Cristopher Black: MH17 Tribunal. The Trap Russia Avoided

EDITOR'S CHOICE | 02.08.2015 | 12:03

The push by NATO countries for a UN tribunal to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 last year over eastern Ukraine was an intentional provocation against Russia. There was no other purpose for this NATO initiative than to use it to demonize the Russian leadership, to increase the negative war propaganda being put out by the NATO alliance and ultimately to use it as justification for further aggression against the peoples of east Ukraine and Russia. There must be no doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that the only result of the creation of such a tribunal by the Security Council was to be an indictment against President Putin himself accusing him of some type of command responsibility. Once Putin was indicted as a war criminal, the anti-Russian propaganda in the west would have increase beyond even the intense levels it now has reached. We saw what happened to President Milosevic of Yugoslavia when the Yugoslav tribunal indicted him with war crimes at a point during the NATO attack in 1999 when the French and Germans were looking for a political solution. The US driven indictment, arranged through their agent Louis Arbour, effectively killed a political solution since as Arbour stated, and I paraphrase, “you can’t negotiate with a war criminal.” The same happened to Muammar Gaddafi. The International Criminal Court, again through its US marionettes in the prosecution, labelled him a war criminal and used it to justify their destruction of Libya. Both Milosevic and Gadhafi ended up dead at NATO’s hands. But they are not alone. The list includes a number of African leaders who are in the way of western interests. All labelled as war criminals when in fact it is the west that committed the crimes. The accused’s’ only crime was to resist. A further stumbling block is the legality of such tribunals. The UN Charter does not give the Security Council the right or jurisdiction to create these ad hoc tribunals and in fact this possibility was explicitly excluded when the International Court of Justice was created which has very limited jurisdiction and none over criminal matters. Of course tribunals have been created as a matter of fact despite this problem but an illegal precedent is still illegal no matter how many times it is repeated. It is clear that the ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda were set up during a period when Russia was under the sway of President Yeltsin and others willing to act in US interests without caring about the implications for Russian and world interests. Russia, and China lost all control over the funding, staffing and running of these tribunals from the very beginning which, from this writers’ personal experience, are controlled at all levels by western intelligence assets. The indictments and evidence are concocted against selected accused for political and propaganda reasons which are three; to defame the leaders targeted, to justify the western aggression involved in these wars, and finally to cover up the real role of the west in these wars. The judges themselves are selected by the Americans after being interviewed to make certain their subservience is assured. The other problem with the proposed MH17 tribunal was the claim that it was a matter under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, that is, a matter of international peace and security. The fact that the other ad hoc tribunals have been created under Chapter VII reveals their true political nature. But in the case of MH17, no such argument can be validly made since there has never been an example of a plane being brought down in any circumstances that has triggered the use of Chapter VII of the UN Charter. If there was to be a tribunal regarding MH17 then why was there not one regarding the shooting down of the Iranian civil airliner Flight 655 in 1988, an airliner that was deliberately shot down by the US Navy. Hundreds were murdered but the Americans never demanded a tribunal to bring their officers to account. In fact the commander and crew of the USS Vincennes were given medals for this massacre. If the Soviet Union had demanded such a tribunal at the time the US would certainly have vetoed the motion. But there is another problem with the proposal that reveals its true political nature. A court can only try those accused of a crime determined to have taken place and can only try accused against whom there is evidence. In regard to MH17 there is the NATO propaganda on one side claiming Donbass militias were involved, aided and abetted by Russia, but without any evidence of this being produced, and, on the other hand, evidence supplied by eye witnesses, air traffic controllers, Ukrainian military pilots and Russian radar plots that indicate that it was more likely shot down by a Ukrainian government Sukhoi jet fighter. In any case, whatever the facts really are, the investigation is not complete and not complete because the NATO alliance refuses to release information that is necessary to make a determination as to who is responsible and what their motives were. Since NATO is not willing to offer this information to investigators now or to make it public why would they do so if a tribunal was created? They would not. They would have used the tribunal as a forum to bash Russia, fabricate evidence and used it to justify even more western aggression. The proposal was clearly a trap for Russia and so its veto of July 29th is welcome news. Russia will face criticism from the usual suspects in NATO and more ravings by Samantha Power that it is trying to stop “justice” or is afraid of the investigation, but better to treat these false accusations with a dismissive wave of the hand than to have taken the bait and be faced with the constant harassment, and injustice that would have surely followed if such a tribunal had been approved. About the author: Christopher Black (Canada), is an international criminal and human rights lawyer. He is Chair of the Legal Committee for the International Committee for the Defence of Slobodan Milosevic and vice-chair of the overall committee, and was Lead Defence Counsel, at the Rwanda War Crimes Tribunal in the case of General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, Chief of Staff, Rwanda Gendarmerie and won his acquittal on all charges in 2014. He was one of the advisers to President Milosevic until his death in 2006 and also worked on other cases at the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals.  gorchakovfund.ru Source: http://www.strategic-culture.org/pview/2015/08/02/cristopher-black-mh17-tribunal-trap-russia-avoided.html

Is It Really а «New Cold War»?

Michael Jabara CARLEY | 12.08.2015 | 00:00

It seems like every week some western journalist proclaims the beginning of a «new cold war» between the United States and the Russian Federation. As proof of this, they point to the US/EU-backed fascist putsch in Kiev, NATO military gesticulations on Russia’s western frontiers, the continued US escalation of hostilities against Russian ally Syria, US objections to BRICS, among other items on a long list. The Cold War, I would remind readers, started in November 1917 when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. The same old gang, the US, France, and Britain, reacted immediately, encouraging the Russian commander-in-chief to disobey orders from the new Soviet government. When he attempted to do so, the poor fellow was lynched by his soldiers. Undiscouraged and terrified of a socialist revolution in Russia, the so-called Entente tossed fat rolls of banknotes to anyone who said he would fight the Soviets. The Entente sent its own forces to the four distant corners of Russia to do the job themselves. This was the «Allied» intervention which continued until the beginning of 1921 in the west and until 1922 in Eastern Siberia. Unfortunately for western elites, their soldiers, having survived the abattoir on the Western Front, refused to fight a new war in Soviet Russia. There were grumblings, refusals to embark, and in the case of the French, outright mutinies. «If you want to fight the Bolsh», French soldiers told their commanders, «go do it yourselves.» French sailors underlined their determination not to fight by raising the red flag on ships of the French Black Sea fleet. Scandalised officers feared mutinous crews would take their ships over to the Bolsheviks. «The complete failure of a ridiculous adventure», reported one French commander. The Entente war against Soviet Russia was driven by fear and hatred of Bolshevism. Russophobia and Sovietophobia did not end after the failure of western military intervention. On the contrary, enmity continued right up until the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941. In the 1920s Sovietophobia was intense in the west; in the 1930s it impeded the formation of a Grand Alliance against Nazi Germany. France paid the price in May 1940 when it collapsed in a few weeks, without a Soviet ally. The 1941 Grand Alliance of the US, Britain, and the USSR was a kind of inadvertent shotgun marriage imposed by the common danger of Hitlerite Germany. Even so, the British high command almost never got on with their Soviet counterparts. At first British generals reckoned that the Red Army could not fight, but who were they to talk? In 1941 the British had yet to win a battle against the Wehrmacht. When the Red Army defeated the Germans at the strategic battle of Moscow in December 1941, British generals had to eat their hats, which they did with bad grace. The outrageous «Operation Unthinkable», a 1945 British contingency plan for war with the USSR, merely underlined undiminished British Sovietophobia, shared of course by the United States, absent President Franklin Roosevelt who died in April 1945. One might argue that the Cold War resumed even before the end of World War II. Of course the Americans, immersed in their exceptionalism and plagued by notoriously short, self-serving memories, thought the ideologically driven Cold War was something which started after 1945. They were wrong about that, even though their idea, like a zombie, is hard to kill. The point is that there is no longer the USSR to feed western Sovietophobia. What we have now is a more traditional Russophobia, nourished by many sources but especially by US intolerance of any state unwilling to bow before the Great American Hegemon. It’s more a pre-World War I type of rivalry, aggravated by the recklessness of Imperial Germany, whose role is now played by the United States. Are they the new Huns? Even in the 1990s when Russia was on its knees and led by the corrupt, drunken puppet, Boris Eltsin, the US pursued a policy of Russian encirclement by pushing NATO toward Russian western and southern frontiers, notwithstanding US promises not to do so. The short Russo-Georgian war in 2008, the Ukraine crisis, escalating US aggression against Syria are all signs of the same belligerent policy aimed at Russia. US conduct, paradoxically under the direction of Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, is a sure formula for continued US-Russian hostility, if not for open war. It might be well to remind people eager to provoke Russia that invaders have generally done poorly against Russian armies. Even the Mongols, who destroyed Kievan Rus in the 13th century, were eventually driven out. Other invaders, Teutonic knights, Poles, Lithuanians, Turks, Swedes, French, Germans, not to mention the Entente in 1918-1920, or the Japanese from 1918 to 1922 and in 1945, all eventually fared badly. Tak bylo, tak budet seems an appropriate warning to would-be invaders. But the Russophobia nourishing US and western belligerence is not a «new cold war». It’s an older pre-1914 type of conflict, and we all know where that led. Quelle/Source: http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/08/12/is-it-really-new-cold-war.html

Tags: Russia US USSR

Wider das ganze verkehrte Wesen  oder Novalis  "geheimes Wort" 

Es wäre dies Wort des Romantikers,  ent-romantisiert zu lesen als die Entzauberung der Propaganda, die Lüftung der Schleier über hochheiligen Tabus, die Richtigstellung der Begriffe, die Wiederentdeckung der historischen Wahrheit aus der Sicht der ewig Unteren, die Wiederbefassung mit Beweismitteln, Quellenforschung. Dies alles ernst genommen und wir könnten die Kriegsherren wie in Andersens Märchen vom Kaiser und seinen angeblich "Neuen Kleidern" schnell entlarven, Frieden stiften und der Gerechtigkeit zum Durchbruch verhelfen. Solange wir das nicht zu tun bereit sind, müssen wir mit den wohlklingenden, wohlgesetzten Worten eines von Hardenberg  Vorlieb nehmen

Wenn nicht mehr Zahlen und Figuren
Sind Schlüssel aller Kreaturen
Wenn die, so singen oder küssen,
Mehr als die Tiefgelehrten wissen,
Wenn sich die Welt ins freye Leben
Und in die Welt wird zurück begeben,
Wenn dann sich wieder Licht und Schatten
Zu ächter Klarheit werden gatten,
Und man in Mährchen und Gedichten
Erkennt die wahren Weltgeschichten,
Dann fliegt vor Einem geheimen Wort

Das ganze verkehrte Wesen fort. ^[2

Novalis um 1800

Syrien als Teil der Anti-IS-Koalition? Russland verhandelt mit Saudi Arabien

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Russland will auch die syrische Regierung ins Boot der Koalition gegen den „Islamischen Staat“ bringen. Dafür lud die russische Regierung den saudischen Außenminister, Adel al-Jubair, nach Moskau, um zwischen den kontroversen Positionen von Riad und Damaskus zu vermitteln. Dennoch scheint Saudi Arabien, was die Position hinsichtlich Präsident Baschar al-Assad angeht, unverändert hart zu bleiben. Riad betrachtet den Präsidenten als Ursache für die Eskalation der Lage in Syrien. RT-Reporter Ilya Petrenko klärt über Russlands Aussichten auf, Saudi Arabien vom Gegenteil zu überzeugen.
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Ehemaliger US-Geheimdienstchef: Aufstieg von IS war eine bewusste Entscheidung der USA

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Während die USA erklären, die syrische Regierung sei am Aufstieg von Dschihadisten im Bürgerkriegsland verantwortlich, sagte nun der ehemalige Geheimdienstchef des Pentagons, Michael Flynn, in einem Al Jazeera-Interview, dass 2012 US-Politiker sehr genau wussten, dass die Hauptkräfte hinter dem Aufstand in Syrien Extremisten waren, dennoch unterstützten sie diese bewusst. RT-Reporterin Gayane Chichakyan geht der Frage nach, ob die USA ein afghanisches Modell à la Mudschahidin in Syrien verfolgen. 
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