Tag: regime change

Academic Journal Supresses Expose of Murderous CIA ‘Maidan’ Coup in Ukraine

A peer-reviewed paper initially approved and praised by a prestigious academic journal was suddenly rescinded without explanation. Its author, one of the world’s top scholars on Ukraine-related issues, had marshaled overwhelming evidence to conclude Maidan protesters were killed by pro-coup snipers.

The massacre by snipers of anti-government activists and police officers in Kiev’s Maidan Square in late February 2014 was a defining moment in the US-orchestrated overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government. The death of 70 protesters triggered an avalanche of international outrage that made President Viktor Yanukovych’s downfall a fait accompli. Yet today these killings remain unsolved.

Enter Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist at the University of Ottawa. For years, he marshaled overwhelming evidence demonstrating that the snipers were not affiliated with Yanukovych’s government, but pro-Maidan operatives firing from protester-occupied buildings.

Though Katchanovski’s groundbreaking work has been studiously ignored by the mainstream media, a scrupulous study he presented on the slaughter in September 2015 and August 2021 and published in 2016 and in 2020 has been cited on over 100 occasions by scholars and experts. As a result of this paper and other pieces of research, he was among the world’s most-referenced political scientists specializing in Ukrainian matters.

In the final months of 2022, Katchanovski submitted a new investigation on the Maidan massacre to a prominent social sciences journal. Initially accepted with minor revisions after extensive peer review, the publication’s editor effusively praised the work in a lengthy private note. They said the paper was “exceptional in many ways,” and offered “solid” evidence in support of its conclusions. The reviewers concurred with this judgment.

However, the paper was not published, a decision Katchanovski firmly believes to have been “political.” He filed an appeal, but to no avail.

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AFRICOM Says African Coup Leaders Share ‘Core Values’ With US Military

Gen. Michael Langley, the head of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), was grilled by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Thursday about African soldiers who received US military training and went on to carry out coups.

Langley insisted only a “very small number” of Africans who receive US training later go on to be involved in coups against civilian governments and said the programs focus on “core values.”

When asked by Gaetz if the US shares “core values” with Guinea coup leader Col. Mamady Doumbouy, Langley replied, “Absolutely … In our curriculum, we do.” Doumboy and his forces carried out a coup in 2021 while US Green Berets were in the country training them, and he still leads Guinea to this day.

Gaetz also referenced a January 2022 coup in Burkina Faso, which was led by Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damib, who had a long history of participating in US training exercises. Later that year, in September 2022, Damib was ousted in another coup led by Capt. Ibrahim Traore. When asked by journalist Nick Turse if Traore also received US training, the Pentagon said it didn’t know.

Writing for Responsible Statecraft, Turse said since 2008, US-trained soldiers in Africa have “attempted at least nine coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries, including Burkina Faso (three times), Guinea, Mali (three times), Mauritania, and the Gambia.”

Langley insisted that the “core values” AFRICOM’s training focuses on include “respect for civilian governance” and said the command will “continue with our persistence in assuring that they harbor democratic norms, democratic values, apolitical.” Gaetz said those values aren’t sticking.

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‘Good’ Fellas: The History of US Covert Actions at Home and Abroad

Long before the attack on the Nord Stream, the United States has gained a reputation for blowing things up, spying and staging coups in foreign countries, all the while trying to portray itself as a stereotypical “good guy.”

US investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh has dropped a bombshell this week when he named the United States as the party responsible for the destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines that used to supply Russian natural gas to Germany.

While the United States feigned ignorance in the wake of the pipeline’s destruction in September last year, Hersh claimed that it was US Navy divers who planted explosive charges on the Nord Stream during a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea last summer.

The explosives were triggered remotely weeks after they were planted, the journalist wrote, citing a source familiar with the planning of this operation.

And though the White House officially denied the United States’ involvement, the US government and secret services have a long history of advancing Washington’s interests through espionage and sabotage, all the while claiming that they didn’t do it.

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Time to Revive the 1995 Act that Called for Abolishing the CIA

In a recent feature article in The New Yorker magazine, writer Amy Davidson Sorkin recalls the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1995 bill, the Abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency Act.

One of the original neoconservatives, Moynihan had served on the 1975/76 Church Committee, which exposed CIA crimes around the world. Thereafter, he emerged as a staunch supporter of the CIA from his perch on the Senate Foreign Intelligence Committeee—which was set up to provide oversight of the CIA but in practice rubber-stamped most of its activities.

Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff called Moynihan, “the biggest friend of the CIA the Agency ever had.”

However, with the end of the Cold War, Moynihan started arguing that the country did not need a CIA—which accords with my own view.

The CIA had not redeemed itself after the Church Committee exposed the fact that the CIA had been working around the world to overthrow governments, influence election, assassinate world leaders, and spy on Americans involved in civil rights or anti-war organizations.

Moynihan’s bill was referred to the Senate Intelligence Committee, where it garnered not a single cosponsor and died a quiet death. Worse than that, the debate over the appropriateness of even having a CIA has ended.

Sorkin focuses on the many travails that the Agency has had over the years. She’s not the first person to write about the crimes that the CIA has committed, beginning with stealing the Italian election of 1948, the CIA’s first covert action operation and continuing through the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran, the attempted (and in some cases successful) assassinations of Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Sukarno, Ngo Dinh Diem, Salvador Allende, Muammar Qaddhafi, and others.

Sorkin’s analysis is both deft and important. But it’s incomplete.

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John Bolton Calls For Putin Assassination, Regime Change

Former White House national security adviser John Bolton is now taking to the networks to call for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assassination. “I think we should make it clear publicly so that not just Putin but that all the top Russian leadership… that if Putin authorizes the use of a nuclear weapon he’s signing his own suicide note,” the well-known neocon hawk said to CBS in a Friday appearance.

Describing that Putin is head of command and control for all Russian – including nuclear – forces, Bolton continued by stating what he says should be official US policy: “He’s a legitimate military target… he needs to know that he’s on our target list at this point.” Bolton essentially called for the US to assassinate the Russian leader if the opportunity ever arises.

Bolton went on the discuss an op-ed he penned days prior in the online military journal 1945 wherein effecting regime change in Russia was the focus.

“There is no long-term prospect for peace and security in Europe without regime change in Russia. Russians are already discussing it, quietly, for obvious reasons. For the United States and others pretending that the issue is not before will do far more harm than good,” Bolton spelled out in that op-ed. 

“To avoid the war simply grinding along indefinitely, we must alter today’s calculus. Carefully assisting Russian dissidents to pursue regime change might just be the answer, he continued. “Russia is, obviously, a nuclear power, but that is no more an argument against seeking regime change than against assisting Ukrainian self-defense.”

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The CIA in Ukraine—Philip Agee Would Have Been Outraged

The U.S. establishment called the 2014 overthrow of President Victor Yanukovych in Ukraine a “revolution.” But given his commitment to social justice and equality, former CIA agent-turned-CIA-whistleblower Philip Agee would have known better. He would call it more accurately a violent, CIA-backed coup. 

Agee would have recognized the usual pattern within the United States’s imperialist, foreign policy: to protect U.S. interests in its attempt to make Ukraine a market satellite, even though the latter is on the other side of the world. Agee would have been aware of the imposition of private monopolies characteristic of capitalism, or what is called neoliberalism. The idea of taking advantage of the wealth, resources and labor in the former Soviet republic as it has done in other nations.  

Another familiar element in the imperial pattern would be the supporting of rights abusers in and out of government. The CIA is particularly known to support right-wing tyrants and death squads in the nations of Latin America, e.g., during the 1980s. It imposed what was called “enhanced interrogation techniques” when the U.S. Empire illegally invaded Iraq in 2003.

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69 Years Ago Today, the CIA Conspired with the UK to Overthrow Iran on Behalf of Big Oil

Today marks the 69th anniversary that the west carried out a coup in Iran that destabilized the county by overthrowing the country’s democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, and installed a CIA groomed dictator.

What was once considered a conspiracy theory is now a fact as the government has since admitted to carrying out Operation Ajax that was planned by the CIA in conjunction with MI6 in the UK to exploit the Iranian people and steal their oil on behalf of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) – the British state-owned oil company established in 1908 with this objective in mind and the forerunner of today’s global oil conglomerate BP.

As TFTP reported, the State Department released a trove of documents that give insight into the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup d’état that led to the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq.

Those declassified documents, titled “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Iran, 1951–1954,” provide a notable difference from the State Department’s 1989 version of the coup, which left out any involvement from American and British intelligence.

A memorandum from Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles to President Eisenhower, dated March 1, 1953, serves as a reminder that internally, “the elimination of Mossadeq by assassination or otherwise,” was used as a method in repairing ties with Iran, restoring oil negotiations, and stopping a “Communist takeover.”

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John Bolton Admits He Helped Plan Foreign Coup Attempts

John Bolton, the former White House national security adviser for the Trump administration, has claimed that he previously helped plan attempted coups of foreign leaders.

Bolton made the comment in an interview with CNN’s “The Lead” on Tuesday, shortly after the Jan. 6 House Select Committee had wrapped up its seventh congressional hearing, regarding the breach of the U.S. Capitol.

Panel lawmakers focused much of Tuesday’s hearing on evidence around testimony provided by former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and alleged ties between former President Trump and “extremist” right-wing groups.

The committee claims that Trump intentionally tried to mount an insurrection against the United States government in a last-ditch effort to remain in power after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Speaking to CNN, Bolton insisted that Trump could not have pulled off a “carefully planned coup d’etat aimed at the Constitution” because “that’s not the way Donald Trump does things.”

“It’s not an attack on our democracy,” Bolton said. “It’s Donald Trump looking out for Donald Trump. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.”

CNN host Jake Tapper responded, “I don’t know that I agree with you, to be fair, with all due respect” adding that “one doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.”

However, Bolton said he disagreed with this statement before referencing his own alleged experience helping to plan a coup.

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