As Ukraine leaves its communist past behind, around 800,000 children have been abandoned and left without a home.
FORCED into prostitution and struggling to survive on the street, these brutal pictures show the homeless children of Kiev who have been left abandoned after communism.
As Ukraine transitions from its communist past to a free market economy thousands of children have been left without a home and have turned to drugs and sniffing glue as a way of stopping them from feeling hungry.
A staggering 10 per cent of the country’s population are abandoned youngsters and often face abuse at the hands of the mafia and even each other.
Ukraine was formerly part of the Soviet Union and faced communist rule from 1922 until independence in 1991.
During this time, the state made provisions for all children, even if facilities were lacking.
However 25 years after the fall of communism with Ukraine moving towards a free market, children are being abandoned as families cannot afford to look after them.
Now it has left thousands of them on the streets and struggling to survive with many of them shunning life in government-run shelters.
They say they would rather be on the streets where they can beg passers-by for cash and also take drugs.
Among those living on the streets is 14-year-old Denise Selivanov who has been living on the streets for four years.
He often inhales glue in his temporary home – a bridge overpass on a busy railway line but he considers himself lucky after escaping with four of his friends after an early morning police raid that netted 18 children that were living there.
Also on the streets is 16-year-old Natasha Dzhuley, who has turned to prostitution and as a result has become pregnant.
She was beaten by her pimps in what her friend Ruslana believes was a warning to other prostitutes to stay in line.
While Sasha, 16, is forced to steal in order to get by and also takes to the streets to beg for money.
The punishment for these children who get caught stealing varies from beatings and arrest, to having the sewers set alight where they become unsuitable for the children to sleep in during the harsh winters.
Meanwhile Ukraine is facing fresh uncertainty as rebels backed by Russian president Vladimir Putin claim Ukrainian troops are preparing a massive assault on areas held by pro-Russian forces.
It comes after last year when as many as 40,000 Russian troops were reported to be massing on the country’s border with Ukraine – prompting fears of a new military invasion.
On Sunday there was an article published on the Huffington Post which details how two major Canadian banks with a vested interest in the Keystone pipeline had paid Hillary Clinton large sums of money for various speaking engagements.
The story itself wasn’t that ground-breaking considering it’s well documented that Hillary Clinton is bought and paid for and has been since day one and it was actually Ron Brynaert of Gate News who first broke the story of her relationship with these banks back on May 17 of this year.
What caught my eye was the bi-line. The article was written by Russ Grim and … Paul Blumenthal. He has the same last name as Sidney Blumenthal, the long-time Clintonista hatchet-man and “message shaper” who just happens to be in the spotlight right now over his emails to Hillary regarding the color revolution and subsequent neoliberalization of Libya and that little messed-up psyop known simply as “Benghazi”.
What are the odds of that? Upon further investigation it turns out the Blumenthal rabbit hole on this one runs deep. Real deep. And the staggering implications are spreading across public domain.
The story of Benghazi and the Blumenthal trio is out there and it can’t be recalled. All you have to do is pay attention.
All My Sons
The first step in understanding what is happening with this story is to figure out who Paul Blumenthal really is which is not an easy task. To that end, I sent him a Twitter message asking if he was Max’s brother and Sidney’s son. At the time of publishing this article, he has yet to reply.
Paul Blumenthal has a Tumblr page in which he states he writes for the Huffington Post and DJed at Wonderland Ballroom and the Looking Glass Lounge. Both are in Washington D.C. where Sidney has made his primary residence for quite sometime.
Sidney Blumenthal’s Wiki page mentions the fact that he has two children and names one of them as Max Blumenthal, which we already know. It doesn’t mention the name or the sex of the other. Any other references to his biography tend to omit specifics on his kids with the exception of Max since his identity is already well known. Considering his close personal ties to the Clinton machine and his insider status in D.C., that’s completely understandable.
Max Blumenthal’s Wiki page only mentions Sidney and the fact that he has “one brother” and that’s it.
When you look at photos of Max and Paul side by side there is a slight resemblance. And by “slight” I mean to say they are nearly identical.
In a brief bio from Governing.com, Paul Blumenthal mentions that he “learned everything he needed to know from growing up in Washington D.C.”
Paul got his start blogging with the Soros sponsored “Sunlight Foundation” which he worked with for 5 years until leaving in 2011 to work for the Huffington Post.
So I don’t think there is any question: Paul Blumenthal is Max Blumenthal’s brother and the son of Sidney Blumenthal.
So why is that important?
A View From the Bridge
On Sept. 11, 2012, something that appeared to be an attack on a secret CIA compound took place in Benghazi, Libya which supposedly claimed the lives of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and Sean Smith. Two CIA contractors, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty were reportedly killed hours later in a follow-up attack on another secret CIA compound less than a mile away.
“Operations conducted by, with, or through irregular forces in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, or conventional military operations.” FM 3-05.201, (S/NF) Special Forces Unconventional Warfare (U) 28 September 2007
The CIA and elite counter-terrorist operators from America’s Delta Force had been in Benghazi since the start of the color revolution back in February of 2011. As a standard unconventional warfare operation, indigenous personnel were recruited, armed and trained to carry out acts of sabotage and terrorism in the country in order to destabilize Libya and make it ready for regime change which is what happened officially on the day their beloved leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was murdered in cold blood by a group of assets working on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
Hillary’s giggling acceptance of credit for that illegal extrajudicial homicide is an extraordinarily embarrassing moment in the history of this nation which has produced many others in the past and since.
An iconic image of the “battle for Benghazi” (as the press quickly named it) shows a typical “bad guy” doing a typical pose in front of a fiery scene. There is the one hand raised in mocking victory and the other carrying the cliche AK-47. The image itself is a modern-day standard of propaganda comparable to others of the same style and purpose.
The images posted above are of staged scenes. They are propaganda designed to illicit a response in the viewer. Specifically, in the American viewer. And that response is designed to be disgust mixed with enough rage and fear to allow for a temporary suspension of disbelief in the viewer just long enough for them to openly support military action in a country far far away. This is how those who craft unconventional warfare create legitimacy.
4-16. Significant moral and legal considerations often exist in a UW effort. Legitimacy is the most crucial factor in developing and maintaining international and internal support. Without this support, the United States cannot sustain assistance to an irregular force. Without recognized legitimacy and credibility, military operations do not receive the support of the indigenous population, the U.S. population, or the international community.” Army Special Operations Forces handbook on Unconventional Warfare – 2008
It’s marketing. Using an emotional context to sell a product. The product in this case is war, occupation, suffering and death.
We have never been told what really happened in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. From the start the White House and the State Department concocted lies, one after the other, to explain and justify what happened. Our understanding of this operation has always been that of an uninformed consumer. And that is as it was intended.
Our view has always been obstructed until recently.
No Villain
Slowly over time, the pieces of the Benghazi puzzle, the “Innocence of the Muslims psyop” as I call it, began to fall into place.
In Aug. of 2013, we came to find out there were dozens of CIA assets and agents on the compound the night of the attack and they were doing everything they could to keep that information a secret. They didn’t want anyone to know what they were doing there.
Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret. CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out. CNN
In May of 2013, I myself revealed that back in May of 2012, a few short months prior to the “battle for Benghazi”, 45 major US corporations got together to map out their 3.5 billion dollar investment plan for Africa. What they needed was stability so they also needed a pretext to send more troops and weapons to AFRICOM.
May, 2012 – “The New Alliance was announced in conjunction with the G8 meeting last Friday. Under the scheme, some 45 corporations, including Monsanto, Syngenta, Yara International, Cargill, DuPont, and PepsiCo, have pledged a total of $3.5 billion in investment in Africa. The full list of corporations and commitments has just been released, and one of the most notable is Yara International’s promise to build a $2 billion fertilizer plant in Africa.” How the US Sold Africa to Multinationals Like Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont, PepsiCo and Others
I was not alone in my assessment of the importance of the Benghazi psyop.
“This major crisis in all the countries will be a justification for more boots on the ground the same way they’re ready to go into Libya now…It becomes a pretext to kill more Muslims, to steal more resources,” member of Dignity, Human Rights and Peace Randy Short, Sept. 15th 2012
On Sept. 21, 2012, I wrote about a major motive in the Benghazi psyop, the privatization of Libya’s universal healthcare system.
Keep that in mind as we move forward.
The State Department’s story began falling apart immediately as their spokesman continued to push it for lack of a better narrative.
Days afterward, the White House and State Department were in panic mode and demanded reporters stop asking them questions about the biggest story since 9/11 until they could fix the message.
“All aspects of the attack, including what led up to it, its causes, the identity of the perpetrators, and the circumstances surrounding the death of Amb. Chris Stevens and the other three Americans,are off limits for reporters.” Foreign Policy mag
The “spontaneous reaction to the film “Innocence of the Muslims” story, the narrative that the White House and the State Department were desperate to maintain was contradicted by all the facts on the ground. Even our installed “president” of the new neoliberal Libya wasn’t buying it:
“The way these perpetrators acted and moved — I think we, and they’re choosing the specific date for this so-called demonstration, I think we have no, this leaves us with no doubt that this was pre-planned, determined,”
It was planned, definitely, it was planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago, and they were planning this criminal act since their arrival,” Libyan President Mohamed Yousef El-Magariaf
There was no spontaneous protest against the film. Our assets, CIA assets, Ansar al-Shariah, who were employed by the city of Benghazi to provide security (and therefore employed by the State Department and CIA by extension) sealed off the street hours before the “attack” and another client thug group, the February 17th Martyrs Brigade, who were employed by the CIA to provide security for the compound itself, packed up their things and left the scene hours before as well, leaving the gate to the compound unlocked for easier access.
“It began around nightfall on Sept. 11 with around 150 bearded gunmen, some wearing the Afghan-style tunics favored by Islamic militants, sealing off the streets leading to the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. They set up roadblocks with pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns, according to witnesses.
The trucks bore the logo of Ansar al-Shariah, a powerful local group of Islamist militants who worked with the municipal government to manage security in Benghazi, the main city in eastern Libya and birthplace of the uprising last year that ousted Moammar Gadhafi after a 42-year dictatorship.
There was no sign of a spontaneous protest against an American-made movie denigrating Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. But a lawyer passing by the scene said he saw the militants gathering around 20 youths from nearby to chant against the film. Within an hour or so, the assault began, guns blazing as the militants blasted into the compound.” Washington Post
Considering the fact that these “terrorists” were CIA and State Department assets assigned to protect our puppet government in Benghazi, it’s easy to understand the next revelation that came out not long after the “attack” and that was that U.S. Special Forces, working with AFRICOM at the time, were essentially ordered to stand down in spite of the fact that we had a Predator drone flying overhead in Benghazi that night recording everything that happened. They therefore knew of the attack in real time and even witnessed the group blocking off the streets and the other group packing up and leaving well in advance of the “attack”
“Mr. Hicks testified this morning that the stand down order for the rescue team in Tripoli came from either AFRICOM or SOCAFRICA. General Ham. leader of AFRICOM, may have been in Washington DC at the time.”
“AFRICOM leader General Carter Ham was never given the order to secure the consulate in Benghazi. This is what the general told Rep. Jason Chaffetz after the 9-11 Benghazi terror attack. That means only Barack Obama or Defense Secretary Panetta, the two men above the AFRICOM commander, never ordered an operation to secure the consulate.” Gateway Pundit
“The United States had an unmanned Predator drone over its consulate in Benghazi during the attack that slaughtered four Americans — which should have led to a quicker military response, it was revealed yesterday.
“They stood, and they watched, and our people died,” former CIA commander Gary Berntsen told CBS News.” New York Post
That last line is the most telling. And the most damning.
Why wouldn’t they want the terrorists, the enemy stopped? Because they weren’t the enemy. There were no villains in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012.
The Reason Why
The pretext for the “attack”, the motive, is important. It has to be believable that a spontaneous protest against a silly film turned ugly unexpectedly and that is why four people died and Obama was ultimately forced to put boots on the ground in Libya and other African nations in order to quell and uprising against our puppet regimes.
Without that pretext, people will start to wonder about the event itself and thus their precious “legitimacy” is lost.
Enter “Sam Bacile” and “The Innocence of the Muslims”
On Sept. 12, 2012, Max Blumenthal wrote an article in which he claimed the motive for the attack against the compound in Benghazi was Muslim outrage against a short film called “Innocence of the Muslims” crafted by a self-proclaimed Jew named Sam Bacile.
It’s interesting to note that earlier this month it was revealed that Hillary Clinton forwarded a link to this article on the afternoon of Sept. 12 to a colleague less than two hours after Max posted it. It is not known how she came to find this article or who sent to her in the first place. That part of the story has been redacted.
Max quickly went around the TV circuit doing interviews telling folks about “Sam Bacile” and the video which supposedly sparked the outrage.
Max quickly became a front-man for the narrative. A false narrative.
Max never revealed his source for his conclusions in his article titled “Meet The Right-Wing Extremist Behind Anti-Muslim Film That Sparked Deadly Riots” and there’s very good reason for that: the source most likely was his father, Sidney Blumenthal, who was on the payroll of the Clinton Global Initiative as a “message shaper” at the time and working in Libya for the State Department, communicating with Hillary Clinton and teamed up with with a former CIA psyops specialist and a retired General from the Pentagon who spent 2002 going to any news station that would have him lying about weapons of mass destruction and Yellow Cake from Niger.
Blumenthal’s team’s mission was simple: help make Libya safe for various U.S. businesses and specifically one which looked to profit from the privatization of the healthcare system.
But more on that in a minute.
Let’s talk about “Sam Bacile” and “The Innocence of the Muslims” first.
While Max was running around helping to sell the official story during the initial days of the unofficial investigations into what happened in Benghazi that night, folks like myself weren’t buying it.
It didn’t take long for people to figure out “Sam Bacile” was really a long-time FBI informant named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula who made the film much earlier under the name “The Innocence of Bin Laden” as a honeypot trap for the feds in California in an effort to lure dimwitted patsies to it’s viewing in L.A.
The original title was “The Innocence of Bin Laden,” which the filmmaker expected would attract an audience of radical Islamists who would become disillusioned about their faith after watching, Klein said.
“Sam had a crew of people passing out fliers around the dangerous mosques in California, trying to get these folks who love Osama Bin Laden who would come to cheer Osama Bin Laden,” Klein said. “But the movie was going to expose all the stuff that Muhammad really did, like murder and pedophilia and stuff like that.” San Fransisco Chronical
“With an Arabic interpreter standing by, Nakoula told Snyder about his decision to inform. He explained, “I decided to cooperate with the government to retrieve some of these mistakes or damage happened. I want to cooperate with the government that they can catch with this other criminals who is their involvement.”
“A variety of documents filed in the U.S. District Court case were sealed at the request of prosecutors and Nakoula’s lawyer. The sealed records–from the transcript of Nakoula’s change-of-plea hearing to sentencing memoranda–appear to indicate that his plea agreement with the government included some form of cooperation.” The Smoking Gun
In late 2010, Nakoula was released from prison due in part to his promise to cooperate with federal authorities.
In early 2011, he started casting for a film he called Desert Warrior at the time. In Aug. of 2011 they shot the film.
Flyers started popping up in various Muslim stores and mosques in the L.A. area advertising a film called “The Innocence of Bn Laden” in early June of 2012.
The screening, only one day, was held on June 23rd at the Vine Theater in Hollywood. No one showed up. The honeypot trap failed to produce any “radical Muslims” for the Justice Department who we must assume put Mr. Nakoula up to this in the first place.
Another viewing was scheduled for June 30th at the same location, another bite at the apple I suppose, but a Hollywood blogger rose concerns about the film on the 29th at city council meeting and the second showing was cancelled.
Later the film would be slightly reworked and uploaded to Youtube by “Sam Bacile” on July 1st, 2012. It had been voluntarily blocked by Youtube and Google in both Egypt and Libya long before the “attack” of Sept. 11th.
The “Innocence of bin Laden” honeypot crafted by the feds and created by one of their informants had failed to produce any results. But it was about to serve a secondary purpose as the reborn ‘Innocence of the Muslims” psyop.
After all, unconventional warfare needs legitimacy so the attack on the Benghazi compound needed a motive.
They just didn’t want anyone to look too closely at it.
Mr Peter’s Connections
Back in March of this year, Hillary Clinton found herself in hot water once again. It was discovered that she was supposedly unable to provide all the emails from her time as Secretary of State due to the fact that she illegally used a private email service and a personal system of servers so that she could eventually hide much of her communications during her run as Sec. of State from the public record.
Yet again, another crime on the part of the Clinton Royal Family goes unpunished.
The story rekindled a bit of interest in an earlier one in which the hacker Guccifer supposedly stole a cache of emails from long-time Clinton hatchet-man Sidney Blumenthal and published them at Gawker.
The dispatches from Blumenthal to Clinton’s private email address were posted online after Blumenthal’s account was hacked in 2013 by Romanian hacker Marcel-Lehel Lazar, who went by the name Guccifer. Lazar also broke into accounts belonging to George W. Bush’s sister, Colin Powell, and others. He’s now serving a seven-year sentence in his home country and was charged in a U.S. indictment last year.
The contents of the memos, which have recently become the subject of speculation in the right-wing media, raise new questions about how Clinton used her private email account and whether she tapped into an undisclosed back channel for information on Libya’s crisis and other foreign policy matters. Gawker, March 2015
Since then a couple of reporters from the New York Times started taking a closer look at those emails from Sidney’s private account and the story they tell is indeed a fascinating one.
The story derived from the vast collection of emails and carefully explained by the New York Times is one of how Sidney Blumenthal was being paid $10,000 a month by the Clinton Global Initiative for “message guidance” while at the same time serving Hillary in the State Department as an adviser in Libya.
It also details Sidney’s partners down there at the time. A former CIA psyops specialist of over 25 years (Tyler Drumheller) and a retired general from the Pentagon who spent 2002 helping promote every lie the Bush administration could come up with to justify the Iraq invasion of 2003 (Mr. Grange).
Mr. White declined to answer follow-up questions about what role Mr. Blumenthal was playing in the business venture. But Mr. Grange described Mr. Blumenthal as an adviser to Mr. White’s company, along with two other associates: Tyler Drumheller, a colorful former Central Intelligence Agency official, and Cody Shearer, a longtime Clinton friend.
“I just know that he was working with the team to work on business development,” Mr. Grange said of Mr. Blumenthal.
In the spring of 2011, Mr. Blumenthal, Mr. Drumheller and Mr. Shearer were helping plan what was to be Mr. Grange’s first trip to Libya, according to emails stolen by a Romanian hacker and published by Gawker and ProPublica in March. Mr. Blumenthal said he had been advised not to comment on the correspondence because the theft remained under investigation by the F.B.I. New York Times
The story about Mr. Blumenthal’s business ventures in Libya on behalf of Clinton’s business elite friends has been slowly making it’s way around the “interwebs”. It was featured on the WSWS on May 21 and 5 days ago on the 28th of May the headline at Politico was about how the CGI was paying Sidney $10,000 a month while he was serving as Hillary’s eyes and ears on the ground in Libya with his crew of psyops creators.
On May 27th, the Daily Caller exposed a couple of communications between Sidney and Hillary directly related to the Benghazi “attack” and how he was helping “guide the message” at the very beginning:
In the hours after the deadly terrorist attack on Clinton’s consulate, Sidney Blumenthal rushed political guidance to the secretary.
“During the afternoon of September 11, 2012 new interim President of Libya Mohammed Yussef el Magariaf spoke in private with senior advisors, including the members of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood, to discuss the attacks by demonstrators on U.S. missions in Tripoli and Benghazi,” Blumenthal reported to Clinton in a memo dated Sept. 12 at 12:50 a.m
“During this session, a senior security officer told Magariaf that the attacks on that day were inspired by what many devout Libyans viewed as a sacrilegious internet video on the prophet Mohammed originating in America. The Libyan attacks were also inspired by and linked to an attack on the U.S. mission the same day,” Blumenthal said. Daily Caller, May 27, 2015
Keep in mind, Blumenthal’s statement at that time is in direct contradiction of the quote by the president of the country which I posted above which clearly states he did not think there was any protest at all and said the attack had nothing to do with any video.
Also keep in mind that Hillary then started sending links to Sidney Blumenthal’s son’s article which falsely described the motive for the attack to be anger at the video “The Innocence of the Muslims”
Where did Hillary get the link from originally? That part is redacted.
Max Blumenthal spent that day feverishly promoting the obscure film’s role in the Benghazi violence. Daily Caller, May 27, 2015
Needless too say, Sidney Blumenthal was suddenly getting a lot of attention as the guy at the center of a rather conspicuous psyop just a couple days before one of his sons, Paul, wrote that distraction piece about Hillary Clinton and the Keystone pipeline.
Perhaps the best accounting of the Blumenthal trio of psyops professionals and their relationship to Hillary Clinton during the pacification of Libya leading up to the Benghazi psyop comes from Propublica back in March of this year. But ultimately, they all seem to miss the point. They can achieve that desired goal by omitting all the other details surrounding the Benghazi psyop that I carefully and painstakingly laid out above.
“Contacted by ProPublica and Gawker, Drumheller’s attorney and business partner Danny Murray confirmed that Drumheller “worked” with Blumenthal and was aware of the hacked emails, but declined to comment further.
Shearer said only that “the FBI is involved and told me not to talk. There is a massive investigation of the hack and all the resulting information.” The FBI declined to comment.
Blumenthal, Grange, and Kikhia all did not respond to repeated attempts to reach them. Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton had no comment on Blumenthal’s activities with Drumheller.
Whatever Blumenthal, Shearer, Drumheller, and Grange were up to in 2011, 2012, and 2013 on Clinton’s behalf, it appears that she could have used the help” Propublica
Death of a Salesman
It is widely understood now that Amb. Stevens played a crucial role in the funneling of weapons from Libya to our other destabilization campaign taking place around the same time in Syria. It’s also been stated that the secret CIA compound where this “attack” took place was in fact the staging area for those weapons.
In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan opposition, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group—a group that has now disbanded, with some fighters reportedly participating in the attack that took Stevens’ life.
In November 2011 The Telegraph reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council, “met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey” in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria.
Last month The Times of London reported that a Libyan ship “carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria … has docked in Turkey.” The shipment reportedly weighed 400 tons and included SA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.
Reuters reports that Syrian rebels have been using those heavy weapons to shoot down Syrian helicopters and fighter jets.
The ship’s captain was “a Libyan from Benghazi and the head of an organization called the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support,” which was presumably established by the new government. That means that Ambassador Stevens had only one person—Belhadj—between himself and the Benghazi man who brought heavy weapons to Syria. Business Insider
What better way to scrub an illegal weapons transfer program than to have it’s primary location burned along with all the records and it’s main manager “killed” in the process?
The Creation of the World and Other Business
So what was Sidney Blumenthal and his pack of raging psyops crafters doing in Libya in the first place?
Is it a coincidence that one of his partners in crime down there was a man who ran clandestine operations for the CIA for 5 years before he retired and the “attack” took place on a secret CIA compound that was literally packed full of CIA assets at the time?
Where did Sidney really come up with the story about the “Innocence of the Muslims” video being the motive behind the attack if it didn’t actually come from the president of the newly neoliberalized Libya and who gave that info to his son Max so he could run with the story all over the alternative press in the early early stages of the coverage of the ‘attack’?
Who told Clinton about Max’s article?
And why is it that just as Max and Sidney are being pilloried in the public domain, Paul Blumenthal decides to basically copy someone else’s work on Hillary’s connection to Canadian banks and publish it on yet another so-called “alternative” site?
What you are seeing is the craft of “message guidance” as it is wielded by a professional by the name of Sidney Blumenthal.
Sidney uses every asset to him in order to control the narrative. In this case, on several occasions, it seems he is more than willing to employ his own children in his various campaigns. He used Max when he wanted to push the false narrative of the video motive and it would seem he is using Paul now in an attempt to shift the focus off himself and the entire Benghazi psyop.
People like Sidney believe they can control the way the public perceives the world around them and when they fail they usually face catastrophic consequences.
How much of a leap is it to wonder about this little Blumenthal trio in Libya and how long before more start to wonder if the story continued to grow?
Is it possible that:
Grange used his Pentagon connections and arranged a stand-down of AFRICOM
Drumheller set up the CIA assets who posed as “protesters” and attacked the abandoned compound
and Blumenthal provided the “message guidance” needed to explain it all in a way that served their interests
Sidney, Max and Paul. The Blumenthal trio. Shaping the world around us as much as they can. But sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men run off course a bit. And that’s why we’re here. To serve as The Crucible in which their forged falsifications are melted away revealing the core components of their Big Lies.
Hārūn ar-Rashīd (Arabic هارون الرشيد also spelled Harun ar-Rashid, Haroun al-Rashid or Haroon al Rasheed (English: Aaron the Upright or rightly-guided) (c. 763 – 809) was the fifth and most famous Abbasid Caliph. Ruling from 786 C.E. until his death in 809 C.E., his reign and the court over which he held sway are immortalized in, The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. His competent government was greatly aided by his choice of able administrators. Hārūn is regarded as having been a wise and just ruler, an enlightened patron of the arts who ruled over a generally open and tolerant court. This was a period of flourishing scholarship often referred to as the Golden Age of Islamic Civilization. This was also a time when much Greek learning was being copied into Arabic, much of which, lost to Europe, would later reach Europe via Islamic Spain.
Biography
Hārūn was the son of al-Mahdi, the third ‘Abbasid caliph (ruled 775–785), and al-Khayzuran, a former slave girl from Yemen, a woman of strong personality who greatly influenced the affairs of state during the reigns of her husband and sons.
Hārūn was strongly influenced by the will of his mother in the governance of the Islamic empire, until her death in 789. His vizier (chief minister) Yahya the Barmakid, his sons, and other Barmakids were also the main controlling forces in the administration.
The Barmakids were a Persian family that had become very powerful under al-Mahdi. Yahya had aided Hārūn in obtaining the caliphate, and he and his sons enjoyed the caliph’s high favor until 798, when, in a turnaround, he threw them into prison and confiscated their land. The cause assigned to that incident was as follows:
Yahya’s son, Ja’far ibn Yahya, was a great friend of Hārūn’s. The caliph enjoyed having his sisters Abbasa and Jafar join him at times of recreation, but Muslim etiquette did not permit them to interact so informally with one another. In order to facilitate their spending time in one another’s company, Hārūn arranged for a marriage between his friend and his sister, on the understanding that it was not to be a true marriage, but purely nominal. Yet according to some versions of the story, Abbasa entered Ja’far’s bedroom in the darkness, masquerading as one of his slave girls. She secretly gave birth to a child whom she sent off to Mecca. One of her maids, with whom she was quarreling, knew the secret and publicized the scandal. Hārūn heard the story while on a pilgrimage in Mecca and ascertained the tale was probably true.
On his return shortly thereafter, he had Ja’far executed, and his body was dispatched to Baghdad. There it was divided in two and impaled on either side of a bridge. It’s remains were visible for three years, when Harun, happening to pass through Baghdad from the East, gave command for the remains to be taken down and burned. Upon his death, Ja’far’s father and brother were both cast into prison.
The aforementioned story is usually regarded as nothing more than fiction. The reason for the fall of the Barkamids was more likely due to the fact that Barkamids were behaving in a manner Hārūn found disrespectful (such as entering his court unannounced) and making decisions of relevance to the state without consulting him first.
Hārūn became caliph when he was in his early twenties. On the day of accession, his son al-Ma’mun was born, and another, named al-Amin was born shortly thereafter. The latter was the son of Zubaida, a granddaughter of al-Mansur (founder of the city of Baghdad); so he took precedence over his older brother, whose mother was a Persian slave-girl. Hārūn began his reign by appointing very able ministers, who carried on the work of the government so well that they greatly improved the condition of the people.
It was under Hārūn ar-Rashīd that Baghdad flourished into the most splendid city of its period. Many foreign rulers paid tribute to the caliph, and these funds were used for architecture, the arts, and a luxurious life at court.
Hārūn built a palace in Baghdad, far grander and more beautiful than that of any caliph before him. He established his court and residence there and lived in great splendor, attended by hundreds of courtiers and slaves. Later in his life, he moved and set up his court at Ar Raqqah, in the north of Syria. He did this ostensibly to hold what was perceived as a disloyal Syria in check, in spite of his attachment to Baghdad, where he never actually resided again.
Hārūn ar-Rashīd was very anxious that his subjects be treated justly by the officers of the government, and he was determined to hear out any complaints. He is said to have occasionally disguised himself at night and gone through the streets and bazaars, listening to the talk of those whom he met and asking them questions. In this way he learned whether the people were contented and happy.
Hārūn was a great patron of learning, poetry, and music. He was a scholar and poet himself and whenever he heard of learned men in his own kingdom, or in neighboring countries, he is said to ahve invited them to his court and treated them with respect. The name of Hārūn, therefore, became known throughout the world. He had diplomatic relations with China and with Charlemagne. It is said that a correspondence took place between him and Charlemagne and in 802, Harun sent him a present consisting of silks, brass candelabra, perfume, slaves, balsam, ivory chessmen, a colossal tent with many-colored curtains, an elephant named Abul-Abbas, and a water clock that marked the hours by dropping bronze balls into a bowl, as mechanical knights—one for each hour—emerged from little doors which shut behind them. The presents were unprecedented in Western Europe and may have influenced Carolingian art. Charlemagne was awarded permission to send financial aid to the Christians of Palestine. On the one hand, Hārūn demanded that Christians wear distinctive clothes but on the other he employed Christians and Jews in significant positions and is said to have loved his Christian physician, Gabriel Bukhtichlo, as if he were a member of his own family.
In military matters, Hārūn was an excellent soldier and demonstrated this ability at a young age when his father was still caliph. He later commanded an army of 95,000 Arabs and Persians sent by his father to invade the Eastern Roman Empire, which was then ruled by the Empress Irene. After defeating Irene’s famous general, Nicetas, Harun marched his army to Chrysopolis (now Üsküdar in Turkey) on the Asiatic coast, opposite Constantinople. He encamped on the heights in full view of the Roman capital.
The Empress saw that the city would certainly be taken by the Muslims. She therefore sent ambassadors to Harun to arrange terms; but he sternly refused to agree to anything except immediate surrender. It is reported that then one of the ambassadors said, “‘The Empress has heard much of your ability as a general. Though you are her enemy, she admires you as a soldier.’ These flattering words were pleasing to Hārūn. He walked to and fro in front of his tent and then spoke again to the ambassadors. ‘Tell the Empress that I will spare Constantinople if she will pay me seventy thousand pieces of gold as a yearly tribute. If the tribute is regularly paid, Constantinople shall not be harmed by any Muslim force.'” The Empress agreed to these terms. She paid the first year’s tribute; and soon the great Muslim army set out on its homeward march. The tribute of gold that the Empress Irene agreed to pay Hārūn was sent regularly for many years. It was always received at Baghdad with great ceremony. The day on which it arrived was made a holiday. The Roman soldiers who came with it entered the gates in procession. Muslim troops also took part in the parade. When the gold had been delivered at the palace, the Roman soldiers were hospitably entertained, and were escorted to the main gate of the city when they set out on their journey back to Constantinople.
In 802, Nicephorus I usurped the throne of the Eastern Empire. He sent ambassadors with a letter to Harun to tell him that the tribute would no longer be paid. The letter contained these words:
“The weak and faint-hearted Irene submitted to pay you tribute. She ought to have made you pay tribute to her. Return to me all that she paid you; else the matter must be settled by the sword.”
As soon as Hārūn had read these words, the ambassadors threw a bundle of swords at his feet. The caliph smiled, and drawing his own sword, or scimitar, he cut the Roman swords in two with one stroke without injuring the blade or even turning the edge of his weapon. Then he dictated a letter to Nicephorus, in which he said: “Hārūn ar-Rashīd, Commander of the Faithful to Nicephorus, the Roman dog: I have read your letter. You shalt not hear but you will see my reply.”
Hārūn was as good as his word. He set out with a large army intent on punishing the emperor. He laid siege to Heraclea, a city on the shores of the Black Sea, and in a week forced it to surrender. Nicephorus felt forced to agree to pay the tribute.
However, scarcely had the caliph reached his palace in Baghdad when the emperor again refused to pay. Hārūn, consequently, advanced into the Roman province of Phrygia in Asia Minor with an army of 15,000 men. Nicephorus marched against him with 125,000 men. In the battle which followed, the emperor was wounded, and 40,000 of his men were killed. After this defeat, Nicephorus again promised payment of the tribute, but once again failed to keep his promise. Hārūn vowed that he would kill the emperor if he should ever lay hands upon him. But as he was getting ready to march once more into the Roman provinces, a revolt broke out in one of the cities of his own kingdom; and while on his way to suppress it he died from a chronic illness. He is said to be buried in Tus.
Timeline
766: Hārūn is born, the son of Caliph al-Mahdi and the Yemeni slave girl al-Khayzuran.
780: Hārūn is the nominal leader of military expeditions against the Byzantine Empire.
782: Hārūn is nominal leader of a military campaign against the Byzantine Empire reaching as far as the Bosporus. A peace treaty is signed on favourable terms. Harun receives the honorific title ar-Rashīd, named second in succession to the caliphal throne and also appointed governor of Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
786: Hārūn’s brother al-Hadi dies under mysterious circumstances—it was rumored that his mother al-Khayzuran was responsible. Hārūn becomes the new caliph and makes Yahya the Barmakid his Grand Vizier—but al-Khayzuran exercised much influence over the politics.
789: Al-Khayzuran dies, leaving more of the effective power in the hands of Hārūn.
791: Hārūn wages war against the Byzantine Empire.
800: Hārūn appoints Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab governor over Tunisia, making him a semi-autonomous ruler in return for substantial yearly payments.
803: Yahya dies, and even more of effective power comes in the hands of Hārūn.
807: Hārūn’s forces occupy Cyprus.
809: Dies while traveling in the eastern parts of his empire. al-Amin succeeds him as caliph.
Hārūn is widely considered the greatest of the Abbasid caliphs, presiding over the Arab Empire at its political and cultural peak. Consequently, Islamic literature (the work of ibn Kather, for example) has raised him to the level of an ideal figure, a great military and intellectual leader, and even a paragon for future rulers to emulate. His best-known portrayal in the West, in the stories of the Thousand and One Nights, has little basis in historical fact, but does show the mythic stature he has attained over time.
Popular culture and references
Future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, when he was a New York Police Department Commissioner, was called in the local newspapers “Haroun-al-Roosevelt” for his habit of lonely all-night rambles on the streets of Manhattan, surreptitiously catching police officers off their posts, sleeping, or otherwise engaged in restaurants or brothels.
The character Jafar, in Walt Disney’s animated motion picture, 1992’s Aladdin, is vaguely based on Hārūn’s vizier’s son.
The comic book The Sandman issue 50 featured a story set in the world of the Arabian Nights, with Hārūn ar-Rashīd as one of the protagonists. The story, entitled “Ramadan,” is included in the collection The Sandman: Fables and Reflections.
The two protagonists of Salman Rushdie’s 1990 novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Haroun and his father Rashid Khalifa were clearly named after the Caliph.
Hārūn ar-Rashīd figures in the third chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in a dream of Stephen Dedalus, one of the protagonists: “Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it.”
Harun al-Rashid is also celebrated in the 1923 poem by W.B. Yeats, The Gift of Harun al-Rashid, first published as part of The Dial in 1924.
In Quest for Glory II, the sultan who adopts Devon Aidendale as his son, is named Hārūn ar-Rashīd. He is often seen prophesizing on the streets of Shapeir as The Poet Omar.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem which started “One day Haroun Al-Raschid read/A book wherein the poet said/Where are the kings and where the rest/Of those who once the world possessed?”
On May 29 an accident at a power plant near the northern Siberian city of Norilsk led to a massive spill that released 23,000 tons of diesel into the environment, most of which has drifted into the Ambarnaya River. It is one the greatest environmental catastrophes to ever occur in the Arctic, and is being compared to the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989, when about 39,000 tons of fuel flooded into the waters off the coast of Alaska.
The company which owns the plant, Norilsk Nickel, stated that the accident likely occurred because thawing permafrost caused an oil tank to collapse. According to Norilsk, the tank rested on 30-year-old pillars. An area of 350 sq kilometers (135 sq miles) has been contaminated. The Ambarnaya is now crimson red.
Special booms could contain the spill. However, Alexei Knizhnikov from the World Wildlife Fund Russia warned, this “doesn’t mean that toxic elements have not gotten into the water of the lake [Pyasino]. Unfortunately, the most poisonous elements of diesel fuel are aromatic compounds like benzol, toluene, ethyl benzene, xylene, which will massively mix with water. It is impossible to collect them using oil booms.”
Environmental groups have noted that cleaning up the spill is difficult because of its scale and the geography of the river, which is located in a remote and swampy area. According to Oleg Mitvoi, the former deputy head of Russia’s environmental agency Rosprirodnadzor, there has “never been such an accident in the Arctic zone”. The clean-up, he said, could take between five and ten years, and cost up to $1.5 billion.
The criminally slow response by both the company Norilsk Nickel and regional authorities has dramatically amplified the scale of the disaster.
Even though the catastrophe occurred on May 29, regional authorities did not take any action until two days later on May 31, when images of the spill had spread on social media. Authorities claimed that they were not aware of the incident until oil oozed onto a highway, causing a car to catch fire.
Sergey Verkhovets from Greenpeace Russia said that in the case of such a catastrophe two days is “a very long time.” He also stated that the company had been reckless in its exploitation of natural resources under conditions where thawing permafrost—a result of global warming—has dramatically transformed the ecological landscape.
Verkhovets warned that the impact of the oil spill would be felt for “many years to come”, further polluting the already damaged water systems in the region. The indigenous population, which depends on these rivers for its livelihood, will be particularly impacted.
“We are talking about dead fish, polluted plumage of birds and poisoned animals”, he said. Authorities have assured the population that the oil has not polluted the ground water, but whether this is true or not is far from certain. About 175,000 people live in the nearby city of Norilsk.
On June 3, Russian president Vladimir Putin, in a highly-staged televised address, chided the company and declared a federal state of emergency. A federal investigation was initiated and state television made a point of showing the foreman at the power plant being led off to jail in handcuffs. He is being made the main scapegoat of the disaster, and is being charged for violating environmental protection rules. He may face up to five years in prison.
In reality, however, it is the government and Norilsk Nickel that bear primary responsibility.
Norilsk Nickel is one of the largest producers of nickel, platinum and copper in the world, and one of the most influential and valuable in Russia. The multi-billion state-owned company has been at the center of intense struggles between Russian oligarchs since the destruction of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism. It is now headed by Vladimir Potanin, who is worth over $25 billion, and is close to President Vladimir Putin. In a statement on Friday, Potanin claimed the company would pay for the clean-up of the disaster.
Environmental protection regulations in Russia are notoriously poor, and systematic violations by companies are routinely overlooked by state authorities. Four years ago, an accident at another plant of Norilsk Nickel in the region resulted in an oil spill that turned another river red and transformed an area twice the size of Rhode Island into a “dead zone.” The company was fined less than $1,000, which made clear signal that it had nothing to fear in case of future disasters.
The catastrophe on the Ambarnaya underlies the dangers bound up with the “new scramble for the Arctic” by the major powers and corporations. Rapidly warming temperatures have made the exploitation of raw material resources in the region much more dangerous from an environmental standpoint, but also more alluring for major corporations.
At the same time, the Arctic, which is of major economic and geostrategic significance to Russia, has become a central arena of the US imperialist drive to encircle Russia. This further heightens the danger of military and environmental catastrophes.
As part of the standoff with the US, Russia launched a floating nuclear power plant in the Arctic Sea late last summer. The ship has been called a “nuclear Titanic” and “floating Chernobyl” by environmental groups that warn of the potentially catastrophic consequences of any accident on board. Just a few months before the launching of the floating nuclear power plant, a fire on a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea killed 14 high-ranking Russian navy officers. An aide to the commander of Russia’s navy later ominously warned that, “With their lives, they saved the lives of their colleagues, saved the vessel and prevented a planetary catastrophe.”
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