The US Department of State seems to have given up all pretense. Its statements are becoming ever more contradictory and double-standard, too much so, even for a diplomatic service. War crimes are one issue on which the US's 'our-son-of-a-bitch' approach is just too sickening to bear.
Speaking at the Atlantic Council in Washington on the July 3 Stephen Rapp, the State Department's Ambassador-At-Large for War Crimes and Director of the Office of Global Criminal Justice, accused Syrian officials including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of crimes against humanity, which “we haven't seen frankly since the Nazis." The Ambassador was referring to deaths in custody, civilian deaths and torture.
Four days later the US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki was asked by one of reporters about Ukrainian army launching airstrikes, killing civilians in the east of Ukraine. She answered that Kiev had every right to do so to protected the country's territorial integrity. "The Ukrainian authorities are protecting the country. I think, they have to have every right to do it", she said.
How come the US Department of State in a matter of days makes opposing statements on what appears to be a single issue of how far a government could go to protect a country's territorial integrity?
Johan Bäckman, Doctor of Social Sciences, Adjunct professor of sociology of law, University of Helsinki:
First of all, I have to say that all the statements by the Department of State of the US are contradictory. Regarding the statements concerning the situation in Syria, it is very clear that the Department of State and the US in general have been very willing to launch a military operation against Syria, against the Assad’s regime together with NATO. And they have been trying to find any propagandistic reasons for launching this military operation against Syria for a long time already.
And now, the recent so-called findings are only a continuation of all this. And these are not very reliable. They are speaking about torture of inmates or torture of detained individuals. Well, the US itself is torturing detained people, they have legalized torture. So, we should talk about that first.
Unfortunately, I would say that the new findings by the Department of State are just a new step, and not very successful, in their propaganda against Syria, and against the Assad's regime. And I have to say that it has no influence at all.
Regarding the statements of Jen Psaki and her deputy Marie Harf, I think that both women are some kind of weapons of psychological warfare, because they are very irritating personalities and they are delivering in fact only contradictory statements.
But regarding their statements about the situation in Ukraine — unfortunately, what is happening now is genocide against the people of east Ukraine. Just to remind you — at the end of February of this year there was a coup in Kiev pulled off by national-socialist organizations. And among these organizations are the so-called Right Sector — a very national-socialist, extremist organization — and also the Svoboda party.
These organizations have the real power in Ukraine today. And these organizations as well in several instances have threatened to mass murder Russians. They have threatened to mass murder Russians with nuclear weapons and this is already, in my opinion, a clear evidence of genocide. And now they are murdering Russians.
The Kiev junta, the illegal government of Kiev, national-socialist revolutionary government or regime of Kiev is mass murdering the civilians in eastern Ukraine with the purpose of annihilating all political support for the rebels of eastern Ukraine. By the rebels I mean the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luganks People’s Republic, and the Novorossia United People’s Republic.
What the illegal regime of Kiev is doing, they are mass murdering the civilians, they are intimidating the civilians with mass violence, targeting the civilians in all the regions of eastern Ukraine. What is happening right now is a genocide of civilians in eastern Ukraine.
And also, they are targeting the Russian journalists. The Russian journalists have become a new target of the genocide. They want to interfere into the work of the Russian journalists by killing them and giving a message that it would be better not to deliver any information which is against the illegal revolutionary junta in Kiev.
Now, we have to say that it is a situation of a factual genocide. And the US, obviously, they have been backing up all kinds of revolutionary movements in Ukraine for more than a decade. Everybody knows that the US was backing up and financing the so-called Orange Revolution.
The Orange Revolution ten years ago was a different revolution than the national-socialist revolution of February 2014. The Orange Revolution in 2004 was a fake Western-minded revolution and it was unsuccessful. Now, the national-socialist revolution in Kiev in February 2014 is an aggressive military coup involving the genocide of the Russian people.
The Ukrainian fascists have been the most dangerous element that all the European extremists have been for a long time. If we compare the Ukrainian fascists with the German fascists in the 1930s, first of all, Hitler and his national-socialists in Germany, they did not have nuclear weapons. But the Ukrainian fascists could have the nuclear weapons, because they are now integrating into the West, into the EU, they are integrating into NATO, they said they are willing to integrate into this structure. And as well, they have threatened to mass murder Russians with nuclear weapons.
These threats have come from the representatives of the revolutionary Ukrainian government. We have to face the fact that the extremists in the Ukrainian revolutionary regime today are more dangerous than the Hitler's regime was in the 1930s. Why? Hitler didn't have nuclear weapons…
Saeed Naqvi, Distinguished Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, India:
This is not the first time they have done it. They described Saddam Hussein as Hitler and they described in a similar way everyone who began to oppose them, after they’ve used them. Once anyone crosses their path, he is called all sorts of names and Hitler seems to be the favorite with them.
And when they are talking about the crimes committed by the Assad’s regime. What is the real situation on the ground?
They have financed the worst kind of extremist Islamists in Syria. They did this in Yemen. They did this in Afghanistan. You see, they confuse you and me, and the world by giving them different names – the mujahidins and the Taliban, and the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And just across the water from Yemen is Somalia where there is the al-Shabab. And al-Shabab goes into Kenya. And then, you have these Syrian extremists.
Libya was a moderate country. Of course, it was under a dictatorship. Of course, Gaddafi was a dictator, but it was an efficient dictatorship. Now, they've gone and dismantled all of that. All the arms are available across from Niger to Mali. In Mali they've gone and destroyed the Sufi mosques in Timbuktu exactly the same way, as they destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.
And they are all sitting and watching it, this destruction of human heritage, and everyone is silent about it. And they, suddenly, they pick up one person and say – he is Hitler. You see, they are talking to themselves, the large part of the world does not believe them any longer.
Do you think that they are already applying this kind of strategy to Ukraine?
In Ukraine, unfortunately, they are trying. There two schools of thought in the US. One is to keep up the old strategy of antiterror, let the Americans be focused on the terror campaign. The other is —resurgent Russia has to be stopped. And one way of stopping the resurgent Russia is to catch them in Ukraine. And immediately, what has happened is that, just as Syria had boomeranged at them, after Putin’s and Lavrov’s very deft handling of the Syrian situation, particularly after the chemical weapons which turned around the whole argument…. Then there is the 400 billion USD gas arrangement with China.
It must be causing huge ripples in America and Europe. And I know it is, the other day I was talking to the British foreign secretary. These things are worrying them. So, yes, the pressure is on. Imperialism will still cast its last die, but after 2008 the kind of strength that you need for a unipolar world just does not exist. And therefore, I'm afraid, it will create more chaos. They have that capacity to create chaos, they do not have the capacity to control the aftermath.
