Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered fromTripoli.

The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials' unfiltered conversations with Col. Moammar Gadhafi's son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community's concerns.

"You should see these internal State Department reports that are produced in the State Department that go out to the Congress. They're just full of stupid, stupid facts," an American intermediary specifically dispatched by the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Gadhafi regime in July 2011, saying the State Department was controlling what intelligence would be reported to U.S. officials.

At the time, the Gadhafi regime was fighting a civil war that grew out of the Arab Spring, battling Islamist-backed rebels who wanted to dethrone the longtime dictator. Mrs. Clinton argued that Gadhafi might engage in genocide and create a humanitarian crisis and ultimately persuaded President Obama, NATO allies and the United Nations to authorize military intervention.

I don't know who exactly (Turchinov? Poroshenko?) commanded the Ukrainian army to disrupt the truce. But I am sure that this decision was taken in Washington.

It is not an accident that this suicidal provocation was preceded by the visit of G. Soros to Kiev. This elderly "philanthropist" who, together with the US Department of State, sponsored all post-soviet fascist regimes (from Saakashvili's Georgia to Poroshenko's Ukraine), was most qualified to assess the financial state of the regime in Kiev and to decide whether it still makes sense to continue prolongation of the agony by monetary injections. His public statement, reprinted by media on January 14, left no doubt - the patient is dead, the corpse is stiff, its resuscitation is meaningless.

Surely, Kiev has understood that if they scrape the bottom of the barrel and if Europe exerts itself then it is possible to collect money for further agony. But Soros clearly said about the necessity to find $50 billion just for 2015. While in 2014 (when the ignoramuses still hoped for the stabilization of the Kiev regime) US, EU and IMF together could scrape up only $20 billion, supposed to be stretched over 3 years. In fact, in 2014 Kiev got only $7.5 - 8 billion in credits. Clearly, in such conditions it is unrealistic to find $50 billion in a year. Soros himself told that he hopes only for a miracle.

Right after Soros' unambiguous demand for the EU to finance Ukraine, the European media coverage of the Ukrainian crisis changed drastically, and it became clear that there will be no miracle. The European mass media (including German TV) and NGO's (including Human Rights Watch) suddenly "saw the light" and found that the Kiev regime is at war with civilians, violating the laws and customs of war. Just a little bit longer and Europe will "realize" that Kiev is taken by a fascist junta that tramples its own constitution, and introduce sanctions against Russia for Kremlin's economic cooperation (supply of coal and gas) with the Nazi regime.

Are Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyers trying to defend his case on the facts at all, or are they just trying to save his life?

Based on the overwhelmingly lopsided advantage the government holds, with a virtual monopoly on investigative evidence, it's safe to assume the latter.

Whether the intent is to deny Tsarnaev a) any infinitesimal chance of proving his case - or even lessening the charges against him - or b) to prevent embarrassing information from leaking out at trial, the government has brought the legal version of "full spectrum dominance" warfare to a knife fight.

But a close look at the nature of the information Tsarnaev's defense team has repeatedly requested from prosecutors in motions to the court suggests Tsarnaev's lawyers are trying to pry loose something about the government's relationship with the Tsarnaevs prior to the bombing on April 15, 2013.

The story of the Boston Marathon Bombing is rife with contradictions, canards, misconceptions and blatant untruths. Boston Wrong is part of WhoWhatWhy's attempt to set the record straight. This is the first in an occasional series of articles debunking the faulty stories and "facts" which persist, despite evidence to the contrary.

Verbal intimations by government officials and a TV re-enactment have given some potential Boston Marathon bombing jurors the mistaken belief they have seen a video of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev setting down a bomb-laden backpack in front of a restaurant.

There's just one problem: that footage has never been made available to the public.

During jury selection on Jan. 26, Juror 186 said she believes Tsarnaev is guilty because of the "surveillance video from Lord & Taylor," a department store across the street from the Forum restaurant. Early media reports suggested that the store's dome surveillance camera captured Tsarnaev dropping his backpack at the spot of the second explosion.

The US is behind the attempted coup in Venezuela - that is the accusation President Nicolas Maduro has leveled amid widespread protests back home. And it's none other than Vice-president Joe Biden who's behind the entire operation, Maduro alleges.

This is the first time a direct accusation of this gravity was made in front of thousands of cheering spectators and the world at large, despite an earlier Friday statement, when Maduro struck out at several US federal agencies for allegedly plotting against Venezuela.

"The northern imperial power has entered a dangerous phase of desperation, going to talk to the continent's governments to announce the overthrow of my government. And I accuse Vice-president Joe Biden of this," the head of state said, addressing the people at the 198th anniversary of the birth of a Venezuelan hero general Zamora in Cua, Miranda state.


He also questioned US President Barack Obama publicly, whether he was "aware of these plans to promote violence and a coup in Venezuela" and "appealed to his consciousness."

"There are US diplomats in Venezuela contracting military officials to betray their country, looking to influence socialist political leaders, public opinion leaders and entrepreneurs to provoke a coup," the head of state went on.

Criticizing the Obama administration's handling of the fight against Islamic State, former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has argued that small teams of special forces will be needed on the ground in Iraq and Syria to assist with airstrikes.

Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense under Obama and George W. Bush, criticized Washington's strategy against the insurgent group as "unrealistic" and "unattainable," he told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.

"The president has set an ambitious and, I think under current circumstances, an unrealistic goal when he talks about our intent being to destroy ISIS," Gates said. "With the means he has approved so far, I think that's an unattainable objective."

Gates said that special forces will be needed in Iraq and Syria to assist with the airstrikes. A "re-invasion of Iraq with large ground forces is a false set of options," he added, but "a few hundred troops" should be stationed in the region.

Exclusive: The armchair warriors of Official Washington are eager for a new war, this time with Russia over Ukraine, and they are operating from the same sort of mindless "group think" and hostility to dissent that proved so disastrous in Iraq, reports Robert Parry.

If you wonder how the lethal "group think" on Iraq took shape in 2002, you might want to study what's happening today with Ukraine. A misguided consensus has grabbed hold of Official Washington and has pulled in everyone who "matters" and tossed out almost anyone who disagrees.

Part of the problem, in both cases, has been that neocon propagandists understand that in the modern American media the personal is the political, that is, you don't deal with the larger context of a dispute, you make it about some easily demonized figure. So, instead of understanding the complexities of Iraq, you focus on the unsavory Saddam Hussein.

This approach has been part of the neocon playbook at least since the 1980s when many of today's leading neocons - such as Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan - were entering government and cut their teeth as propagandists for the Reagan administration. Back then, the game was to put, say, Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega into the demon suit, with accusations about him wearing "designer glasses." Later, it was Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and then, of course, Saddam Hussein.

As Eric Kraus has pointed out there is complete confusion in the media today about how to spin the latest EU sanctions decision. Did Syriza fold as per Reuters and Bloomberg. Or did the meeting expose growing splits within the EU as per the Financial Times and the London Times.

The best answer is that nothing definite was decided at the latest EU Council meeting but Syriza did manage to put a marker down.

I go back to my piece about Syriza for Russia Insider. Whether one likes the fact or not, for Syriza relations with Russia are not the priority. Syriza does not agree with the sanctions, but its overriding priority is Greece's own economic crisis.

There is a window of hope, thanks to a U.N. human rights body, for a solution to the diplomatic asylum of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, holed up in the embassy of Ecuador in London for the past two and a half years.

Authorities in Sweden, which is seeking the Australian journalist's extradition to face allegations of sexual assault, admitted there is a possibility that measures could be taken to jumpstart the stalled legal proceedings against Assange.

The head of Assange's legal defence team, former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, told IPS that in relation to this case "we have expressed satisfaction that the Swedish state" has accepted the proposals of several countries.

The prominent Spanish lawyer and international jurist was referring to proposals set forth by Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, Slovakia and Uruguay.

Translated from Russian

Fighting in Debaltsevo outskirts have been continuing for several days. Their intensity approaches the earlier fight for the Donetsk Airport. Considering the length of the frontline, the Battle for Debaltsevo is increasingly reminiscent of the Battle of Ilovaysk.

The wedge that was pushed into Novorossia defenses during the summer had strategic sense for the Ukrainian military. In the event the offensive was continued, one could have launched a disintegrating blow that would have cut off the entire Donetsk-Makeyevka-Gorlovka urban agglomeration in one fell swoop. But during the winter, when it became obvious the Ukrainian military is in no condition to attack, from the military point of view the salient should have been abandoned.