Europe's Migrant Crisis - September 11, 2015 Friday
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In pictures: A Look at Europe migrant crisis
Kabardino-Balkaria Republic Balks At Accepting More Ethnic Kin From Syria by support@pangea-cms.com (Liz Fuller)
Russia's Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society has just drafted an appeal to President Vladimir Putin to accept Circassian refugees from Syria and settle them in Kabardino-Balkaria, Adygheya, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, and Krasnodar Krai -- which constitute their historic homeland
Some in Moscow say they have no problem with Russian military involvement in Syria. RFE/RL's Current Time program asked a number of people in the Russian capital on September 11 if they were concerned by reports of a growing Russian military presence in the war-torn Middle Eastern country.
BAKU (Reuters) - Azerbaijan canceled a European Commission delegation visit on Friday and said it might review relations with the EU after the bloc's parliament called on it to free an investigative journalist and several human rights figures.
AP PHOTOS: Trailing across Europe, desperate Syrian refugees and others keep on coming
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YALTA, Crimea (Reuters) - Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi became the most prominent Western politician to visit Russian-annexed Crimea when he strolled beside the Black Sea on Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
An Israeli start-up has launched a pocket device which analyses instantly the composition of food, drink, medication or other objects.
Records show officer in ex-tennis pro's NYC arrest has history of excessive force allegations
Soviet diplomat Ivan Maisky (pictured) served in London between 1932 and 1943 and enjoyed close relationships with some of the most influential figures in public life.
As the current migrant crisis in Europe continues, one particular fact gets repeated over and over: this is the worst such disaster since World War II.
That conflict sent millions of Europeans fleeing the persecution, fighting, and poverty that came with it. The displacement began even before the war did, as the first signs of Nazi aggression pushed German residents and their neighbors—particularly Jews—to seek safety elsewhere. Migration continued throughout the war, as families left burned-out towns, children were sent to safer areas, and the scale of Nazi crimes increased. Even the return of peace saw a surge of refugees, with released prisoners as well as citizens of occupied Axis powers left wandering the continent.
All told, by some estimates, a total of about 60 million Europeans became refugees during the entire World War II period. According to the United Nations, a million people had yet to find a place to settle by 1951, more than five years after the fighting stopped.
The despair and urgency of Europe’s contemporary humanitarian plight has been powerfullycommunicated through photography, and that was no less true during the Second World War. These are just a few images that help convey the impact and scope of the post-war refugee crisis.
Azerbaijan has cancelled a visit by a European Commission delegation and threatened to "review" its relation with the EU after a European Parliament's resolution urged Baku to free an investigative journalist and several human rights activists.
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Sarah Doyle had been married to Pc Neil Doyle, 36, for less than six months when he was fatally struck whilst celebrating his Christmas party in Liverpool.
Several casualties reported as crane collapses on the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabian city of Mecca
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain has scrambled Royal Air Force Typhoon fighter jets to intercept two Russian bombers flying near UK airspace, the Ministry of Defense said.
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DUBAI (Reuters) - At least 52 people were killed when a crane crashed in Mecca's Grand Mosque on Friday, Saudi Arabia's Civil Defense authority said on its Twitter account.
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On a Friday night last June, the CIA quietly released an internal accountability report focusing on the lead-up to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The declassified report was not new. Titled "Office of Inspector General Report on Central Intelligence Agency Accountability Regarding Findings and Conclusions of the Report of the Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001," it had first been released in 2007 in a heavily redacted state. The version released last June, however, had far fewer redactions — and also included never-before-seen rebuttal letters from then-CIA Director George Tenet.
The new version of the report absolves Saudi Arabia for any complicity in the attacks. It also paints a fascinating picture of a corporate culture at the CIA in which backstabbing and turf wars were common. The relationship between the CIA and the FBI — specifically the one between the CIA's Usama bin Laden station and the FBI's New York Field Office, which was responsible for al Qaeda-related matters — was described as "troubled at best and dysfunctional at worst." Additionally, the "significant differences" found to have existed between the CIA and the NSA "remained unresolved well into 2001 in spite of the fact that considerable management attention was devoted to the issue, including at the level of the Agency's Deputy Executive Director."
The CIA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that the CIA had a "readiness level of only 30 percent in the most critical terrorism-related languages." It didn't have an "operational profile" of bin Laden until April 2002, eight months after the 9/11 attacks. And although the head of the bin Laden station had "both formal operations training and relevant overseas experience, he was gone frequently, leaving his deputy — who had neither — in charge."
Tenet wrote two scathing memos to Inspector General John Helgerson about the findings in the OIG report, objecting to the fact that he had been "accused of not devoting professionalism, skill, and diligence to countering terrorism as DCI [director of Central Intelligence]." Both of the once-secret documents were originally classified "Top Secret/Codeword Sensitive," which means access was on a strict need-to-know basis.
"In responding to your assessment of my performance as Director of Central Intelligence in the period leading up to the tragedy of September 11, 2001, I must tell you in the strongest possible terms that your report has mischaracterized my leadership of both the Intelligence Community and the CIA with regard to the strategy, plans, and actions which I directed to deal with a very difficult problem," Tenet wrote. "The segment of the report that I read portrays almost no understanding of the resource context in which the Intelligence Community was operating, the programmatic priorities established by me, the obstacles I had to overcome to secure more resources, both dollars and people, to meet all of our highest priorities."
Tenet also accused Helgerson of "ignoring" the fact that a counterterrorism strategy was "forcefully put in place in 1999" — meaning that even though the CIA wasn't able to prevent the 9/11 attacks, the response was more robust than it might have been if the new programs hadn't already been underway.
"We did not have to go from a standing start to war footing immediately after September 11, because the Intelligence Community was already well engaged," Tenet wrote.
The OIG's finding that counterterrorism funding had been given short shrift at the CIA was disputed by Tenet, who noted that while the agency's budget declined by 18 percent during the 1990s, its funding level for counterterrorism immediately prior to 9/11 was more than 50 percent higher than it was in 1997. He said the report did not reflect his "active engagement, sometimes on a daily basis, with the National Security Advisor, with (National Coordinator for Counterterrorism) Richard Clarke, and with other members of the national security team," nor his "strong, personal relationships with the Directors of NSA, NIMA, DIA and other leaders of the Intelligence Community."
He concluded, "I take this challenge to my reputation very seriously."
Tenet does make valid points, says Glenn Carle, a veteran CIA operative who was responsible for interrogating a number of high-level al Qaeda terrorists.
VICE News interviews former CIA deputy director Michael Morrell
"Helgerson's report was on the money, but I would agree with Tenet's rebuttals too," Carle told VICE News. "Yes, there were a lot of blind spots and inefficiencies, but he and President Clinton recognized in a coherent and insightful way the nature of the terrorist threat we faced — far more than the subsequent Bush administration who never understood anything, really."
Carle believes Tenet's reorganizations actually "saved" the Directorate of Operations, which he said had been gutted after the fall of communism.
"I think that America confuses resources with capabilities, and we say that more is better, though that's not true — better is better," Carle said. "But better requires a conceptual shift, and right now, we're plugging holes while the foundation is collapsing."
* * *
The OIG review team didn't find any instances of laws being broken by CIA employees. They did, however, find that "Agency officers did not always perform their Agency duties in a satisfactory manner — that is, they did not, in a particular instance, act 'in accordance with a reasonable level of professionalism, skill, and diligence,' as required by Agency regulations." The OIG identified specific officers responsible for doing things they shouldn't have, or in some cases, not taking action when they should have, though they did not refer any of them to the CIA's Accountability Board.
Joseph Wippl is a 30-year CIA veteran who served both overseas and in domestic headquarters positions. When he was invited to speak to a group of agency personnel about management issues, he says he named CIA supervisors he thought were effective managers, and also named those he thought were ineffective.
"That was the last time I was asked to speak on the topic," Wippl said. "There are always these calls for accountability, but then when real accountability takes place, they don't like it."
The CIA has seen a significant decline in expertise among personnel over the years, Wippl says. That skills gap doesn't go unnoticed in the OIG report, particularly when it comes to agents' language capabilities.
Almost 20 years ago, according to the OIG, the Directorate of Intelligence — the division in which analysts work — identified a critical need for speakers of Farsi and other languages. However, language proficiency was never deemed a "core capability" for intelligence analysts in general, nor was language capability made a requirement for membership in the Senior Analytical Service.
Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA officer who worked both as an operative and an analyst, said that when he was working on the Central American desk in 1986, there were only five analysts out of 50 who spoke fluent Spanish.
"This mythology that you've got a whole bunch of people at CIA with impressive levels of expertise is just horse shit," Johnson said. "The unfortunate thing with CIA is that it's become a perverse place where politics has taken precedence over merit. Thirty years ago it was a meritocracy, but started changing during the Reagan administration, and the precedents of politics over merit have accelerated."
The OIG report is focused largely on the CIA's attempts to track bin Laden. Johnson said the officer who supervised the bin Laden station, a man Johnson nicknamed "Crazy Mike," didn't speak Arabic and staffed the station largely with several Soviet affairs analysts that "had no experience in Islamic affairs, nothing."
With the exception of the station chief, the OIG report reveals that none of the officers in Alec Station, as the unit came to be codenamed, had operational backgrounds, meaning they hadn't spent time in the field. The station's operations branch chief was an analyst "with no formal operational training as of early 2000."
The OIG report refers to a "declining appreciation for the significance of 'KSM'" — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks — inside the CIA. From mid-1999 through September 11, 2001, the report says they "made little effort" to look at KSM's connections to bin Laden, which might have helped them better understand how al Qaeda operated, and how KSM fit into the overall puzzle. While the CIA's Renditions Branch, which tracks down terrorists and captures them, maintained a high level of interest in KSM's whereabouts, the report says it had "little apparent interest in who he was and what he might be planning."
"Never underestimate the power of bureaucracy to completely fuck everything up, then protect or promote everybody who was responsible for the failure," Johnson said. "All the people identified as dropping the ball in those reports, nobody got fired, nobody got punished."
Tenet stayed on at the CIA until 2004, when he resigned and joined Allen & Company, a New York investment bank. His 7-year term as DCI was the second-longest in American history.
* * *
The exact number of employees working for the CIA is classified, but former agency counterterrorism analyst Aki Peritz told VICE News that there are about 20,000 in all, approximately half of whom were hired after 9/11. As a result, he says he saw the agency's case officers and analysts start to look much younger after the attacks.
Peritz's observation is supported by the OIG report: As the bin Laden station staffed up, the amount of agency experience each member had went from an average of 12.8 years at the end of 1998 to 7.4 years at the end of 2001.
When the OIG team spoke with bin Laden station personnel, they heard the work atmosphere described as "chaotic," with "no single supervisor fully aware of activity underway at any point in time." The OIG team also learned that so much of the analysts' time was spent answering emails and receiving overwhelming amounts of data and intelligence traffic that they found themselves unable to read entire field reports, or cables. In fact, according to the OIG, analysts were so overloaded they "routinely" spent less than 10 seconds, on average, looking at each cable, according to computer logs.
"At the end of the day, these are just people, with all the fallibilities, all the eccentricities, all the failures and successes that come with being one of the human race," said former CIA officer Jack Rice. "You know, we desperately want our intelligence officials to be superheroes, and it's always a little disappointing when we realize that they look just like us."
Follow Justin Rohrlich on Twitter: @JustinRohrlich
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Despite pushback from Washington and NATO over the Russia's widening military buildup in Syria, Moscow is now calling on world powers to help arm government forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad, calling them the "most efficient and powerful ground force" in the fight against the Islamic State.
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This expanded military presence may signal Moscow's intent to play a more direct role in the Syrian endgame — or at the very least help the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad preserve what limited control it has over the war-ravaged country. But, as The Washington Post noted earlier, the move may not present a significant policy shift.
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Some 22,500 refugees and migrants arriving on the Greek island of Lesbos have been registered by officials since Monday evening, police told AFP late Thursday.
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When rumours spread through Lebanon this week that a massive boat was coming to bring Syrian refugees to Germany, huge crowds rushed to Berlin's embassy outside Beirut.
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(VIENNA) — Desperate to head west even after Austria cut the number of border trains, a trickle of migrants marching toward Vienna swelled into a torrent Friday as thousands made their way toward the city on foot.
But the Austrian capital has only been a transit point for many of those arriving over the past week. Most have gone on to Germany, which saw its efforts to get fellow European Union nations to help share the burden firmly rejected Friday by four Central European nations.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had urged fellow E.U. nations to give more help to those seeking safety in Europe, describing the influx as “probably the biggest challenge for the European Union in its history.”
“No single country can resolve such a challenge alone — we need European solidarity,” he told reporters in the Czech capital of Prague.
Despite his warning, he failed to persuade his Czech, Slovak, Polish and Hungarian counterparts to drop their objections to a proposed E.U.-wide quota system to help migrants already in the E.U.’s most overburdened nations. Steinmeier then left a joint news conference early, allegedly due to a busy schedule.
Germany has already seen 450,000 migrants enter the country and is expecting at least 800,000 this year, the most in Europe.
“We need to have control over how many (migrants) we are capable of accepting,” said Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek, who hosted the meeting.
The plan to share 120,000 refugees now in Greece, Italy and Hungary among the E.U.’s 28 nations was unveiled Wednesday by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and will be debated Oct. 8 during an emergency E.U. interior ministers’ meeting. An earlier plan to share 40,000 other asylum-seekers among E.U. nations is expected to get the ministers’ final approval on Monday.
Tens of thousands of people, many from war-torn Syria, have traveled across the eastern flank of Europe this summer, from Turkey to Greece by sea, over land in Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and Austria. Tense bottlenecks have developed at those borders, especially since Hungary began building a fence to keep the migrants out.
Friday’s foot march began after rail traffic to Vienna from the Nickelsdorf crossing was sharply reduced due to overcrowding. Buses and taxis then were called to Nickelsdorf to take migrants to the Austrian capita, but thousands decided not to wait.
Hungarian police spokesman Helmut Marban said a “group dynamic” started, with a few people beginning to walk toward Vienna from the border, inspiring thousands of others to join them on the 40-mile (60 kilometer) trek.
Police briefly closed the A4 expressway to vehicles because of the potential dangers posed by the migrants.
The trek petered out a few hours after it began with police and emergency crews persuading those wanting to push on to the Austrian capital that there would be enough buses for them eventually.
Hans Peter Doskozil, the police chief of eastern Burgenland, said on Thursday alone 7,500 people had crossed into Austria at Nickelsdorf — a number that apparently overwhelmed the Austrian Federal Railways.
Regularly scheduled trains from Nickelsdorf continued Friday to other Austrian destinations, including Vienna, with three departures scheduled. But the railway company announced an end to special shuttles for the migrants between Nickelsdorf and Vienna that had been running for days.
The rail company on Thursday had already suspended all train service toward Vienna from the Hungarian capital, Budapest, where thousands of migrants and refugees have overwhelmed the train station.
In Munich, the first arrival point in Germany for most of those traveling from Austria, authorities said more than 40,000 people have arrived over the past six days.
Bracing for the continued influx, the U.N. refugee agency announced the deployment of hundreds of pre-fabricated homes to central and southeastern Europe. UNHCR spokesman William Splinder said his agency estimates over 380,000 people have arrived in Europe across the Mediterranean so far this year. The International Organization for Migration has put the figure at more than 432,000.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been criticized by other E.U. leaders and human rights groups for what they say is gross mismanagement in housing, feeding and processing the thousands of arriving migrants.
Human Rights Watch on Friday released video footage from inside a holding facility at the Hungarian border town of Roszke. Metal fences surrounded clusters of tents and border guards were shown throwing food into the air for desperate migrants to grab. Peter Bouckaert of the rights group claimed migrants and refugees were “kept in pens like animals, out in the sun without food and water.”
Orban, who has ordered his country’s border with Serbia to be turned into a razor-tipped fortress, shrugged off the criticism, saying Friday the solution to the migration crisis lies in Greece.
“We have to take care of the problem where it exists,” Orban told a Budapest news conference. “If Greece is not capable of protecting its borders, we need to mobilize European forces to the Greek borders so that they can achieve the goals of European law.”
More than 250,000 people have reached Greece so far this year, the vast majority arriving on its eastern islands from the nearby Turkish coast, especially the island of Lesbos. Few, if any, want to remain in financially stricken Greece.
In Budapest, a Hungarian camerawoman caught on video kicking and tripping migrants near the Serbian border offered a qualified apology Friday for her behavior.
In a letter published by the daily Magyar Nemzet newspaper, Petra Laszlo said she was “sincerely sorry for what happened,” but added: “I was scared as they streamed toward me, and then something snapped inside me.”
The 40-year-old was fired by the right-wing N1TV online channel after footage went viral on social media.
Police have released Laszlo without charges after questioning her on suspicion of disorderly conduct. They say the investigation is continuing.
___
Geir Moulson and David Rising in Berlin, Shawn Pogatchnik in Budapest, Elena Becatoros in Greece, Jamie Keaten in Geneva and Philip Jenne in Nickelsdorf, Austria, contributed to this story.
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Ukrainian president urges Russian withdrawal from eastern Ukraine, sealing of border
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DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (Reuters) - A U.S. drone strike killed at least 15 Pakistani militants in Afghanistan's Gomal district on Wednesday, intelligence officials said on Friday, part of an intensifying drone campaign against Pakistani militants in Afghanistan.
MOSCOW Russia called on Friday for Washington to restart direct military-to-military cooperation to avert "unintended incidents" near Syria, at a time when U.S. officials say Moscow is building up forces to protect President Bashar al-Assad's government.
The United States is leading a campaign of air strikes against Islamic State fighters in Syrian air space, and a greater Russian presence would raise the prospect of the Cold War superpower foes encountering each other on the battlefield.
Both Moscow and Washington say their enemy is Islamic State. But Russia supports the government of Assad, while the United States says his presence makes the situation worse.
In recent days, U.S. officials have described what they say is a buildup of Russian equipment and manpower.
Lebanese sources have told Reuters that at least some Russian troops were now engaged in combat operations in support of Assad's government. Moscow has declined to comment on those reports.
At a news conference, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia was sending equipment to help Assad fight Islamic State. Russian servicemen were in Syria, he said, primarily to help service that equipment and teach Syrian soldiers how to use it.
Russia was also conducting naval exercises in the eastern Mediterranean, he said, describing the drills as long-planned and staged in accordance with international law.
Lavrov blamed Washington for cutting off direct military-to-military communications between Russia and NATO over the Ukraine crisis, saying such contacts were "important for the avoidance of undesired, unintended incidents".
"We are always in favor of military people talking to each other in a professional way. They understand each other very well," Lavrov said. "If, as (U.S. Secretary of State) John Kerry has said many times, the United States wants those channels frozen, then be our guest."
U.S. officials say they do not know what Moscow's intentions are in Syria. The reports of a Russian buildup come at a time when momentum has shifted against Assad's government in Syria's 4-year-old civil war, with Damascus suffering battlefield setbacks this year at the hands of an array of insurgent groups.
Moscow, Assad's ally since the Cold War, maintains its only Mediterranean naval base at Tartous on the Syrian coast, a strategic objective.
In recent months NATO-member Turkey has also raised the prospect of outside powers playing a greater role in Syria by proposing a "safe zone" near its border, kept free of both Islamic State and government troops.
COMMON ENEMY
The four-year-old multi-sided civil war in Syria has killed around 250,000 people and driven half of Syria's 23 million people from their homes. Some have traveled to European Union countries, creating a refugee crisis there.
Differences over Assad's future have made it impossible for Moscow and the West to take joint action against Islamic State, even though they say the group, which rules a self-proclaimed caliphate on swathes of Syria and Iraq, is their common enemy.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Friday it was too early to judge what exactly Russia's motivations at present were in Syria, but that "adding war to war" would not help resolve the Syrian conflict.
"If it's about defending the base in Tartous why not? But if it's to enter the conflict ...." he said, without finishing the thought.
BARGAINING POWER
Diplomats in Moscow say the Kremlin is happy for the West to believe it is building up its military in Syria, calculating that this will give it more bargaining power in any international talks about whether Assad stays in power.
Western and Arab countries have backed demands from the Syrian opposition that Assad must give way under any negotiated settlement to the war. Assad refuses to go and so far his enemies have lacked the capability to force him out, leaving the war grinding on for years. All diplomatic efforts at a solution have collapsed.
Assad’s supporters have taken encouragement this week from an apparent shift in tone from some European states that suggests a softening of demands he leave power.
Britain, one of Assad’s staunchest Western opponents, said this week it could accept him staying in place for a transition period if it helped resolve the conflict.
France, another fierce Assad opponent, said on Monday he must leave power “at some point or another”. Smaller countries went further, with Austria saying Assad must be involved in the fight against Islamic State and Spain saying negotiations with him were necessary to end the war.
The pro-Syrian government newspaper al-Watan saw Britain’s position as “a new sign of the changes in Western positions that started with Madrid and Austria”.
(Editing by Peter Graff)
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St. Petersburg, Russia — People who came of age after the end of the Cold War may not realize how powerfully Russia influenced Western culture for 150 years. For more than a century, intellectuals, writers, artists and activists were partly defined by the stances they took toward certain things Russian: Did they see the world like Tolstoy or like Dostoyevsky? Were they inspired by Lenin and/or Trotsky? Were they alarmed by Sputnik, awed by Solzhenitsyn or cheering on Yeltsin or Gorbachev?
That was because Russian culture had an unmatched intensity. It was often said that Russian thinkers addressed universal questions in their most extreme and illuminating forms.
In his classic book, “The Icon and the Axe,” James H. Billington wrote that because of certain conditions of Russian history, “the kind of debate that is usually conducted between individuals in the West often rages even more acutely within individuals in Russia.”
Russian influence was especially strong in America. There were certain mirror image parallels. Both nations didn’t quite know what to make of the sophistication and polish of Western Europe. Both countries had Eurocentric elites who copied Parisian manners, and populist masses who ridiculed them. Both nations had mental landscapes defined by the epic size and wild beauty of their natural landscapes.
But Russia stood for something that America has never been known for: depth of soul. If America radiated a certain vision of happiness onto the world, Russian heroes radiated a vision of total spiritual commitment.
“The ‘Russian’ attitude,” Isaiah Berlin wrote, “is that man is one and cannot be divided.” You can’t divide your life into compartments, hedge your bets and live with prudent half-measures. If you are a musician, writer, soldier or priest, integrity means throwing your whole personality into your calling in its purest form.
The Russian ethos was not bourgeois, economically minded and pragmatic. There were radicals who believed that everything should be seen in materialistic terms. But this was a reaction to the dominant national tendency, which saw problems as primarily spiritual rather than practical, and put matters of the soul at center stage.
In the Middle Ages, Russian religious icons presented a faith that was more visual than verbal, more mysterious than legalistic. Dostoyevsky put enormous faith in the power of the artist to address social problems. The world’s problems are shaped by pre-political roots: myths, morals and the state of the individual conscience. Beauty could save the world.
Even as late as the 1990s, one could sit with Russian intellectuals, amid all the political upheaval in those days, and they would talk intensely about the nature of the Russian soul. If it was dark in the kitchen at night, they wouldn’t just say, “Let’s replace the light bulb.” They’d talk for hours about how actually the root problem was the Russian soul.
Many of Russia’s most charismatic figures were on a lifelong search for purity. For the elder Tolstoy, you could live with material abundance and rot inside, or you could live the pure, simple rural life of the peasant. Solzhenitsyn wrote, “It makes me happier, more secure, to think … that I am only a sword made sharp to smite the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them.”
All of this spiritual ardor, all of this intense extremism, all of this romantic utopianism, all of this tragic sensibility produced some really bad political ideas. But it also produced a lot of cultural vibrancy that had an effect on the world.
While the rest of the world was going through industrialization and commercialism and embracing the whole bourgeois style of life, there was this counterculture of intense Russian writers, musicians, dancers — romantics who offered a different vocabulary, a different way of thinking and living inside.
And now it’s gone.
Russia is a more normal country than it used to be and a better place to live, at least for the young. But when you think of Russia’s cultural impact on the world today, you think of Putin and the oligarchs. Now the country stands for grasping power and ill-gotten money.
There’s something sad about the souvenir stands in St. Petersburg. They’re selling mementos of things Russians are sort of embarrassed by — old Soviet Army hats, Stalinist tchotchkes and coffee mugs with Putin bare-chested and looking ridiculous. Of the top 100 universities in the world, not a single one is Russian, which is sort of astonishing for a country so famously intellectual.
This absence leaves a mark. There used to be many countercultures to the dominant culture of achievement and capitalism and prudent bourgeois manners. Some were bohemian, or religious or martial. But one by one those countercultures are withering, and it is harder for people to see their situations from different and grander vantage points. Russia offered one such counterculture, a different scale of values, but now it, too, is mainly in the past.
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LONDON — On this day 14 years ago, Sept. 11, 2001, I was newly arrived in Berlin as bureau chief and doing an interview in a cafe. The normally unflappable bureau manager, Victor Homola, telephoned and said I should get back to the office, because an airplane had just hit the World Trade Center in New York.
I filed and had lunch the next day with Susan Sontag, talking about what had happened and why, and then soon it became clear that the plotters were from Hamburg. Suddenly my life was wrapped up in that of Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, the Egyptian architecture student who had been personally charged by Osama bin Laden with this spectacular attack on the United States.
I visited Mr. Atta’s apartment on Marienstrasse 54, in a moldy yellow building, and his school, the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg. I read his dissertation, with his elegant, hand-drawn maps of Aleppo, in Syria, one of the oldest cities in the world. Mr. Atta studied the urban development of Aleppo and decried how modernity was destroying its ancient beauty.
Today, Mr. Atta and Bin Laden are dead, Al Qaeda is atomized, the old city of Aleppo that Mr. Atta cherished is nearly destroyed, and so is Syria.
Bin Laden’s distant dream of a caliphate in lands cleared of Western influence is being reshaped by the Islamic State, which exercises terror very differently, with less interest in attacking the “far enemy” of the West than in creating a Salafist revolutionary regime.
And it is the Islamic State, not Western development, that is systematically destroying the treasures of the ancient world — the very treasures that mattered so much to Mr. Atta, and the despoiling of which did so much to radicalize him.
It is a measure of how the world was changed that day, and how much it hasn’t.
Richard Dearlove, head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, from 1999 to 2004, points out that “some of what we worried about after 9/11 and were sure would happen — a dirty bomb, some sort of biological attack — didn’t happen.” That kind of strategic threat never materialized, in part because of good intelligence and the disruption of Qaeda networks.
The July 7, 2005, suicide bombing attacks on London subways and buses killed 52 people. But since then, he noted, only one person in Britain has been killed by terrorism.
“It’s quite easy to exaggerate the threat and overplay it,” Mr. Dearlove said. “A lot of these young jihadis are not a serious, strategically organized group driven by a clever brain.”
But the nature of the threat has changed and in some sense has become more pervasive, as single actors (“lone wolves”) or small cells, often with little contact with any central authority and inspired by social media, suddenly decide to shoot up a museum or a train.
Florence Gaub, an analyst of the Arab world at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris, was herself in New York on Sept. 11. Afterward, she noted, “we got the illusion that the problem was contained and manageable,” and at the NATO Defense College, where she worked on new threat assessments after the death of Bin Laden, the focus was on climate change and cybersecurity.
But now the Arab world is imploding, she said, and the Islamic State poses a new challenge to the current world order — it has become a self-styled nation highly unlikely to join the United Nations or subscribe to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
And the threat is different, and in a sense, more pervasive. “We have managed to deter high-profile attacks like 9/11 but now have pressed it down to attainable targets like supermarkets and trains,” she said. “But it’s almost as effective, because now you’re afraid everywhere.”
Too often now, she said, we see Muslim migrants “as a threat, not as an opportunity.”
Terrorism is not about numbers, Ms. Gaub said. “It’s about fear.”
Correction: September 11, 2015
An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of The Times’s bureau manager in Berlin. He is Victor Homola, not Viktor.
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In recent days, there's been a steady stream of reports detailing an escalation of Russian military activity in Syria.
An investigation by Reuters, citing Lebanese sources, suggested that Russian troops had begun participating in operations in support of forces of the Syrian regime, a longtime Moscow ally. U.S. officials indicated that two Russian tank landing ships, aircraft and naval infantry forces had reached Syria this week.
This expanded military presence may signal Moscow's intent to play a more direct role in the Syrian endgame -- or at the very least help the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad preserve what limited control it has over the war-ravaged country.
But, as The Washington Post noted earlier, the move may not present a significant policy shift.
"Russia has never made a secret of its military-technological cooperation with Syria. Russian military specialists help Syrians master Russian hardware," a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman toldjournalists on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was a bit more direct. "We have always been frank regarding the presence of our military experts in Syria who help the Syrian army in training and learning how to use the equipment," he told a press conference in Moscow. "And if further steps are needed we will stand ready to fully undertake those steps."
The following day, Lavrov went even further, arguing that supporting the Syrian regime was essential if the world wanted to defeat the jihadists of the Islamic State.
"You cannot defeat Islamic State with air strikes only," Lavrov said on Friday. "It’s necessary to cooperate with ground troops and the Syrian army is the most efficient and powerful ground force to fight the IS."
Some speculate that Russia's actions are not a reflection of a genuine strategy, but rather, more crudely, are the tactics of an authoritarian regime holding desperately onto its remaining levers of power.
"It is the confrontation between Russia and the West that drags Russia into the Middle East," Nikolay Kozhanov, a fellow at London's Chatham House think tank, told NBC News.
This has been the case for quite some time. Ever since the days of Catherine the Great, political elites in Moscow have coveted their own dominion -- or at least, a sphere of influence -- in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
The Cold War brought more focus to Soviet ambitions. The United States, the Western superpower, had close allies throughout the region -- Israel, of course, but also authoritarian or military regimes in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran (until the 1979 revolution).
Syria and quasi-socialist Egypt gravitated to Moscow's orbit. Between 1955 to 1960, the Soviet Union gave Syria more than $200 million in military aid. Some Western and Israeli observers believe the Soviets played a key role in instigating the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which Israel won in six blistering days (with the U.S.S.R. nowhere to be seen).
The Syrian-Soviet alliance, though, tightened in 1971 with the rise to power of Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, a military officer who spent years in the Soviet Union learning to fly the MiG fighter jets that soon became the mainstay of Syria's air force.
His Baathist regime was built loosely on the model of a Soviet single-party state, supported by an all-pervasive network of intelligence agencies. Many of Syria's elites were educated in top Soviet schools in Moscow.
The Assad regime let the Soviet Union set up a repair and resupply center in the port of Tartous, a facility which is now Moscow's last outpost on the Mediterranean. Considerable Soviet military aid went to supporting the Syrian forces that intervened in fractious Lebanon in the mid-1970s and only finally withdrew in 2005.
Even in the past decade, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia accounted for the bulk of Syrian weapons purchases. In 2011, on the eve of the Syrian uprising, Russia had some $4 billion worth of outstanding weapons contracts with Damascus. An estimated 100,000 Russian citizens were still living in the country. Between 2009 and 2013, Russian companies invested some $20 billion in Syria.
"Since 2000, [President Vladimir] Putin has sought to restore Russia as a Great Power, shaping its policy as an anti-American zero-sum game in order to position the country as a counterweight to the West in the Middle East," wrote Anna Borshchevskaya, an analyst at the Washington Institute, in 2013. "Syria is Russia's most important foothold in the region and a key to Putin's calculus."
But this footprint is a tiny dot compared to the influence and assets the United States and NATO have already in place in the region.
"It is not even a contest between David and Goliath, but between an elephant and a pug," wroteRussian military analyst Alexander Korolkov earlier this year. "Russia’s permanent naval task force in the Mediterranean, announced in March last year, will consist of 5-6 ships — a tenth of the size of the Soviet Union’s 5th Squadron, which was still inferior to its opponent."
It's unclear how much difference even the new escalation may make.
“There has always been a Russian presence in the Middle East,” the Atlantic Council's John E. Herbst told The Post. “It’s not surprising that they are reasserting themselves in Syria.”
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Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.
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Flashback 9/11: As It Happened
In somber remembrances from New York City to Shanksville, Pa., from the White House to cities around the nation, America paused once again Friday to mark the 14th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The largest ceremony was taking place Friday morning at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum near the site of the World Trade Center's twin towers, which were brought down when two hijacked passenger jets slammed into them that day. Families of the victims gathered at the memorial's plaza and marked the day tolling bells, moments of silence, and the sad reading of the names of those who died.
The plaza was reserved for victims' relatives and invited guests for the ceremony, but will be open for the public to pay their respects in the afternoon. An estimated 20,000 people flocked to the site last year, the first year the public was able to visit on the anniversary.
"When we did open it up, it was just like life coming in," National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum President Joe Daniels told the Associated Press this week, adding "the general public that wants to come and pay their respects on this most sacred ground should be let in as soon as possible."
The Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville in western Pennsylvania is marking the completion of its visitor center, which opened to the public Thursday. At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and other officials joined in remembrances for victims' relatives and Pentagon employees.
President Obama observed a moment of silence with the first lady and White House staff on the mansion's South Lawn. He then planned to visit Fort Meade in Maryland, in recognition of the military's work to protect the country.
The observance began at 8:46 a.m. when the first plane slammed into the World Trade Center's North tower. The second plane hit the South tower at 9:03 a.m.
Ohio's statehouse will display nearly 3,000 flags — representing the lives lost — in an arrangement designed to represent the World Trade Center towers, with a Pentagon-shaped space and an open strip representing the field near Shanksville. Sacramento, Calif., will commemorate 9/11 in conjunction with a parade honoring three Sacramento-area friends who tackled a heavily armed gunman on a Paris-bound high-speed train last month.
Major League Baseball will pay its own tribute to mark the anniversary of the attacks. At every stadium where a big league game is played Friday, there will be moments of silence, as well as other remembrances. Players, managers, coaches and umpires will wear caps with flag patches
In Washington, some members of Congress plan to spend part of the anniversary discussing federal funding for the ground zero memorial. The House Natural Resources Committee has scheduled a hearing Friday on a proposal to provide up to $25 million a year for the plaza.
The memorial and underground museum together cost $60 million a year to run. The federal government contributed heavily to building the institution; leaders have tried unsuccessfully for years to get Washington to chip in for annual costs, as well.
Under the current proposal, any federal money would go only toward the memorial plaza. An estimated 21 million people have visited it for free since its 2011 opening.
The museum charges up to $24 per ticket, a price that initially sparked some controversy. Still, almost 3.6 million visitors have come since the museum's May 2014 opening, topping projections by about 5 percent, Daniels said.
Any federal funding could lead to expanded discounts for school and other groups, but there are no plans to lower the regular ticket price, he said.
This year's anniversary also comes as advocates for 9/11 responders and survivors are pushing Congress to extend two federal programs that promised billions of dollars in compensation and medical care. Both programs are set to expire next year.
But some of those close to the events aim to keep policy and politics at arm's length on Sept. 11.
Organizers of the ground zero ceremony decided in 2012 to stop letting elected officials read names, though politicians still can attend. Over the years, some victims' relatives have invoked political matters while reading names — such as declaring that Sept. 11 should be a national holiday — but others have sought to keep the focus personal.
"This day should be a day for reflection and remembrance. Only," Faith Tieri, who lost her brother, Sal Tieri Jr., said during last year's commemoration.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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