{"id":116413,"date":"2014-05-05T16:55:46","date_gmt":"2014-05-05T16:55:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=116413"},"modified":"2014-05-05T16:55:46","modified_gmt":"2014-05-05T16:55:46","slug":"war-propaganda-another-new-york-times-sort-retraction-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/war-propaganda-another-new-york-times-sort-retraction-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"War Propaganda: Another New York Times \u2018Sort of\u2019 Retraction on Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Parry<\/strong><\/p>\n

The mainstream U.S. media likes to talk about Ukraine as an \u201cinformation war,\u201d meaning that the Russians are making stuff up. But the false narratives are actually being hatched more on\u00a0the U.S. side, as a new New York Times story acknowledges, writes.<\/p>\n

The New York Times, which has asserted for weeks that the Russian government is behind the unrest in Ukraine\u2019s east, finally sent some reporters to the region to dig up the proof, but all they found were eastern Ukrainians upset by the coup regime in Kiev that replaced President Viktor Yanukovych.<\/p>\n

The Times, which has been an unapologetic promoter of the \u201cpro-democracy\u201d uprising that ousted the democratically elected president through violent extra-constitutional means, has recently been promoting the \u201ctheme\u201d that Ukrainians would be happy with their new unelected government if only the Russians weren\u2019t \u201cdestabilizing eastern Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Times\u2019 editors thought they had the goods two weeks ago with a front-page\u00a0scoop<\/a>\u00a0featuring photographs supposedly proving the presence of Russian special forces troops. According to the Times, the photos \u201cclearly\u201d showed Russian special forces in Russia and then the same soldiers in eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n

However, only two days later, the scoop\u00a0unraveled<\/a>\u00a0when it turned out that a key photo \u2014 supposedly showing a group of soldiers in Russia who later appeared in eastern Ukraine \u2014 was actually taken in Ukraine, destroying the premise of the entire story.<\/p>\n

So, the Times belatedly dispatched reporters C.J. Chivers and Noah Sneider to Slovyansk in eastern Ukraine to\u00a0talk with the militants who are opposing the coup regime in Kiev. To their credit, the two reporters actually seem to have\u00a0recounted<\/a>\u00a0what they found, albeit with some of the anti-Russian bias that is now deeply embedded in the Western media narrative.<\/p>\n

Noting that Moscow says the Ukrainian militants are not part of the Russian armed forces while \u201cWestern officials and the Ukrainian government insist that Russians have led, organized and equipped the fighters,\u201d the reporters write:<\/p>\n

\u201cA deeper look at the 12th Company [of the People\u2019s Militia] \u2013 during more than a week of visiting its checkpoints, interviewing its fighters and observing them in action against a Ukrainian military advance here on Friday \u2013 shows that in its case neither portrayal captures the full story.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rebels of the 12th Company appear to be Ukrainians but, like many in the region, have deep ties to and affinity for Russia. They are veterans of the Soviet, Ukrainian or Russian Armies, and some have families on the other side of the border. Theirs is a tangled mix of identities and loyalties.<\/p>\n

\u201cFurther complicating the picture, while the fighters share a passionate distrust of Ukraine\u2019s government and the Western powers that support it, they disagree among themselves about their ultimate goals. They argue about whether Ukraine should redistribute power via greater federalization or whether the region should be annexed by Russia, and they harbor different views about which side might claim Kiev, the capital, and even about where the border of a divided Ukraine might lie.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chuckling at Kiev<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Times reporters cited one unit leader named Yuri as chuckling \u201cat the claims by officials in Kiev and the West that his operations had been guided by Russian military intelligence officers. There is no Russian master, he said. \u2018We have no Muscovites here,\u2019 he said. \u2018I have experience enough.\u2019 That experience, he and his fighters say, includes four years as a Soviet small-unit commander in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 119 fighters he said he leads, who appear to range in age from their 20s to their 50s, all speak of prior service in Soviet or Ukrainian infantry, airborne, special forces or air-defense units.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reporters also discovered mostly well-worn and dated weaponry, not the newer and more sophisticated equipment that is available to Russian forces.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the fighting on Friday, two of the fighters carried hunting shotguns, and the heaviest visible weapon was a sole rocket-propelled grenade,\u201d Chivers and Sneider wrote. \u201cMuch of their stock was identical to the weapons seen in the hands of Ukrainian soldiers and Interior Ministry special forces troops at government positions outside the city. These included 9-millimeter Makarov pistols, Kalashnikov assault rifles and a few Dragunov sniper rifles, RPK light machine guns and portable antitank rockets, including some with production stamps from the 1980s and early 1990s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other Western journalists, who have\u00a0bothered to report from eastern Ukraine rather than just accept handouts from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev or the State Department in Washington, discovered a similar reality.<\/p>\n

For instance, on April 17, Washington Post correspondent Anthony Faiola\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0from Donetsk that many of the eastern Ukrainians whom he interviewed said the unrest in their region was driven by fear over \u201ceconomic hardship\u201d and the IMF austerity plan that will make their lives even harder.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt a most dangerous and delicate time, just as it battles Moscow for hearts and minds across the east, the pro-Western government is set to initiate a shock therapy of economic measures to meet the demands of an emergency bailout from the International Monetary Fund,\u201d Faiola reported.<\/p>\n

But this on-the-ground reality of legitimate and understandable concerns among the eastern Ukrainians has been missing from the U.S. propaganda barrage, which has overwhelmed the mainstream press as thoroughly as a similar P.R. campaign did during the run-up to the Iraq War, if not more so. Official Washington\u2019s \u201cgroup think\u201d now is all about blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for the Ukraine crisis.<\/p>\n

One of the more preposterous theories that I have heard from Washington punditry and officialdom is that Putin arranged the Ukraine chaos as part of a scheme to reclaim land lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Though this notion of Putin as the aggressor plotting to reassert Russian imperialism has become something of a \u201cconventional wisdom,\u201d it is fully unsupported by the facts.<\/p>\n

To believe that Putin instigated the Ukraine crisis, you would have to believe that he organized the Maidan protests, that he built up the neo-Nazi militias that spearheaded the Feb. 22 coup, and that he intentionally overthrew his ally, Yanukovych, whom Putin seemed to be trying to save. Though this conspiracy\u00a0theory\u00a0is ludicrous, it is now widespread in Official Washington.<\/p>\n

Caught Off-Guard<\/strong><\/p>\n

The reality was that Putin was caught off-guard by the events in Ukraine, in part, because he was preoccupied with the Sochi Winter Olympics and the threat that the games would be marred by a major terrorist attack. He spent a great deal of time in Sochi personally overseeing the security.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Maidan uprising was unfolding in Kiev, cheered on by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and partly financed by American entities, such as the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, whose longtime president Carl Gershmandeemed<\/a>\u00a0Ukraine \u201cthe biggest prize\u201d in a Washington Post op-ed published in late September, months before the current crisis erupted.<\/p>\n

Though many of the protesters from western Ukraine had legitimate grievances over the pervasive corruption in Ukrainian politics and the inordinate power of a handful of wealthy oligarchs, the final violent coup was carried out by well-trained neo-Nazi militias organized in 100-man brigades, known as \u201cthe hundreds.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the Feb. 22 putsch when Yanukovych and many of his officials were forced to flee for their lives, Putin began reacting to this deteriorating situation on Russia\u2019s border. What he was doing was \u201ccrisis management,\u201d not implementing some Machiavellian scheme that had long been contemplated.<\/p>\n

But the demonization of Putin in the Western media has been so total that anyone who dares question the most extreme interpretations of his behavior is\u00a0denounced as a \u201cPutin apologist.\u201d Indeed, any attempt to present a nuanced narrative of what has happened in Ukraine is dismissed as somehow promoting Russian imperialism or spreading Russian propaganda.<\/p>\n

This oppressive \u201cgroup think\u201d has, in turn, made formulating any rational policy toward Russia and Ukraine politically impossible in Official Washington.<\/p>\n

In this context of asking who\u2019s the real propagandist, it\u2019s worth looking back on another New York Times front-page\u00a0story<\/a>\u00a0from mid-April by David M. Herszenhorn, who accused the Russian government of engaging in a propaganda war.<\/p>\n

In the article entitled \u201cRussia Is Quick To Bend Truth About Ukraine,\u201d Herszenhorn mocked Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev for making a Facebook posting that \u201cwas bleak and full of dread,\u201d including noting that \u201cblood has been spilled in Ukraine again\u201d and adding that \u201cthe threat of civil war looms.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Times article continued, \u201cHe [Medvedev] pleaded with Ukrainians to decide their own future \u2018without usurpers, nationalists and bandits, without tanks or armored vehicles \u2014 and without secret visits by the C.I.A. director.\u2019\u00a0And so began another day of bluster and hyperbole, of the misinformation, exaggerations, conspiracy theories, overheated rhetoric and, occasionally, outright lies about the political crisis in Ukraine that have emanated from the highest echelons of the Kremlin and reverberated on state-controlled Russian television, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.\u201d<\/p>\n

This argumentative \u201cnews\u201d story spilled from the front page to the top half of an inside page, but Herszenhorn never managed to mention that there was nothing false in what Medvedev wrote. Indeed, as the bloodshed has grown worse and a civil war has become more apparent, you might say Medvedev was\u00a0tragically prescient.<\/p>\n

It was also the much-maligned Russian press that first reported the secret visit of CIA Director John Brennan to Kiev. Though the White House later\u00a0confirmed<\/a>\u00a0that report, Herszenhorn cited Medvedev\u2019s reference to it in the context of \u201cmisinformation\u201d and \u201cconspiracy theories.\u201d Nowhere in the long article did the Times inform its readers that, yes, the CIA director did make a secret visit to Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Perhaps, the Chivers-Sneider story about the backgrounds of the fighters in the People\u2019s Militia of eastern Ukraine \u2014 what looks like\u00a0another New York Times\u2019 \u201csort of\u201d retraction of its earlier claims \u2014 will give some pause to the U.S. propaganda stampede into another unnecessary war. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cUkraine, Though the US \u2018Looking Glass.\u2019<\/a>\u201d]<\/p>\n

Investigative reporter\u00a0Robert Parry<\/strong>\u00a0broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,\u00a0America\u2019s Stolen Narrative,\u00a0either in\u00a0print here<\/a>\u00a0or as an e-book (from\u00a0Amazon<\/a>\u00a0andbarnesandnoble.com<\/a>). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry\u2019s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes\u00a0America\u2019s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer,\u00a0click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Parry The mainstream U.S. media likes to talk about Ukraine as an \u201cinformation war,\u201d meaning that the Russians are making stuff up. But the false narratives are actually being hatched more on\u00a0the U.S. side, as a new New York Times story acknowledges, writes. The New York Times, which has asserted for weeks that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-116413","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}