.
[Update] Marcy Wheeler at her best, her response to Mark Ames:
Of Neo-Fascists and Smiley-Face Neoliberals
I will make a follow-up shortly. Bear with me …
Unwittingly, the saga of the faked black-ops sniper video published by RFERL on 20 February 2014, is connected with the publication by Mark Ames and response of Marcy Wheeler to the NGOs and media outlets under responsiblility of billionaire Omidyar.
My reply in a new diary – Confirmed: Omidyar’s NGOs Clearly Partner in Regime Change
h/t somebody @MoA. In article below, Russia expert Mark Ames makes an astonishing revelation which must be an embarrassment to Glenn Greenwald and Marcy Wheeler under Pierre Omidyar at The Intercept. I quoted Mark Ames on the Ukraine in another recent article – From The eXile – Misinformation Proxy War Ukraine.
Pierre Omidyar Co-funded Ukraine Revolution Groups With US Government, Documents Show
(Pando Daily) – Just hours after last weekend’s ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, one of Pierre Omidyar’s newest hires at national security blog “The Intercept,” was already digging for the truth.
Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site’s “senior policy analyst,” speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a “coup” engineered by “deep forces” on behalf of “Pax Americana“:
“There’s quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is.”
These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking.
Continued below the fold …
Wheeler is partly correct. Pando has confirmed that the American government – in the form of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) – played a major role in funding opposition groups prior to the revolution. Moreover, a large percentage of the rest of the funding to those same groups came from a US billionaire who has previously worked closely with US government agencies to further his own business interests. This was by no means a US-backed “coup,” but clear evidence shows that US investment was a force multiplier for many of the groups involved in overthrowing Yanukovych.
But that’s not the shocking part.
What’s shocking is the name of the billionaire who co-invested with the US government (or as Wheeler put it: the “dark force” acting on behalf of “Pax Americana”).
Step out of the shadows…. Wheeler’s boss, Pierre Omidyar.
Yes, in the annals of independent media, this might be the strangest twist ever: According to financial disclosures and reports seen by Pando, the founder and publisher of Glenn Greenwald’s government-bashing blog,”The Intercept,” co-invested with the US government to help fund regime change in Ukraine.
* * * *
When the revolution came to Ukraine, neo-fascists played a front-center role in overthrowing the country’s president. But the real political power rests with Ukraine’s pro-western neoliberals. Political figures like Oleh Rybachuk, long a favorite of the State Department, DC neocons, EU, and NATO–and the right-hand man to Orange Revolution leader Viktor Yushchenko.
Last December, the Financial Times wrote that Rybachuk’s “New Citizen” NGO campaign “played a big role in getting the protest up and running.”
New Citizen;, along with the rest of Rybachuk’s interlocking network of western-backed NGOs and campaigns– “Center UA” (also spelled “Centre UA”), “Chesno,” and “Stop Censorship” to name a few — grew their power by targeting pro-Yanukovych politicians with a well-coordinated anti-corruption campaign that built its strength in Ukraine’s regions, before massing in Kiev last autumn.
…
According to the Kyiv Post, Pierrie Omidyar’s Omidyar Network (part of the Omidyar Group which owns First Look Media and the Intercept) provided 36% of “Center UA”‘s $500,000 budget in 2012– nearly $200,000. USAID provided 54% of “Center UA”‘s budget for 2012. Other funders included the US government-backed National Endowment for Democracy.Read full article here …
“My own guess is that Hungtington’s theory is roughly correct, and that the reasons for the current turmoil and god forbid imminent war in Ukraine (something along the lines of Syria) are ultimately due to the country sitting along the cultural fault-line in that country in a world driven more and more by “civilizational” forces rather than national or ideological forces.”
The damage done by Islamophobes in Europe, Middle East and the US is immense. These groups claim to be ‘believers’ in the Clash of Civilization, but is false and pushing forward their own agenda. The exploitation of Huntington’s thesis in a world where people searching for their identity, ethnicity and cultural history.
Many conflicts are sourced in the aftermath of WWI and the artificial borders drawn by old-colonial powers. See Iraq and Syria after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean peninsula was transfered to the Soviet Union. We still see a Cold War policy playing out in Eastern Europe: Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo and now in the Ukraine. The revolutions in Kosovo, Libya and Ukraine are part of a proxy war between handful Western nations and Russia, pushing the frontier deep into the heart of the old Soviet empire. Strategic interests in gas pipelines also play a role.
Look at the history of the Crimean and what has passed since Communism took hold in the Soviet Union. Handing the Crimea to the Ukraine was a ‘gift’ by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 due to a 300 year-old anniversary. A similar ‘gift’ was by Stalin, handing Abkhazia and Ossetia to the republic of Georgia.
In the end, it’s ethnicity, religion and cultural ties that will result in a nationalist movement for independence. The violent overthrow of the Yanukovich regime was not one that will unite, but will divide the people of the Ukraine into three federal states.
The Neocons and ‘rolling back Russian imperialism’.
See my earlier post – Nazi Collaboration by Banderists in East Galicia and diary – Ukraine’s Holodomor of 1933 and the Maidan Revolution.
… this coup was a KGB conspiracy.
Interesting, same topic in article authored by Valery Drotenko [Валерій Дротенко in Ukrainian] – Is bloody KGB plan of Ukraine’s collapse carried out?, dated 08.12.2013.
Same story appeared in Ukrainian om 24-02-2014 after the black militia “sniper” attack on Instytutska Street.
Who Were Snipers In Kiev Massacre – A CIA-Svoboda False Flag Op?
Radio Free Europe published the black militia “snipers” video on 20.02.2014 and UK newspaper The Guardian spliced both videos together for publication the same day. This was pure Western propaganda as the first video by rferl « RadioSvoboda.org » was taken during the riots in the night of 28/29 November 2013.
Coverage here.
Cross-posted from Moon of Alabama.
Absent all the background, and well established, animosity between “Pando” and “New Look” players, your diary is, to be charitable, not helpful.
I haven’t visited either sites, so I have no knowledge of a feud. I found another article by Mark Ames, see link at the end. I’m sitting on the fence, but Ames may have a point. If I have a chance [time], I’ll dig a little deeper.
○ Keeping Secrets: Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald and the privatization of Snowden’s leaks
So Wheeler doesn’t deny that her new boss funds a Rybachuk organization, but does deny the “coup-ness” of Rybachuk’s activities that her tweet seemed to assert? Or that her tweet asserted it? Because the context was really just talking about Paraguay in 2012?
(Adam Colligan’s comment contains the weirdest typo, 2012 for 2014: “When the EuroMaidan movement made a breakthrough to parliamentary control in Ukraine around 2012-02-23, and the Rada voted to depose Yanukovich”)
Sounds like the coming into being of a Party Line.
Ames did not accurately reflect Wheeler’s tweets in his article. That came out in the tweetstorm last night. In fact Ames’s article is clearly a hit piece based on the flimsiness of its English evidence and the connections he draws from them and the depth of explanation he allows in explaining what is a complicated situation in Ukraine.
And the “Russia attacks Ukraine” articles that are coming in the MSM will be equally flimsy.
Wheeler wants to know what it is that Rybachuk’s organization is accused of doing using Omidyar Network money. Demanding government transparency in and of itself is not a revolutionary act.
No need to deny the funding of Rybachuk’s activities. The Omidyar Network website links to them and the funding line item that Ames’s published is from Rybachuk’s web site. Both sides of the transaction report that as a fact. So what is “embarrassing”?
Let’s see how Jeremy Scahill handles his reporting of this dirty war before passing judgement on First Look.
Yes, I saw at FirstLook that UA Center funding by Omidyar is no secret. Some of FirstLook looks good, I thought Froomkin’s piece was excellent. I doubt Scahill will be covering the Crimean War though.
.
Quite surprising, traffic is quite busy. Sometimes social media spreads like a wildfire without verifying the facts.
Some nasty comments by Paul Carr, editor @Pando.
○ Armando about the Ukraine dilemma.
Ah, the woman that wouldn’t put up or shut up.
I tend to cut those that claim to be in possession of very important and secret information a lot of slack as to the timing of those revelations. But Edmonds long ago passed the point of reasonable time limits. She has nothing but a following of suckers.
1984 came a little late this century.
Hustlers working all three sides of the street under deep cover. It’ll never make the headlines, though. Bet on it.
And the Great Game continues.
Station WTFU, once again signing off.
Sigh.
AG
Omidyar funded an NGO media center operation under its government transparency portfolio called First Citizen (NGO UA). They provided media staff and equipment (h/t pico at Daily Kos for the translation).
Who do Thiel and Andressen support?
People who assert that Omidyar Network had any direct hand in the regime change in Ukraine are going to have to connect some more dots in order to be credible. Funding a democracy movement media center even under a US AID flag does not quite do that.
The more important point is that First Look has editorial independence from Pierre Omidyar and journalists who know they can make it independently because they have. If they walk, Omidyar’s publication is finished. Can the same be said of the Pando crew?
There are lot of folks connecting dots overly quickly, why by the way is what NSA bulk collection and social network analysis is also guilty of.
Contrary to your title, Greenwald, Wheeler, and others are not embarrassed. They want to know more of exactly what Pando is accusing them of doing.
At this point there isn’t sufficient information to assert that Omidyar co-funded the Ukraine revolt or had any role in it at all. Unless you can translate the full pages that First Citizen posted, which includes the budget document (untranslated) that Mark Ames posted as “proof” of his allegations.
It is more likely that the defenders of the NSA (and who might those be in Silicon Valley) would very much like the continued drip-drip-drip of the release of Snowden documents to go away by discrediting those journalists who have been doing articles about them.
And suddenly after all these years, Marcy Wheeler is perceived to be a threat to someone.
It’s not an embarrassment. It’s an attempt at a distraction. If Ames were a serious investigative reporter, he would be digging into what Victoria Nuland-Kagan and the US CIA were doing to set up the revolt and how exactly a neo-con got appointed to such a high position in the State Department. There’s your embarrassment.
Meanwhile John Schindler thinks that this is a great popcorn feast instead of high-fiving his collaborator Pierre.
You write:
There should be no “embarrasment” in thgat, Tarheel. I mean…we’re all part of one big happy PermaGov family, right? What’s good for America is good for all of us. Neocons, neolibs…where’s the real difference?
I got yer “bipartisanship.” Right here!!!
With poor, goodhearted li’l ol’ Jimmeh wondering why he’s not shoulder to shoulder w/the rest of the big dogs.
It’s a Permanent Government, Tarheel.
Everything else is just window dressing.
Where’s the embarrassment?
It’s just more window dressing.
AG
Don’t know about Andressen, but Peter Thiel is one of those faux libertarian bully boys with more bucks than humane brain cells.
Ignorant ass with that last point. But there’s more:
He’s also openly gay and Ann Coulter is one of his good friends.
Why am I not surprised – what a class act.
He’s probably pissed that Omidyar snagged Greenwald, Wheeler, Scahill and Taibbi and he only got Ames.