10 August 2014 — Slavyangrad.org – Original: The Unwashed Brain

Something unprecedented is happening in Ukraine.

For decades the US and its proxies have committed war crimes with total impunity. They’ve trampled on just about every humanitarian convention there’s ever been, and the most they’ve had to fear is a Wikileaks-type exposé in a safely distant future.

Not in Ukraine. For the first time ever the world is seeing these crimes first hand and immediately – sometimes while they’re still happening. Poor villagers of Afghanistan and Iraq were unlikely to possess either mobile phone or camera, but Ukraine is a modern country with the advantages of Android and iPhones, video cameras and livestreaming. The US and Kiev can lie all they like, but it’s never going to work if there’s already a video online to show the truth.

Video is the liars’ worst enemy, and they fear it beyond anything else. That’s why they’re kidnapping, torturing, deporting and even murdering journalists. It’s why they’re kidnapping and intimidating citizens who dare to upload amateur footage of their crimes. It’s why the first thing they did in occupied Krasny Liman wasconfiscate laptops and mobile phones. They’ll stop at nothing to hide the truth.

Sometimes they fail. Sometimes a video makes it through to youtube, which is when the second line of defence springs hurriedly into action. We’re all familiar with the excuses employed for ‘yanking’ a video (especially the ‘disgusting content’ used to pull evidence of atrocities) but if something’s really dangerous we’re likely to win the jackpot with this little number:

‘Newsmedia’, of course, does not exist, but those of us who’ve been tracking US atrocities since Wikileaks will be very familiar with this Orwellian-sounding organization and have our own ideas who it really represents.

There’s a higher level still, which produces the weirdest and most surreal result of all.

I can’t verify this personally, but have been told by someone ‘in the business’ that this means the video removal was so urgent that youtube’s own procedure was bypassed in favour of deleting the offending item from the server itself. Probably paranoia, but look at the kind of material that receives this treatment, and see what you think for yourself.

But the system isn’t infallible, and material still slips through for long enough to impinge on public consciousness. When this happens Kiev has to fall back on Plan C, which is simply to discredit the material in any way it knows how.

And it certainly knows how. Their first and best weapon is similar to the one they use with pictures which is a fraudulent attempt to label genuine videos as ‘fake’. We saw this first with the utterly damning video from Kramatorsk in May, which showed Ukraine using helicopters with UN markings in order to pursue punitive assaults on so-called ‘pro-Russian’ rebels. This was shot by LifeNews reporters Oleg Sidyakin and Marat Saichenko, but RT also picked it up, adding the information that Ukraine had acquired UN markings on its helicopters during its tour of duty in the Congo in 2012.

Solid, you’d think – but not for the Disinformation Experts of US Kiev, who immediately used this comparison to ‘prove’ Russia was trying to pass off Congo footage as video from Ukraine.