its death-spiral.” The big question now is whether the U.S. Government, which controls NATO, will allow NATO to go all the way to WW3 in order to prevent a Russian victory in the Ukraine war.
PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.).
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.