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CASCFEN: Orange-Rose Syndrome: Early Symptoms Guide for Central Asia
> http://www.cascfen.org/contents.php?cid=104
> By Tariq Saeedi (nCa), Ashgabat, 15.12.2004 -- Serbia in 2000, Georgia in
> 2003, Ukraine in 2004: The template for regime change in favour of the
> United States is fairly identifiable now.
> There are some early symptoms that can tell that the regime change crowd
> is knocking at your doors. The Central Asian countries need to watch out
> if they would like to keep their house in order. Here are some indicators:
>
> Youth Movements
> Young people, because they have lots of time and energy to spare, because
> they are not bogged down by the worries to feed their families, because
> they are still naïve to believe that the United States is an honest
> champion of 'democracy and human rights,' are a fair game.
> There are many ways to collect the youth on a common platform and keep
> them there for the day when they would be needed to conduct marathon
> celebrations in the main square.
> In Ukraine, Pora - it is time - is the main engine of public show. Pora
> received direct training from Otpor - resistance - the Serbian youth
> movement that toppled Milosevic. Georgian youth organization Kmara -
> enough is enough - also was trained directly by the Serbian activists.
> There was Zubr in Belarus but it did not succeed because Lukashenko proved
> more than a match for the US machinations.
> What is common between Pora, Otpor, Kmara and Zubr is that all three were
> created and financed by the United States, directly and indirectly.
> By masking the aims of regime change under such organizations, the United
> States has successfully desecrated the very concept of democracy and human
> rights.
> In most cases, it is not possible to launch a fully fledged youth movement
> in a target country in one go. There are various methods to go about it.
> One way is to create a cluster of NGOs and then string them together in a
> countrywide movement when the time is right.
> Another way is to keep in touch with a large number of young people on
> individual basis and encourage them to form their own private, informal,
> groups of no more than ten. These groups would have the power to rise
> suddenly if they have been coached well.
> Yet another way is to send the students for short courses - no more than a
> few weeks - for indoctrination by the veterans in this field. These
> students can then be expected to influence their peers.
>

NGOs
> As seen in several cases, NGOs are the preferred vehicle for starting the
> process of regime change.
> It is not very difficult to distinguish benign NGOs from malignant NGOs.
> For instance, an organization engaged in teaching better farming methods
> or taking care of mother and child is, in most cases, what it claims to
> be.
> However, an NGO that appears with a catchy name and wants to interact with
> young people only must be scrutinized thoroughly. Such NGOs can come in
> many forms. If such an NGO says that it wants to create debating clubs,
> conduct writing seminars, hold declamation contests, it needs to be
> examined twice.
>

Funding
> Source of funding can be another indication of the intentions of an NGO
> that comes with ill designs.
> Some of the direct sources of funding that should ring alarm bells are:
> * US State Department
> * USAID
> * SOROS Foundation
> * Freedom House
> * National Democratic Institute (Democratic Party)
> * International Republican Institute (Republican Party)
> Not all the projects funded by them are subversive but one needs to be
> careful.
> Funds rarely come directly from these sources if the intention is regime
> change. However, any suddenly prosperous NGO should attract attention into
> its sources of funding and the funds must be traced to the ultimate
> source. In two or three upward tiers, one would usually find any or more
> of the above financiers.
>

Identification of Candidate
> An important part of the whole process is to identify a US candidate who
> would head the government after the regime change.
> The usual way is to pick more than one candidates and then groom them
> thoroughly. Saakashvili was flown to Belgrade for tuitions in mass
> defiance. Yushenko was given fully financed trips to the United States to
> learn about methods of protests and develop contacts with power brokers.
> Belarus opposition candidates were sent to Serbia for training.
> Sometimes one candidate can prove to be 'un-winnable' and the puppet
> masters in such cases need to pull the second doll from the sack. When it
> was found in Belgrade that Zoran Djindjic did not stand a chance with the
> public, he was dumped and Vojislav Kostunica was brought in even though he
> was reputedly an anti-western.
> The so-called opposition leaders living in mostly self-imposed exile could
> be suitable candidates if they have any standing with the people at home.
> If that is not the case, conditions can be created for a popular figure to
> defect to the west and then build a personality cult around him through
> the media and NGOs.
> Whatever the case, the United States doesn't usually go for the final
> showdown unless it is sure that it has found a strong candidate.
> It helps if the candidate or their spouse has spent considerable time in
> the USA. Saakashvili spent a number of years in the United States. The
> wife of Yushenko was born in the United States.
>

Election Monitoring
> Monitoring of elections is a streamlined tool of intervention. The
> underlying principle is that if 'their' candidate wins, it is the success
> of democracy, if 'your' candidate wins, it indicates massive rigging and
> fraud.
> The tip of this tool is exit poll. Even though it has been proved in the
> recent presidential elections in the United States that exit polls are not
> reliable, they don't have any qualms in using it to trigger mass protests
> in other countries.
> At the command shoo, the crowds can pour into streets 'spontaneously.'
> Having observed the political process in several countries for a couple of
> decades, one can say that real spontaneous crowds don't come out of their
> homes in a holiday mood. Also, spontaneous crowds don't bring with them
> the ordinary items found in every attic such as laser lights,
> double-quilted waterproof tents, hi-fi sets, sandwich makers, power
> generators, medicine chests, generous supply of condoms, colourful banners
> and tastefully designed posters, portable stage and pavilions for rock
> concerts, matching dresses in orange colour etc.
> When the crowd comes out, it comes out in anger and there is hardly any
> leader that can control the expression of that anger.
>

US Ambassadors
> US ambassadors are usually the field managers for putting the plan into
> action. For example, Ambassador Richard Miles, who facilitated the Rose
> Revolution of Georgia greatly, was the US ambassador in Belgrade and
> played a key role in toppling Milosevic.
> Michael Kozak, US ambassador in Belarus, tried to use his experience of
> regime change in Nicaragua to bring down Lukashenko.
> Looking at the biographies of the US ambassadors in the region, one can
> make out as to what could be in store for the host country. The important
> thing is to analyze the pattern of their careers and recall as to what was
> happening in the vicinity when they were at any particular appointment.
> Their past experience and their qualifications are mostly compatible with
> the tasks they are assigned.
>

US Ambassador to Kazakhstan
> Ambassador John M. Ordway was sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic
> of Kazakhstan on August 30 and arrived in Almaty on September 2, 2004. He
> presented his credentials to President Nazarbayev on September 17, 2004.
> He was U. S. Ambassador to Armenia from 2001-2004.
> A career Foreign Service Officer since 1975, he has an extensive
> background in Soviet and Russian affairs, as well as experience in
> European security affairs, conflict resolution and peacekeeping
> operations. Mr. Ordway served abroad at the U. S. Embassies in Prague
> (1978-81) and Moscow (1985-87), and in Brussels at the U. S. Mission to
> NATO (1993-1995).
> More recently he was in Moscow from 1996-2001, serving the last two years
> as Deputy Chief of Mission. While in Moscow, he also was chairman of the
> Anglo-American School Board during the successful construction of a new
> 1200-student facility. In Washington, Mr. Ordway worked in the State
> Department's Press Office, the Office of Southern African Affairs, and
> twice in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs. He served twice as Director
> of African Affairs for the National Security Council. During this period,
> he was a member of the U.S. negotiating team that achieved and then helped
> implement the agreement that led to Cuban withdrawal from Angola and the
> independence of Namibia. At the NSC, he was deeply involved in the
> decision-making process in 1992-93 that led to American military
> participation in efforts to overcome starvation in Somalia. His foreign
> languages include Russian, French, Italian, Czech and Armenian.
>

US Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan
> Ambassador Dr. Stephen M. Young of New Hampshire, a career member of the
> Senior Foreign Service, was nominated on April 1, 2003 to serve as the
> next Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of
> America to the Kyrgyz Republic, and confirmed by the Senate on April 11.
> Prior to his appointment as U.S. Ambassador, Steve Young was the Director
> of the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs in the East Asian and
> Pacific Bureau of the Department of State from July 2002 to June, 2003.
> From 2001 to June 2002, he was Director of the Office of Pakistan,
> Afghanistan and Bangladesh Affairs in the South Asian Bureau. Prior to
> this assignment, from summer of 1998 to summer of 2001, he was Deputy
> Director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), America's unofficial
> office in Taipei. Earlier in his career, Mr. Young served as Director of
> the Office of Caucasus and Central Asian Affairs in the Department and as
> Desk Officer on the Russian Desk. His previous overseas assignments
> include Beijing, Moscow (twice), and Taipei. Mr. Young joined the Foreign
> Service in 1980.
> Dr. Young is a graduate with High Honors in History of Wesleyan University
> (1973). He has a PhD (1980) and MA (1974) in History from the University
> of Chicago.
>

US Ambassador to Georgia
> Ambassador Richard Miles was born in 1937 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He
> grew up in rural and small-town Indiana. After serving in the Marine Corps
> from 1954 to 1957, he obtained degrees from Bakersfield College, the
> University of California at Berkeley and Indiana University. He is also a
> graduate of the U.S. Army Russian Institute, Garmisch-Partenkirchen,
> Germany.
> Ambassador Miles and his wife, Sharon, worked for the South Carolina Voter
> Education Project from 1964 to 1967 in the field of voter registration and
> political leadership training.
> He entered the Foreign Service in 1967 and has served abroad in Oslo,
> Moscow, Belgrade, as Consul General in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and
> as Principal Officer of the U.S. Embassy Office in Berlin.
> Ambassador Miles served as Ambassador to Azerbaijan from 1992 to 1993, as
> Chief of Mission to Belgrade from 1996 to 1999, and as Ambassador to
> Bulgaria from 1999 to 2001.
> In the State Department, he also worked in the Offices for Soviet and East
> European and Yugoslav Affairs and in the Politico-Military Bureau.
> Ambassador Miles worked for Senator Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC) on an
> American Political Science Fellowship in 1983-1984, and in 1987-1988 he
> was a fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs.
> Ambassador Miles has been awarded the State Department's Meritorious Honor
> Award and Group Superior Honor Award (twice). In 1992 he was awarded a
> Presidential Meritorious Service Award and a national award for reporting.
>
> US Ambassador to Tajikistan
> Ambassador Richard E. Hoagland was sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to
> Tajikistan on October 16, 2003. Ambassador Hoagland was Director of the
> Office of Caucasus and Central Asian Affairs in the Bureau of Europe and
> Eurasian Affairs, Department of State, June 2001-July 2003. In that
> position, he wrote and negotiated four of the key bilateral documents
> defining the Central Asian states' enhanced relationship with the United
> States. After September 11, 2001, he initiated regular U.S.-Russia
> consultations in response to the mandate by Presidents Bush and Putin that
> the two governments work together to increase their collaboration and
> transparency in Central Asia and the Caucasus. In July 2002, this
> consultative group became part of the ongoing U.S.-Russia Counterterrorism
> Working Group.
> A member of the Senior Foreign Service (Minister-Counselor), Ambassador
> Hoagland's previous assignment (1999-2001) was Director of the Office of
> Public Diplomacy in the South Asia Bureau of the State Department where
> his additional portfolio was Special Adviser to the National Security
> Council for public diplomacy on Afghanistan. His foreign assignments have
> included Russia (where he was Press Spokesman for the U.S. Embassy),
> Uzbekistan, and Pakistan twice -- the first time (1986-1989) working with
> the Afghan Resistance during the Soviet-Afghan War. He has also served in
> the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research where he was
> the lead analyst for Afghanistan (1989-1991). Subsequently, because of his
> Afghanistan expertise, he was U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Afghanistan
> (1991-1992). During the course of his career, he has received three State
> Department Honor Awards (one Meritorious, two Superior), as well as
> several group honor awards and Presidential Performance Awards.
>

US Ambassador to Ukraine
> Ambassador John E. Herbst, Career Member of the Senior Foreign Service,
> arrived on September 13 to assume the position of U.S. Ambassador to
> Ukraine. Ambassador Herbst presented his credentials to President Kuchma
> in an official ceremony September 20, 2003.
> Ambassador Herbst, who has the rank of Minister-Counselor, last served as
> the U.S. Ambassador to Uzbekistan. He assumed that post in October 2000.
> Prior to becoming Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Mr. Herbst served as the U.S.
> Consul General in Jerusalem. Previously, he served as the Principal Deputy
> to the Ambassador at Large for the Newly Independent States, the Director
> of the Office of Independent States and Commonwealth Affairs and as the
> Director of Regional Affairs in the Near East Bureau of the State
> Department. Mr. Herbst has also worked overseas as political counselor at
> the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and at the embassies in Moscow and Saudi
> Arabia. He joined the Foreign Service in 1979.
>

US Ambassador to Uzbekistan
> Ambassador John Purnell presented his credentials as U.S. Ambassador to
> the Republic of Uzbekistan on January 28, 2004.
> He is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. His most recent
> assignment was as Minister Counselor for Political Affairs at the U.S.
> Embassy in Moscow. He has also served as a Senior Inspector in the State
> Department's Office of the Inspector General (2001-2002) and, prior to
> that assignment, as Deputy to the Secretary's Acting Special Adviser for
> the Newly Independent States. Mr. Purnell's overseas postings have
> included Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he was Deputy Chief of Mission from
> 1997-2000 and St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was Deputy Principal
> Officer at the U.S. Consulate General (1989-1992). He also worked in
> Vienna, Austria as a member of the U.S. conventional arms control
> delegation (1988-1989) and in Monrovia, Liberia (1980-1981). He first
> worked in Moscow from 1982-1984.
> Mr. Purnell's assignments in Washington have focussed on Russia and
> Ukraine. He was Director of the State Department's Office of Ukraine,
> Belarus and Moldova from 1993-1996 and worked as special assistant to
> Ambassador Jack Matlock on the National Security Council in 1986. Mr.
> Purnell has received the Department of State's Superior Honor Award and
> Meritorious Honor Award.
> Prior to joining the State Department, Mr. Purnell worked for the
> Massachusetts Audubon Society as a specialist in environmental education.
> He maintains a strong interest in environmental issues.
>

US Ambassador to Turkmenistan
> Ambassador Ms. Tracey Ann Jacobson, U.S. Ambassador to Turkmenistan, is a
> career member of the Foreign Service. She most recently served as the
> Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Riga, Latvia. In Riga, she
> designed and implemented strategies to assist Latvia in becoming a
> successful candidate for NATO membership.
> Prior to her three year assignment in Riga, Ms. Jacobson served as Deputy
> Executive Secretary at the National Security Council at the White House,
> where she facilitated the development of foreign policy initiatives for
> the National Security Advisor and the President.
> Her Foreign Service overseas assignments include Seoul, Korea; Nassau,
> Bahamas, and Moscow, Russia. Her domestic assignments include the Bureau
> of Intelligence and Research, the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs,
> and the Office of the Under Secretary for Management.
> Ms. Jacobson received her BA from John Hopkins University (JHU), and her
> MA from the JHU Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
> Ms. Jacobson's foreign languages include Russian, Spanish, French and
> Korean. She has received a number of Superior and Meritorious Honor awards
> from the Department of State.
>

US Ambassador to Azerbijan
> Ambassador Reno Harnish previously served as Chief of Mission, U.S. Office
> Pristina. His prior assignment was Deputy Chief of Mission in Cairo, where
> he was responsible for the operations of a $2 billion plus, 2400 employee
> Mission. Before arriving in Cairo, Mr. Harnish served as the Deputy Chief
> of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm and engaged in Baltic Sea
> cooperation. From 1992 - 1995 he led U.S. policy on Central Asian politics
> and scientific cooperation with the New Independent States in the
> Department of State.
> Earlier, he served as Environment, Science and Technology Counselor, U.S.
> Embassy Rome; Economic and Commercial Counselor at the U.S. Embassy to the
> German Democratic Republic; in the Office of Developed Country Trade,
> Department of State; as an Economic Officer, U.S. Embassy, Vienna; a
> Political Officer, Status Liaison Office, Saipan and an Economic
> Commercial Officer, U.S. Embassy, Lagos, Nigeria. Mr. Harnish was honored
> for Presidential Meritorious Service, received Senior performance pay
> twice and has been awarded a Meritorious and two Superior Honor Awards.
> Before entering the Foreign Service, Mr. Harnish worked as a research
> assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, an international economist
> at the U.S. Department of Treasury and as a clerk for Congressman Dave
> Martin of Nebraska. He received a Bachelor's in Political Science from San
> Diego State University, a Masters in International Studies from American
> University and a Masters in Economics in 1975. In 1995/96 he attended
> Seminar XXI, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Harnish speaks
> German, Italian, Swedish and some Arabic.

Quote:

Russia�s Fifth Column

What�s in it for Yanukovich supporters in the West?

By Jake Rudnitsky

One of the more disturbing developments to come out of the situation in Ukraine is watching Anglo-American dissidents shamelessly defile themselves. Leftist media like counterpunch.org and The Nation, horrified by what they mistakenly see as a Bush victory in Ukraine (rather than a victory for millions of Ukrainians), have come down hard on Yushchenko's crowd, attempting to legitimize Yanukovich, and basically toeing the Kremlin's hysteric spin. Admittedly, it's never pleasant finding yourself on the same side of the debate as the likes of William Safire, Anders Aslund and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but they've actually got this one right. The left needs to come to terms with the fact that, regardless of what horrific crimes American policy has perpetrated in other parts of the world or how they feel about Bush, Americans have generally been a force for good in the former Warsaw Pact countries (with the obvious exception of Yugoslavia, not a Warsaw Pact country anyway). There's a reason that half of the members of the Coalition of the Willing are from Eastern Europe. They like us. Which isn't all that hard, after the Russian experience.

But instead of accepting this, the left's been cozying up with shady groups and corrupt journalists to find proof of evil American meddling. They'd have it that US putschists rather than massive electoral fraud and state corruption inspired Ukraine's protests. Most of these reports have one thing in common -- they're all within a couple of degrees of separation from the Guardian and Jonathan Steele, probably the single most corrupt Western journalist writing about this region today.

Taking money or favors to write articles is pretty much the bukkake shot of journalism. It is the most debasing thing a journo can do. And Steele, the Guardian's senior foreign correspondent, wasn't content just having several splashes drip down his face; he did it for cheap.

Steele has gone on at least two 5-star Kremlin-sponsored junkets in the last four months, and not surprisingly, he is also taking the Kremlin's line. Yet he keeps getting printed in the Guardian and in The Nation. His first junket was the Valdai Discussion Group in early September, in which several journalists and Russia experts were invited by the state-owned RIA-Novosti news agency to a plush conference that featured meetings with Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Ivan Ivanov. Steele, who at the time was criticized by Evgenia Albats in Yezhenedelny Zhurnal, defended himself on Johnson's Russia List by writing, "There is no blanket ban [on accepting paid trips at the Guardian]. If they provide unique access which would not otherwise be attainable, they are acceptable -- provided the invitation is acknowledged at some point in the material which arises from it."

So, what "unique access" was offered during his expense-paid October trip to Kiev? As Steele admitted in the Guardian, this trip, taken in between the first and second rounds of the Ukrainian election, was paid for by the Russia Club. (Note that he didn't say who paid his way when writing for The Nation.) What Steele did not mention in the Guardian is that this club was a Russian-financed think tank created this spring exclusively with the goal of getting Viktor Yanukovich elected. It was the brainchild of Gleb Pavlovsky, the powerful Kremlin spin doctor and one of the chief propagandists of the Yanukovich campaign. Any doubts about what the Russia Club's agenda was should be erased by the fact that, after months of organizing weekly roundtables, it has completely vanished in the weeks following the elections.

Pavlovsky probably picked Steele because he's an old school America basher. His pet issue these days is dismantling NATO and creating a pan-European force in its place. Pavlovsky must have calculated that Steele already had an anti-American disposition that only needed a little coddling at the Premier Palace Hotel to toe his line. Not surprisingly, Steele's articles, "Where the cold war never died," "Ukraine's postmodern coup d'etat," and, in The Nation, "Ukraine's Untold Story," completely parrot his sugar daddy. One indication that Pavlovsky was pleased with his investment in Steele was that gazeta.ru, a site linked to the spin doctor, published an article summing up Steele's writings that gleefully led, "The Western media's views of the political crisis in Ukraine have become less single-minded." Steele's articles have been quoted repeatedly on Russian TV as proof that the Orange Revolution is little more than an American coup d'etat, that the events in Ukraine were illegal and the result of a vast anti-Russian conspiracy. These same reports give little mention the massive falsification that caused the protests in the first place, or the hundreds of millions that the Kremlin poured into Yanukovich's campaign. Steele's article, not surprisingly, also downplays the electoral fraud in favor of evil American conspiracies.

The protesters in Ukraine did not travel to Kiev from every corner of the country because they wanted to hear rock concerts or to wave orange flags designed by American PR firm Burson-Marstellar. They came out because they are sick of living in a vicious kleptocracy. They came out because the election was blatantly stolen by Yanukovich. This is not an "alleged truth" based on American financed exit polls, as Steele would have it, but a fact. There are over 10,000 documented cases of violations, such as election observers being severely beaten and of districts where 103 percent of the population voted for Yanukovich.

Unfortunately, the only violations Guardian readers are likely to hear about are from western Ukraine, despite the fact that there hasn't been any convincing evidence of systematic violations there. That's because in the last month Steele's paper has printed two opinion pieces ("The price of People Power" by Mark Almond and "The revolution televised" by John Laughland) by trustees of the obscure Oxford-based British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG). Not bad for an organization that has about five members. In spite of what its name suggests, this group has absolutely no connection to the International Helsinki Federation, and in fact, couldn't be farther from it. Joachim Frank from the IHF Secretariat wrote about BHHRG in a letter on Dominique Arel's Ukraine List, "We can only disassociate from this group, but not hinder them to use the "Helsinki" in their name."

The name itself is a lie meant to dupe the public. The BHHRG was founded in 1992 and, according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, spent nearly half a million pounds from 1997 to 2003, mainly defending Eastern European dictators like Milosevic and Lukashenka. Basically, their activities consist of sending election observers to cover elections and posting reports that are both counter-intuitive and the knee-jerk opposite of the mainstream Western consensus, whatever that may be.

Interestingly, they don't make a big deal out of the massively corrupt elections in Azerbaijan, ones that the US cynically approved of. Instead, they prefer to send observers to places where the West supports the democratic opposition (like Georgia and Serbia) and declare that there were no violations. Their role is purely in opposition to the West, and generally only in support of dictators. Opposition movements only earn their ire when they are backed by the West.

The British Helsinki Group's love for Milosevic apparently got them into trouble, and Wikipedia reports that their funding has dropped by 99 percent since 2001. Still, somehow they had the funding to send several observers to western Ukraine, where their observers reported witnessing low-level intimidation of Yanukovich supporters. The tameness of the violations they report, like using transparent ballot boxes, speaks for itself.

The real issue BHHRG has is with what they call the New World Order, a name that far right libertarians, Pat Buchananites and Lyndon LaRouchians give to what they see as the dawning of a world government run by men in black helicopters. These guys' paranoia makes Ames seem downright rational. Almond explicitly refers to this worldwide conspiracy in his piece, while it lurks in the shadows of Laughland's.

It's the same libertarian position that informs Chad Nagle's article for left-wing counterpunch.org, titled, "In Ukraine's "Redneck" Regions, People Like Yanukovich." Nagle is one of the main contributors to the right-libertarian antiwar.com (along with Pat Buchanan), a site which Wikipedia also links with the BHHRG.

In his article, Nagle argues that "support for Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich was widespread and enthusiastic." So enthusiastic, in fact, that it reaches 103 percent in some places. One of his main arguments is that Yanukovich's brilliant management skills, rather than the market rise in commodities that Ukraine produces, has improved the lots of Ukrainians everywhere. He also denies the thuggish tendencies of Yanukovich supporters, in spite of the well-documented and often filmed footage of them kicking the **** out of Yushchenko supporters. One might think that, since he was in Donetsk, he just didn't get a chance to watch Channel 5 (since it's been shut down in peace-loving Donetsk) and the reports it had on such violence, except for the fact that Nagle's story was datelined Kiev. So he really has no excuse for putting on his blinders. And really, the left has no business cozying up to paranoid far-rightists like Nagle.

Why is it that literally the only Western critics of the Orange Revolution are linked to the BHHRG?

In their blind anti-American and anti-Western positions, these jerks ally themselves with regimes like Putin's, Milosevic's and Lukashenka's. Reputable leftist media, ones I have always looked up to, have now, in a knee-jerk response, aligned themselves with a truly odious group of people. The suffering and hopes of Ukrainians don't mean anything to them, which is why they're so willing to sell out the Ukrainian public. But what's worse, the left has shown that it is willing to sell out its own ideals just to take a cheap jab at the things it hates back home.

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