How Putin Turns Turmoil in the Middle East to His Advantage: The Kremlin has come close to declaring victory in the confrontation with the West. The visit of John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, to Sochi in May 2015 was portrayed by the Russian media as American political surrender. The dominant theme was that the West needs Russian assistance on a number of issues, including Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s civil conflict. Lavrov declared that Kerry’s visit marked Washington’s failure to isolate Russia. | Kurdish Rebels Attack Police, Military in Turkey
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- How Putin Turns Turmoil in the Middle East to His Advantage:
The Kremlin has come close to declaring victory in the confrontation with the West. The visit of John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, to Sochi in May 2015 was portrayed by the Russian media as American political surrender. The dominant theme was that the West needs Russian assistance on a number of issues, including Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s civil conflict. Lavrov declared that Kerry’s visit marked Washington’s failure to isolate Russia.
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BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - A car bomb exploded in Derna in eastern Libya on Sunday, killing at least three people and wounding 13 others, medics and residents said, as Islamic State militants pressed an offensive to retake the port city.
The U.S. Air Force has deployed a small detachment of F-16 fighter aircraft to a base in Turkey as part of a deal with Ankara to step up strikes on Islamic State targets in northern Syria, the Pentagon said Sunday.
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19 illegal immigrants were held after a lorry was stopped on the M1 near St Albans. A motorist on the M25 spotted a suspicious lorry on the M25 in Hertfordshire and called the police. The driver was arrested for assisting entry to the UK./ SOUTH BEDS NEWS AGENCY (FAIRLEY's) LUTON 01582 572222 / john o reilly- southbedsnews agency- luton.. (fairlys) 07850 840246..pic..illegal lorry stopped...M25...st albans
19 illegal immigrants were held after a lorry was stopped on the M1 near St Albans. A motorist on the M25 spotted a suspicious lorry on the M25 in Hertfordshire and called the police. The driver was arrested for assisting entry to the UK./ SOUTH BEDS NEWS AGENCY (FAIRLEY's) LUTON 01582 572222 / john o reilly- southbedsnews agency- luton.. (fairlys) 07850 840246..pic..illegal lorry stopped...M25...st albans
Two spectacular volcanic eruptions in Mexico have been caught on camera. Report by Conor Mcnally.
Gen. Manuel Contreras, who was imprisoned after heading the feared spy agency that kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands during Chile’s military dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, died Aug. 7 at a military hospital in Santiago. He was 86.Read full article >>
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Kurdish Rebels Attack Police, Military in Turkeyby webdesk@voanews.com (Reuters)
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants attacked a military outpost and a police car in southeast Turkey overnight, killing one policeman, officials and security sources said on Sunday, part of a surge in violence between the PKK and the state. The Turkish military launched an air campaign against PKK camps in northern Iraq on July 24. State-run Anadolu news agency said more than 260 militants had been killed, including senior PKK figures, and more than 400 wounded until August...
Forensic testing of 400-year-old pipes suggest playwright might have smoked more than just tobacco
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Mohammad Ali Taheri, an Iranian faith healer, reportedly died in prison and was then sentenced to death to cover it up
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The Russian capital is looking ever more like an elegant European capital, but its political life is marching steadily in the opposite direction.
22 Killed In Taliban Attack In Kunduzby support@pangea-cms.com (RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan)
Afghan police say at least 22 people were killed in the northern province of Kunduz on August 8 when a Taliban suicide bomber drove a vehicle loaded with explosives into a group of pro-government militia and detonated it.
Authorities in Moscow say nine people were killed when a helicopter and a private airplane collided over the Istra reservoir in the Moscow region.
An Azerbaijani journalist who was allegedly attacked and beaten by supporters of a local soccer player has died of his injuries
Many Feared Dead In Uzbek Concert Tragedyby support@pangea-cms.com (RFE/RL's Uzbek Service)
Many people are feared dead in the western Uzbek city of Urgench after a bridge collapsed during a concert.
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Four armored vehicles belonging to the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were burned in the early hours of August 9 in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk. (RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service)
Russia says the United States is "unprepared" for including the Syrian government in international plans to counter extremist Islamic State (IS) militants.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the United States should cooperate with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to fight Islamic State and that this required an international coalition uniting all those for whom the jihadists are "a common enemy".
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian who stabbed an Israeli man at a petrol station in the occupied West Bank on Sunday along a main highway near Jerusalem, police said.
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CASHIERS, N.C.
Going to lunch with former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham can be hazardous to retirement.
And extremely interesting.
Take the recent Sunday when my husband and I met Graham, his wife, Adele, and daughter, U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham of Tallahassee, for lunch at Randevu, a small restaurant in the mountains of western North Carolina.
Over eggs benedict and cheese grits, Graham updated us on his continuing fight to force the FBI to disclose reports documenting the involvement of a Saudi Arabian family that left Sarasota in great haste 11 days before terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Graham, a former legislator and governor who served in the Senate from 1987 to 2005, is absolutely convinced that the hijackers had outside help from Saudi Arabian officials. The official position of the U.S. government is that the 19 hijackers acted without assistance. He says high level law enforcement officials have told him to "forget it.''
And then he told us about the day in 2011 when he and Adele were heading to the Washington, D.C., area to spend Thanksgiving with one of their daughters.
As they stepped off an airplane at Dulles International Airport, two FBI agents approached and asked the Grahams to accompany them to a nearby agency office.
Graham had not informed the FBI that he was traveling to the Washington area and to this day does not know how they knew where he planned to spend Thanksgiving or what airplane he would be aboard.
A little scary huh? Perhaps his phone is on the NSA's list.
The agents escorted the Grahams to a nearby office where Sean M. Joyce, the deputy director of the FBI, awaited. The No. 2 guy in the entire agency had traveled out from the District of Columbia to meet him.
Graham said he didn't feel threatened by the sudden attention from FBI agents because he thought the agency was finally going to release information he had been requesting for months.
He had received an email from a White House aide on Sept. 15 saying the FBI would be in touch with him to answer questions he had raised in an attempt to get the White House to force release of the FBI's investigation into the situation in Sarasota on 9/11.
The FBI had told Graham that they had released the information to the 9/11 Commission and congressional investigators. He says both groups received nothing that mentioned Sarasota from the FBI.
So his immediate reaction to being stopped by federal agents was to hope they would finally respond to his questions.
When they reached the FBI office at Dulles, Mrs, Graham was placed in a room by herself while Graham was ushered in to see Joyce.
After some period of time Mrs. Graham knocked on the door of her cell-like room and asked for something to read. Someone gave her an FBI Training Manual, noting that was all they had lying around.
Meanwhile, Joyce was telling Graham that the FBI had done a thorough job investigating all of the events in Sarasota and concluded there was no communication between the Saudi family that fled and the 9/11 hijackers who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center.
Forgive Graham for doubting the FBI. But he had just seen some FBI reports and a Florida Bulldogstory about the investigation of the Sarasota family. It included interviews with guards at the gated subdivision where the Saudi family lived and an allegation that cars linked to Mohamed Atta and other Saudi pilots who trained in Florida had been frequent visitors to the Saudi-owned house in Prestancia, south of Sarasota. Atta had trained at a nearby Venice airport where a member of the Saudi family also took flying lessons.
Graham had reason to be suspicious. He was chairman of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee when the 9/11 attacks occurred and co-chair of a joint congressional commission that investigated the attacks. From the very beginning, the commission and Congress requested all FBI reports on their investigation.
Graham said not one single report involving the Sarasota family was given to the commission until he began to ask questions 10 years later. He learned of the investigation from the Florida Bulldogauthors. Later, after seeing some of the FBI reports, he tried to contact Gregory J. Sheffield, the FBI agent who wrote the report, only to find he had been transferred to Honolulu. He says the FBI also withheld reports involving a similar situation in San Diego, where two other hijackers lived.
The FBI has repeatedly claimed to find no connection between the Saudi family and the 9/11 hijackers. In a highly unusual move, the agency earlier this year issued a written statement calling that original FBI report "unsubstantiated and poorly written,'' a move that tossed their own agent under the bus.
In 2003, the commission that Graham co-chaired released a preliminary report on the hijackings, but a 28-page section of the report remains secret. Graham says the missing pages could buttress claims for justice by the families of 9/11 victims who filed suit against Saudi Arabia for allegedly financing the attacks. He has filed an affidavit supporting a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Florida Bulldog and other Florida newspapers seeking the missing pages.
Before his encounter with Joyce at Dulles in 2011, Graham left several messages for Sheffield that were not returned,
Graham says he told Joyce on that November day that he had seen two reports indicating that the ties between the family and the hijackers needed more investigation. He said Joyce told him that the reports were based on information that had been taken out of context by an agent and insisted Graham would understand if he saw the "full context.''
"I said I'd like to see the context,'' Graham recalled saying. Joyce scheduled a Dec. 7 meeting with Graham in Washington promising an agent would show him the "context.''
Graham, traveling from Miami on his own nickel, returned to Washington for the meeting only to be told by Joyce that the FBI would provide no further information. "And he said he had directed Agent Sheffield not to talk.''
Sheffield left the FBI in April after 20 years. He is still not returning phone calls. Joyce retired from the FBI in 2013 to work for Price Waterhouse Coopers, a firm that does international consulting work for businesses and government agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency. He could not be reached.
When the FBI was forced to release some of its reports as a result of the lawsuit filed in South Florida, the documents included a report apparently prepared by Sheffield saying the FBI inspected the Sarasota home and discovered they left the residence "quickly and suddenly. They left behind valuable items, clothing, jewelry and food in a manner that indicated they fled unexpectedly without prior preparation.''
The report also said further investigation of the family revealed many connections between the Saudi family and 11 individuals associated with the terrorists attacks.
The Saudi family was identified as Abdulaziz al-Hiiji and his wife, Anoud. The home was owned by Mrs. al-Hiiji's parents, Esam A. and Deborah Ghazzawi. It was sold in 2003 to a California man. Ghazzawi was an adviser to the Saudi royal family. In a 2012 statement, al-Hiiji denied that Atta or other hijackers visited his home.
Graham said a similar situation was discovered in San Diego where two of the hijackers received substantial assistance from a Saudi resident. The FBI also failed to submit reports on the group in San Diego, Graham added.
Since he retired from the U.S. Senate in 2005, Graham has repeatedly pushed for more disclosure and contends national security has been undermined by the oil rich Saudis as they continue to support violence around the world.
Graham has asked Floridians to push for more disclosure by getting members of Congress to push a resolution asking the president to release the 28 missing pages.
He may be 78 years old, but Graham remains sharp as a tack and full of outrage toward the FBI and two presidents who have ignored the obvious while protecting relations with Saudi Arabia and its oil.
And that FBI training manual? Graham says his wife learned a lot and has been using it against him ever since.
Contact Lucy Morgan at <a href="mailto:lucytimes@gmail.com">lucytimes@gmail.com</a>. Follow @lucytimes.
Why did the FBI detain Bob Graham? 08/07/15 [Last modified: Friday, August 7, 2015 5:29pm]
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If the Middle East did not exist, Moscow would definitely have to invent it.
Chaos in the Arab world has offered the Kremlin a convenient opportunity to shape public opinion at home on such issues as the legitimacy of the regime, its confrontation with the West and the situation in Ukraine. As a result, for the past two years, Middle East unrest has become one of the most popular topics discussed by Russian journalists and politicians.
Many middle- and working-class Russians are nostalgic for the “imperial” glory of the USSR, and the Kremlin gives them what they want. Russian support for Damascus, close relations with Tehran and rapprochement with Egypt are presented as the restoration of the Kremlin’s influence that was lost after 1991.
With a receptive audience, all the Russian authorities have to do is to present the Middle East through a Soviet-era prism, even though this often has nothing to do with today’s reality. Thus, Moscow’s support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime and rapprochement with Cairo are portrayed as symbols of Russian-Arab unity in the struggle against instability caused by America and terrorism supported by its regional partners, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The Russian media do not mention that the Assad regime does not represent the Arabs, nor even the Syrians. They remain silent on Moscow’s responsibility, as the key diplomatic supporter of the Assad regime, for the continuing bloodshed.
Propagandists also prefer not to mention that “evil” Saudi Arabia—together with the United Arab Emirates—assisted at the birth of the new Russian-Egyptian friendship by allowing Cairo, at a time when it is dependent on Gulf financial support, to invite the Russians back.
While accusing the West of reviving the language of the Cold War, Moscow appeals to similar sentiments by resurrecting the image of the United States as the “great evil.” The situation in the Middle East, as well as the Obama administration’s mistakes in regional policy, make this task easy.
In 2011, Putin labeled the United States and the European Union “new crusaders” for their military operation in Libya. In an interview with Russian media in April, Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister, accused Washington of being responsible for the creation of Al-Qaeda and the jihadists of the so-called Islamic State by supporting anti-Soviet mujahidin in Afghanistan in the 1980s and then invading Iraq in the 2000s.
Some pro-government analysts and journalists go further. They spread conspiracy theories along the lines that America deliberately destabilized the Middle East after the 9/11 attacks and has no real interest in stopping the bloodshed in Syria and Iraq.
The street protests that greeted Putin’s re-election for a third presidential term in 2012 compelled the Kremlin to promote the idea of a special model of governance that allegedly suits Russia better than Western democracy. Thus, Moscow’s propagandists accuse the West of trying to impose “improper” democratic values on Middle Eastern nations that had their own non-democratic but nevertheless authentic forms of governance, leading to political chaos and bloodshed.
In Libya, for example, the population was tempted by “Western fairy tales” about democracy to overthrow their authoritarian government, but got a failed state instead. Although the Russian media acknowledge that Muammar al-Qaddafi was a dictator, they argue that in exchange for political freedoms he gave his people social security and stability.
The latter argument creates parallels with ideas that were promoted in Russia prior to the 2012 presidential election: that Putin’s return to the Kremlin would mean stability, while a change in the leadership would spread havoc.
Finally, through its Middle Eastern narratives, Moscow legitimizes its policy toward Ukraine. Shortly after the beginning of the Saudi-led operation in Yemen against the Houthi rebels, the frontman of Russian propaganda, Dmitry Kiselyov, argued on state-owned Rossiya TV that there was no difference between Yemen and Ukraine. According to him, in both countries radical rebels had ousted legitimate presidents.
He posed a question: If the Saudis can support the overthrown Yemeni president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and even bomb Yemen, then why blame Russia for supporting Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president who was forced from power by street protests?
In a similar vein, Russian propaganda compares Ukrainian nationalists fighting in the Donbas region to the jihadists of Islamic State. The presence of Muslims, including Crimean Tatars and Chechens, among Ukrainian volunteers fighting against the so-called Donetsk and Lugansk republics is served up as proof of this connection.
In this narrative, pro-Russian insurgents are waging war against global forces that represent the same challenge to international security and human values as the jihadists in Syria and Iraq. Russian rhetoric has thus elevated the civil conflict in eastern Ukraine to sacred status.
The Kremlin has come close to declaring victory in the confrontation with the West. The visit of John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, to Sochi in May 2015 was portrayed by the Russian media as American political surrender. The dominant theme was that the West needs Russian assistance on a number of issues, including Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s civil conflict. Lavrov declared that Kerry’s visit marked Washington’s failure to isolate Russia.
Over the past two years there have been cases where Russian media have falsified the facts. On several occasions, Russian tabloids used photos from Syria to prove the “atrocities” of the Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region. Mostly these were the result of overzealous journalists trying to show they were on-side with the Kremlin.
In general, however, the output of Moscow’s official propagandists is cunningly contrived. They offer a selection of facts and put them in a framework that naturally leads the audience to the desired conclusions. Thus, it is hard to disagree that Islamic State represents a serious challenge to the international community and the U.S. invasion of Iraq was one of the factors that changed the geometry of regional power.
It only remains for the Kremlin to emphasize the importance of American involvement and to ignore the role of other factors in the development of the situation in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
The Russian opposition has failed to challenge Moscow’s narratives of the Middle Eastern events. In 2014, Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster and prominent critic of the regime, made a clumsy attempt to blame Putin for political turmoil in the Middle East. He found no support, even in the West.
When covering the Middle East for the domestic public, Russian politicians and the media make bold, emotional statements designed to focus the audience’s attention on a simple message. Yet, so far, the Kremlin is aware of the difference between propaganda and diplomacy. Thus, while presenting Kerry’s visit to Sochi as its diplomatic victory, the Russian government understands that it needs Washington’s involvement in Syria no less than the U.S. authorities need Moscow’s.
To understand Russia’s real intentions, it is necessary to watch Moscow’s moves rather than listen to its words. But the barrier between propaganda and reality is porous. Russian experts have, for example, started to accept some propaganda statements as truth and label Saudi Arabia and Qatar as terrorist sponsors.
Yet in June, a high-level Saudi delegation, led by the son of King Salman, the deputy crown prince and defense minister Mohammed bin Salman, was received by Putin in St. Petersburg and signed a series of agreements, including on peaceful nuclear cooperation.
There is still a risk that officials will come to accept the oft-repeated lie and start to believe in a real victory over the West, not just a propaganda advantage. It is worth recalling that in a TV interview in February 2013, Lavrov stated that the Russian government was eager to teach the Americans a “lesson” in Syria that they should deal with Moscow only “on the basis of equality, balance of interests and mutual respect.” Teaching that lesson is a goal which stretches beyond the realm of propaganda.
Nikolay Kozhanov is the Academy Robert Bosch Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, the Royal Institution of International Affairs, on whose site this article first appeared.
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Dozens of Syrian Christians Missing From Town Attacked by ISIS by By BEN HUBBARD and HWAIDA SAAD
Contact with the Christians was lost after the jihadists attacked the isolated oasis town of Qariyatain in Homs Province and routed the Syrian Army.
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