Syria’s Phony Peace Talks

Syria’s Phony Peace Talks - WSJ

February 01, 2016

Syria’s Phony Peace Talks - WSJ
Monday February 1st, 2016 at 12:51 PM

Regarding the Syrian peace talks that began over the weekend in Geneva, allow us to raise two questions: What peace—and what talks?

The regime of Bashar Assad is intensifying its longstanding “starve or kneel” policy against besieged enclaves containing an estimated half a million people. The regime has also scored recent battlefield victories against moderate opposition forces, aided by a combination of Russian air power, Hezbollah ground fighters and Iran’s elite Quds Force.

Meantime, the Institute for the Study of War reports that Islamic State (ISIS) has responded to its recent losses in Iraq by launching a fresh offensive in eastern Syria to consolidate control of the Euphrates River valley, while the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front is gaining strength in Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial capital. Neither ISIS nor Nusra are at the talks, and they will continue to fight regardless of what comes out of Geneva.

Also not represented are Kurdish forces, which have been the most effective ground fighters against ISIS but were excluded due to Turkish sensitivities.

Instead, the opposition is represented by an umbrella group backed by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia called the High Negotiations Committee, which is demanding that the regime lift its starvation sieges and end air strikes as a precondition to “proximity negotiations”—so named because the two sides won’t agree to sit in the same room. But the opposition’s diplomatic leverage has fallen with its battlefield fortunes, so any deal it might strike in Geneva would have little effect inside Syria.

None of this augurs well for the talks called Geneva III after the collapse of Geneva I and II. Why hold them at all? For President Obama, the effort fulfills his pledge after the San Bernardino terrorist attack to renew U.S. diplomatic efforts over Syria, regardless of the prospects for success. It also gives Hillary Clinton an opening to say on the campaign trail that Mr. Obama is “finally” on the right course in Syria, after her previous disagreements with Mr. Obama while Secretary of State.

The Assad regime welcomes talks because they offer international legitimacy as well as new opportunities to extract political concessions from its opponents. Russia sees the talks as a vehicle for its own diplomatic rehabilitation amid Western sanctions, even as it defends its clients in Damascus and extends its influence in the Middle East.

Less clear is how this helps the Syrian people. “As usual, the regime imposes the siege on the city before each conference or an important event,” a councilman in one starved and encircled town recently told the Journal. Creating catastrophes it can then “solve” in exchange for Western concessions is an Assad family specialty. It has already parleyed this into U.S. acquiescence in Mr. Assad’s participation in a “transitional” future government with no fixed timetable for his departure.

The tragedy for Syria is that, even as talks enhance Mr. Assad’s legitimacy and strengthen his hand, they will further discredit the moderate opposition, which is being pressured to participate in a transitional government with the same regime most Syrians are desperate to overthrow. The dragooning may further embitter moderates toward the U.S., while strengthening claims by Islamic State and the Nusra Front that they are the only serious Sunni opposition to the Shiite regime.

That point is worth underscoring as Republicans like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul argue that intervening against Mr. Assad would strengthen the jihadists. In reality, the regime and Islamic State are symbiotic enemies, each drawing political strength from the other’s brutality even as they both target more moderate forces. There’s a reason Russian warplanes have rarely targeted Islamic State and the Assad regime buys Islamic State oil.

Next month marks the fifth anniversary of the Syrian war. Nobody can claim there’s an easy solution to what has become the greatest geopolitical disaster of the decade. But a plausible solution isn’t possible as long as Islamic State controls much of the country and the Assad regime feels free with Russian help to force Syrians into exile with barrel bombs and hunger sieges. The only peace likely to come out of Geneva is if the U.S. bludgeons the moderate Sunni opposition into surrender.

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After Sanctions, Iran's Growing Role in the Caucasus
Monday February 1st, 2016 at 12:36 PM

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, President Hassan Rouhani and Azerbaijan's Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov attend the opening session of a two-day conference of the Economic Cooperation Organization. (ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images)

Summary

With the end of sanctions on Iran, the country's regional economic influence will begin to rebound. The adjacent South Caucasus region, encompassing Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, is one area that Tehran will target for greater cooperation, reaching out to make deals on trade and energy. In doing so it will inevitably have to consider the role of Russia, which has dominated the political and economic affairs between the Black and Caspian seas for two centuries. Russia and Iran are regional geopolitical rivals, a dynamic manifested in the long-simmering Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia and on negotiations over pipeline projects for Iranian hydrocarbon exports. Despite their rivalry, Russia and Iran will have to work together in order to block Western-led infrastructure projects, which they both largely oppose, and to avoid foreign military presence in the region, particularly by Georgia.

Analysis

The Jan. 17 end of sanctions on Iran will have important consequences worldwide, changing the state of play in the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Yemen. In the South Caucasus, however, Tehran's reemergence will have particularly sweeping effects. For some time, Iran has lagged far behind its regional rivals in terms of economic and military influence, even as it has become increasingly interested in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia for their transit and energy possibilities.

Iran has a number of reasons for increasing its regional involvement. Europe is trying to diversify away from Russian natural gas, and Iran wants to seize the opportunity to take over these markets. But it needs access to the South Caucasus first. Tehran recently expressed interest in using existing infrastructure such as the Trans-Anatolian Gas Pipeline and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, which connect the Caspian and Mediterranean seas. Another option would be reaching Georgia's Black Sea ports of Batumi and Poti through Armenia. Iranian officials are already courting Yerevan for that purpose.

Exporting energy through Turkey would be more convenient for Iran, but difficult relations between the countries on issues including how to end the Syrian civil war ultimately make the Armenian route more viable. So far, there has been talk of building a $3.7 billion railway and of extending a natural gas pipeline between Armenia and Iran. However, that plan, too, is complicated for Tehran, because Moscow has repeatedly tried to stall or become a shareholder in major infrastructure projects so as not to lose its influence in Armenia.

Weighing the Options

The recent diplomatic battle over who will meet Georgia's growing natural gas demand is emblematic of the ways Iran is being blocked from taking on a more active regional role. The dispute began when Azerbaijan announced that it was unable to meet Georgia's requests for more natural gas. Iran saw this as an opportunity and immediately reached out to Georgian officials, even announcing that an official agreement had been signed. Georgia, however, later refuted the claim. The silent player in the dispute is Russia, which has used Armenia to hinder attempts to transport natural gas to the Georgian market via either the construction of a new pipeline or the expansion of an existing one.

The Russian obstacle has spurred Iran to look for routes that avoid Armenia. Tehran is now considering building around $400 million in railway infrastructure to Georgia through Azerbaijan, Armenia's regional rival. This north-south transport corridor would run from Iran to Russia's Baltic ports and take precedence over any plans for transit through Armenia. This is reflected by the pace of construction on railways from Iran through Azerbaijan connecting to Russia's North Caucasus railway branch. Again, because of Russian interference, regional powers are circumventing Armenia to get their exports to the European market, in turn increasing Armenia's dependence on Russia. But Iran is determined to increase its trade with all the South Caucasus countries. Trade with Georgia and Azerbaijan is set to more than triple from below $1 billion to $3 billion.

Post-sanctions Iran will also try to become more involved in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. In the early stages of the territorial dispute, Tehran tried to mediate between the two sides, but Armenian forces violated the truce. Now, Azerbaijan is working to change the status quo on the contact line, and Iran sees an opportunity to insert itself into the new configuration. On Jan 22, Iran's Foreign Ministry offered to mediate the conflict, as a possible resolution to the standoff would make it easier for Tehran to implement its infrastructure projects in the region. Tehran's involvement will also undermine Russia's dominant position in the negotiation process. Moscow could theoretically cooperate with Tehran, but considering how opposed Russia is to any Iranian moves into the Armenian and Georgian energy sectors, this scenario is unlikely. On the other hand, as other world powers try to increase their involvement in the conflict, Moscow could see Tehran as a valuable partner to counter foreign influence.

Indeed, despite the disputes over influence in the South Caucasus, Russia and Iran have shown they can cooperate. In December, both managed to sign a memorandum to synchronize their electricity transmissions systems with those of Georgia and Armenia. And both are keenly aware of the larger threats to their interests. For example, the European Union and NATO are increasing their regional presence through political and economic treaties, as well as a new NATO training center in Georgia. Tehran and Moscow also both oppose Western-sponsored economic projects, namely the Baku-Tbilisi-Akhalkalaki-Kars railway, the Trans-Caspian transit route, and other projects such as the Nabucco pipeline.

Russia's fears of being sidelined were magnified Jan. 15, when following the severance of ties between Ukraine and Russia, Kiev signed an agreement with Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan to move its exports to Asian markets through the Trans-Caspian transport route. This fear, along with the buildup of an economic and military alliance between Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, may make Russia more willing to work with Iran in the future, especially when it comes to blocking Trans-Caspian efforts.

Military Considerations

Iran and Russia's military priorities broadly align. Both worry about growing military cooperation between Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan, and they fear a potential expansion of NATO's presence in Georgia. Tehran and Moscow know that they need to prepare for such a threat by building out their regional military connections, and as a result, Iran wants a direct route to Russia. This, however, is politically difficult, given that Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan are unlikely to allow Russian military equipment to transit through their territories. One suggestion for avoiding the issue altogether is to use the Caspian Sea as a transit route. Meanwhile, both sides are also concerned with the ongoing conflict in Syria and are both working to secure an alternate route to the country for Russian troops. Indeed, for the past two years, Stratfor has been closely tracking an expanding network of Russian and Iranian rail and road projects around the Caspian Sea and through the Caucasus mountains.

Though military confrontation with any third party is a distant prospect, boosting mutual trade is a much more immediate motive for building roads and railways. Trade between Russia and Iran increased after the fall of the Soviet Union, reaching almost $1.2 billion at one point, but it eventually stagnated under sanctions. Trade is expected to rebound following the removal of sanctions on Tehran, particularly Iran rejoining the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), an international payments network. Moscow has already made some important moves to reestablish the lost ties.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Tehran in November 2015, he signed around 35 agreements on a range of issues, including in the areas of agriculture, military, nuclear stations and waste disposal. Moscow also provisionally agreed to provide Iran with a $5 billion line of credit. Moreover, as a token of the trade potential between Iran and Russia, Tehran recently floated the idea of signing a free trade agreement with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. Regarding military cooperation, Moscow has agreed to provide Iran with an S-300 missile system, and Iranian specialists are now being trained in Russia. From 1992-2012, 52 percent of Iranian imports of military equipment came from Russia, but Iran's share in the global military trade amounted to less than 1.5 percent.

Thus, while Iran will certainly become more active in the region politically, and while it will increase trade with every South Caucasus country, it will encounter significant obstacles along the way. Russia is unlikely to loosen its grip on Armenia by allowing Iran's large energy infrastructure projects to move forward — unless Iran allows significant Russian participation in them. And though Tehran will try to re-engage in Nagorno-Karabakh, Russia will limit or possibly block its involvement. Nonetheless, on a range of issue, the two have enough common ground to work together.

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Fraternal Order Of Police Hacked, Private Files Reveal Criticism Of Obama, Sonya Sotomayor
Monday February 1st, 2016 at 3:31 AM

International Business Times

Electronic files of the Fraternal Order of Police — the United States’ largest police union — were hacked Thursday, revealing a series of forum posts criticizing President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor and undocumented immigrants, the Guardian reported. The names and addresses of officers as well as various contracts between police agencies and the cities they are located in were also released in the data dump. By early Friday afternoon, the FOP’s websitewas offline.

The FBI is investigating the hack, and the head of the FOP, Chuck Canterbury, said while some information was taken, more sensitive information such as financial details were most likely not compromised.

“Some names and addresses were taken,” Canterbury said. “It concerns us. We’re taking steps to try to notify our members but that is going to take some time.”

One 2010 post from a private forum by someone who went by the name of Robert Schafer wrote Obama was both anti-police and anti-law and order. Another post, from 2009, called Sotomayor a radical socialist, and said FOP officials shouldn’t have endorsed her.

Police unions, including the FOP, have been highly critical of Obama in the wake of the high number of police-involved shootings of civilians in the past two years, including the killing of Michael Brown, who was black, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, which sparked national protests, the Hill reported. Obama said after said after the Ferguson unrest there was no excuse for violence against police officers, but that there is also no excuse for police to use excessive force.

Contracts that numbered in the hundreds were also released in the data dump, some of which have been scrutinized in the past year in the wake of the officer-involved shootings. Some groups have criticized the contracts for making it more difficult to prosecute police officers involved in these shootings, the Huffington Post reported.

Death of the GRU Commander
Monday February 1st, 2016 at 1:50 AM

Defense One - All Content

In February 2014, contact ceased between U.S. and Russian military intelligence as part of an overall shutdown of defense relations in the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. It was the right policy move at the time, but it’s time to get U.S. and Russian military leaders, including intelligence officials, talking to each other again.

One unlikely and subtle advocate of the value of personal communications was the chief of Russian military intelligence, Igor Sergun, who died suddenly on Jan. 3 of a probable heart attack. Recently promoted to Colonel General, Sergun was only 58 years old, young even for an overworked, highly stressed Russian male. An experienced special operations veteran who made his name in the restive Northern Caucasus, Sergun became GRU chief in 2011, later becoming one of the troublingly imaginative architects of Russia’s hybrid, proxy aggression in Ukraine.

I’m frankly unsure how to feel about his death. As a career U.S. Army military intelligence officer, and our senior military attaché to Russia from 2012 to 2014, I met with General Sergun and his staff several times for extended periods. I found him soft-spoken, unassuming, complex, erudite and nuanced. And I learned that even as Sergun relentlessly directed global intelligence operations against our interests, he — paradoxically — also viewed constant confrontation with the U.S. and West as not in Russia’s best long-term interest.

Before U.S.–Russia relations collapsed, Sergun facilitated increased contact between our countries’ military intelligence leaders. During 2012-13, I watched as U.S. and Russian intelligence chiefs from strategic regional and global commands discreetly met in cities across Russia: Khabarovsk in the east, Rostov in the south, and also Sochi, just before the 2014 Winter Olympics. These meetings — which were often the first face-to-face interactions between these senior U.S. and Russian MI officers — always entailed straightforward, cordially hardnosed discussions that intelligence officers understood from a world of black and gray, and rarely white, as traditional adversaries, often foes. Clearly, both sides entered cautiously, but increasingly saw substantive talks emerge on carefully cleared topics.

Never lost or conceded was our unwavering support for our allies, and partners such as Ukraine, who ideally should want us to engage with Russia. But such meetings were invaluable opportunities for both sides to explain why they disagreed on issues such as Syria, the Arab Spring, missile defense and Ukraine. Consequently both sides began to discover issues on which we did agree: radical Sunni Islam, the need for a stable Afghanistan and Central Asia, global terrorism, looming demographic challenges, and future global resource competition.

Perhaps the highest-profile visit came in June 2013, when Sergun invited Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, for a three-day visit to Moscow. Following a trail carefully blazed by several predecessors, Flynn laid a wreath at Russia’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and visited the GRU’s ultra-modern headquarters outside Moscow. There he gave a unique hour-long address on leadership and intelligence to a conference room full of young GRU officers who, judging by their questions, clearly had never before encountered an American intelligence general.

Finally, Flynn hosted an unprecedented dinner for his counterpart in my residence at the U.S.Embassy. The GRU director arrived with two generals and an interpreter. It must have been bemusing for them to go through U.S. Embassy security onto U.S. soil for the first time. Always inquisitive, Sergun showed particular interest in a colorful Leroy Neiman print titled “Red Square.” The customary toasts were hoisted, though Sergun himself was a modest drinker. The last toast called for making “the airlocks fit,” an allusion to the extraordinary Apollo–Soyuz link-up in 1975 during the heart of the Cold War, and an allegory for improving relations. He liked that. All departed with U.S. Embassy baseball caps for their children. The following night Sergun hosted our U.S.delegation at the venerable Sovietsky Hotel, where he gave us a personal tour of Stalin’s time-warped suite upstairs.

General Sergun clearly placed a high value on these exchanges, which showed his desire to do more than simply learn about our military capabilities and intent. If I were Russian, obsessed by real and perceived existential threat, uneasy about the viability of my vast northern nation of demographically challenged citizens, I would be seriously worried. I believe these next-generation geostrategic concerns helped drive Sergun and other senior leaders toward these engagements with us.

My last contact with Sergun occurred in late 2013, just months before relations broke. I requested a meeting to deliver a message, and this powerful intelligence general arrived in short notice in modest street clothes. He took my message and we talked briefly about a planned visit to the United States with some of his senior GRU officers. That idea, of course, went stillborn when Russia invaded Crimea.

So where do we go from here? The status quo, despite some minor improvement, remains quite negative. We must find meaningful ways to talk and work with Russian military counterparts on geo-strategic concerns of mutual interest, of which there are plenty. Despite disagreements and frustrating disinformation, we must persist in this. Nations, especially ones that are traditional confrontational competitors that can existentially threaten each other, must constantly and intensively communicate via different channels and echelons, including sensitive military and intelligence conduits. This is hardly weakness or supplication; rather it displays strength, confidence and prudence, and it shows we are comfortable in our own skin.

Certainly we collectively can learn that much from the complex Colonel General Sergun.

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Новости России — Появился признак того, что у Путина есть проблемы
Sunday January 31st, 2016 at 8:45 AM

Позиции российской власти прочны, несмотря на падающий рубль, но есть один признак того, что у Владимира Путина проблемы, — мнение Леонида Радзиховского для "Апострофа".

В вопросе курса рубля я склонен согласиться с Песковым (пресс-секретарем президента РФ Владимира Путина Дмитрием Песковым, который 21 января заявил, что ничего страшного в обесценивании рубля пока нет, — "Апостроф"), что, в общем-то, никакой катастрофы для обычных российских граждан нет. Единственное, что в стране резко увечилось — цены на доллар. При этом цены в магазинах с высокой скоростью не меняются. Кто-то сказал, что обесценивание рубля на 10% дает рост стоимости обычных товаров на 1%. Вот и считайте.

Пока что эта тенденция вызывает тревогу и опасения, но не бьет непосредственно по людям. Если же судить о ситуации в России по макроэкономическим показателям, то это национальная катастрофа. Валюта обесценилась практически в два раза, а стоимость главного источника государственных доходов — нефти, упала более, чем в три раза. Тем не менее, если посмотреть на уровень жизни и потребления, то никакой катастрофы в РФ не произошло. По крайней мере, пока.

Политическая стабильность в России по-прежнему велика, вертикаль власти, как говорится, вмерзла в землю достаточно прочно, и пока никаких признаков, что почва под ней расползается, я не вижу. Кроме одного. Он заключается в том, что в стране перестали публиковать победные рейтинги Путина. Раньше нас чуть ли не каждый месяц оглоушивали этими цифрами, но уже два или даже три месяца их не публикуют.

Конечно, наши социологи могут все, что угодно. Они могут хоть 100% уровня поддержки посчитать. Но тот факт, что их данные по этому поводу давно не публикуют — достаточно странный. Я не связываю это с особой честностью социологов, но, с другой стороны, у них также есть определенные пределы лжи. Например, 5 или 10%. Так что вот вам косвенный признак того, что сейчас не все в порядке.

Люди не особо радуются нынешней ситуации, но говорить о том, что в России резко рухнул уровень жизни, нельзя. Важную роль в этом сыграли антисанкции Кремля. Они выстроили дополнительный барьер, и, конечно, он во многом сглаживает ситуацию. У нас очень много русских и белорусских товаров. Качество у них не очень, правда. Но для среднего уровня потребления это не так важно.

Вместе с тем, в РФ происходят довольно странные события в другом направлении. Например, заявления Кадырова (главы чеченской республики Рамзана Кадырова, — "Апостроф") о том, что сейчас необходимо беспощадно бороться с врагами народа. Причем делать это нужно по всей строгости закона. А враги названы по именам. Это тем более странное заявление, что в законе нет понятия "враг закона". Понять, зачем это делается, довольно сложно, но внутреннюю ситуацию в стране это мало расшатывает. Хотя бы потому, что об этой истории мало кто знает. По телевидению о ней не говорят.

Доверие к власти сохраняется, но это как мартовский снег. Он накапливается, подтаивает, а потом в один прекрасный момент падает. По моему мнению, именно так сейчас Путин и власть воспринимают ситуацию. Сегодня у них доверие есть, но если события будут развиваться так же катастрофически, то завтра народ почувствует падение уровня жизни. Тогда начнутся сильные шатания.

Путина спасает только одно — в стране нет никакой политической оппозиции. В чем Кремль действительно преуспел, так это в том, что в России фактически нет оппозиционных сил. Существуют болтуны, кухонные оппозиционеры, абсолютно прикормленные "оппозиционеры", которые сидят в Думе. Таким образом, все психически нормальные люди не видят никакой альтернативы Путину. Любая критика нынешнего главы Кремля в конечном итоге упирается в простейший вопрос: "Кто вместо него?" Но альтернативы нет... Это одна из главных логических основ, на которой держится нынешняя власть.

Но это пока народ не начнет реально страдать. Резкая нехватка денег заставит власть резать бюджет или печатать деньги. И то и другое нежелательно. Путин это прекрасно понимает. Поэтому выход из положения является очевидным — надо любой ценой договариваться с Западом о кредитах. Затыкать дыры заграничными финансами. Китай нам денег не даст, поэтому остается только Запад.

По моему мнению, именно это является причиной активизации дипломатических связей между российскими и американскими дипломатами. Поэтому я думаю, что Путин пытается разрешить эту ситуацию. Но сделать это крайне трудно. Потому что если он просто пойдет на выполнение Минских соглашений, это вызовет изумление у россиян. Народ к этому абсолютно не готов, а переложить ответственность на кого-то вряд ли удастся — сказать, что условный Сурков устроил это за спиной Путина — смешно. Все понимают, что такие решения принимает один-единственный человек. Второй вопрос — что украинская сторона, насколько я понимаю, совершенно не готова к тому, чтобы проводить на Донбассе перевыборы. Минск-2 так написан, что все пункты выполнить вообще невозможно. То одна сторона категорически против, то другая...

Но я думаю, что сейчас Москва крайне заинтересована в том, чтобы сняли санкции. Отмена ограничительных мер, в частности, запрета на финансирование — приоритетный вопрос для Кремля сегодня. России нужны деньги, значит, нужна отмена санкций, следовательно — необходимо договариваться по Минску. А договариваться не так уж просто.

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Новости России - Зачем Путина обвинили в убийстве
Sunday January 31st, 2016 at 8:42 AM

Недавно прозвучавшее заявление британского судьи о том, что экс-сотрудник ФСБ Александр Литвиненко в 2006 году, вероятно, был отравлен полонием с одобрения Владимира Путина, будет иметь серьезные последствия для президента России. Какие именно, - мнение Андрея Пионтковского для "Апострофа".

Обстоятельства убийства Литвиненко были настолько очевидны, что давно уже все знали, что убийство совершили офицеры российских спецслужб Луговой и Ковтун, которым самим не пришло бы в голову забрать полоний на секретном, единственном в мире предприятии, выпускающем этот продукт, и вылететь с ним в Лондон. Ясно, что они получили приказ от вышестоящего начальства. Порученная им миссия радиоактивной атаки в столице государства "Большой восьмерки" была настолько масштабна, что санкционировать ее мог только глава государства.

Поэтому ничего нового по существу событий десятилетней давности мы не узнали. Для меня стала большой неожиданностью резкость и определенность формулировки обвинения. Потому что когда англичане говорят probably approved, то есть, "возможно санкционировал Путин", то это — высшая дипломатически допустимая степень обвинения. Ведь просто сказать "санкционировал" нельзя, потому что не было состязательного процесса, где у Путина был бы адвокат. Но раз британский судья говорит такое в палате общин, а после ту же формулировку повторяют министр внутренних дел и премьер-министр, значит у англичан имеются совершенно бесспорные секретные данные, видимо, какие-то прослушки разговоров этих двух деятелей, когда они были в Лондоне и общались с Москвой.

Это очень сильный моральный удар по Путину. Патрушева (в 2006 году — главу ФСБ, а сейчас— секретаря Совета безопасности РФ, — "Апостроф"), в данном случае, можно вынести за скобки. Кого он вообще интересует?

Теперь любой государственный или общественный деятель, Папа Римский, президент США или президент Порошенко, например, пожимая руку Путину, должен понимать, что он пожимает руку убийцы, который организовал одно из самых отвратительных и жестоких политических убийств последнего времени. Это серьезное изменение не только морального, но и политического статуса Путина. Поэтому понятна болезненная реакция Москвы.

Естественный вопрос: а почему лондонский суд молчал 10 лет? Ведь ясно, что они там это все знали и раньше. Ответ тоже носит политический характер: я думаю, решение принял не один (британский премьер, — "Апостроф") Кэмерон, он советовался с Обамой и другими лидерами G7.

Путин перешел все возможные красные линии — это аннексия Крыма, война на Донбассе, ядерный шантаж. И они решили, что его пора окончательно переводить в разряд нерукопожатных. Россия все-таки крупная держава, и они долгое время надеялись, что с ним можно о чем-то договориться, что он может измениться.

И то, что после 10-летних раздумий они решили наконец назвать Путина убийцей, означает, что ни на какие серьезные отношения Запад с ним больше не рассчитывает.

В феврале будет доклад по Boeing. К тому же, новое польское правительство возобновило расследование по катастрофе польского самолета, где погибло 100 представителей высшей польской политической элиты (в 2010 году в России, включая президента страны Леха Качиньского, — "Апостроф").

Путин выводится в круг неприкасаемых. Глава государства пользуется иммунитетом, и юридически ему обвинения не грозят. Но это серьезный сигнал российским политическим элитам, среди которых мы сейчас наблюдаем определенные признаки раскола. Что, конечно, сокращает срок, который Путин еще будет находиться у власти. А после того, как он власть потеряет, ему много чего грозит.

"Черные лебеди" как бы стаей слетаются над Путиным (обещая ему трудпрогнозируемые события и обстоятельства, —"Апостроф"). Это переход количества в качество. Если человек периодически совершает преступные действия, даже вялый, нерешительный, не желающий создавать себе проблемы Запад рано или поздно вынужден реагировать...

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Новости России — Почему Кремлю придется искать новый портрет вместо Путина
Sunday January 31st, 2016 at 8:38 AM

Почему после появления компромата Запада на Владимира Путина Кремлю придется менять главный "портрет", и в связи с чем активизировались бывший главарь ДНР Игорь Стрелков (Гиркин) и другие националисты, — мнение Александра Сотника для "Апострофа".

"Гипс снимают, клиент уезжает!" — примерно в таком истерическом состоянии сегодня находятся Кремль и Лубянка. Они бьются в эпилептическом припадке и вывешивают на окнах "конторы" портрет Обамы с надписью "Killer" (портрет был вывешен напротив посольства США в Москве, — "Апостроф"). Остается только разводить руками: неужели ребята настолько немощны?

Да, они немощны и импотентны. Вся их мощь — в плетении интриг и коварстве их исполнения — была обрушена ценой на нефть и экономическими санкциями. Искандеры сдулись. Запад долго пытался "привести в чувство" заигравшегося полковника Путина, но в итоге поставил окончательный диагноз: "Болен". И вывалил на стол внушительный компромат. Это означает, что Путин более не сможет представлять Россию в качестве президента, с ним попросту никто не станет разговаривать. В отличие от России, где каждый плебей боится вымолвить свободное слово, трудно себе представить западного политика, который решится пожать руку коррумпированному убийце-педофилу (о причастности президента РФ к убийству экс-сотрудника ФСБ Александра Литвиненко заявил британский судья, погибший же обвинял Путина в педофилии, что снова всплыло в западной прессе, — "Апостроф"), не опасаясь за свою репутацию, которая, безусловно, будет уничтожена прессой и осуждена обществом в следующий же момент.

Стало быть, Кремлю придется менять "портрет". Когда и каким образом? — это вопрос вопросов. Пока у кооператива "Озеро" — у его условного "политбюро" и экономической группы — еще есть 300 млрд долларов. Их надо успеть отжать, вывести из страны в какой-нибудь Гонконг, после чего — быстро "сделать ноги". Но до этого момента "братва" еще поиграет внутри России. Вести серьезную политическую игру вне РФ ей уже никто не даст, поэтому на "любимом народе" они "оттопчутся" по полной программе. Уже запущена страшилка "Кадыров", уже запрыгали на политическом столе националистические заводные игрушки "Стрелков-Лимонов-Просвирнин", и то ли еще будет.

Я бы не исключал в ближайшее время серьезных политических провокаций — вплоть до нанесения увечий и убийств известным медийным оппозиционерам. Режиму это очень нужно для отвлечения внимания. Не хочется никого пугать, но после показательного убийства Бориса Немцова в нашей стране возможен самый жуткий хоррор. Кремль это умеет, а сегодня уже явно хочет этого. Назвав Кадырова "эффективным", Путин фактически дал ему отмашку: "Если очень хочется — то можешь мочить". У Кадырова полно "советников", в том числе — и из ФСО, с самого верха. Они, если что, — подскажут.

Россия вступает в эпоху смуты, когда режим рушится за кулисами, а в партере еще об этом не подозревают, наблюдая на авансцене дешевый водевиль с переодеванием.

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Putin Lives in Fear of Another Chechen War
Sunday January 31st, 2016 at 7:39 AM

Newsweek

This article first appeared on the Atlantic Council site.

“I ask Ramzan Akhmatovich for forgiveness and thank him for not yet killing me.”

This is an example of the messages Russian opposition members have been posting on their social media pages. They are appealing, of course, to the leader of the Chechen republic, Ramzan Kadyrov.

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The story of this social media campaign begins on January 12, when Kadyrov declared that all members of the “non-systemic opposition”—those who truly oppose Russian President Vladimir Putin—are “enemies of the people.” In response, an opposition parliamentarian, Konstantin Senchenko, wrote on Facebook that Kadyrov was “the shame of Russia.”

In the post, Senchenko said that the Chechen leader discredited everything that was great about Russia. Kadyrov demanded an apology. On January 15, Senchenko allegedly spoke with some “serious” people from Chechnya and then immediately apologized to Kadyrov in front of a camera. His hands shook and his voice trembled.

Some opposition members were disappointed by Senchenko’s apology, but others quickly rose to his defense, reminding the others of the fate that often befalls Kadyrov’s enemies.

In the aughts, Kadyrov’s bodyguard, Umar Israilov, fled to Europe and publicly revealed his former boss’s many crimes, linking him to a series of murders, kidnappings and torture between 2003 and 2005. In 2006, Israilov was given political asylum in Austria.

Three years later, he was shot at the entrance of a supermarket in Vienna. Whoever ordered the shooting was never found because the Russians refused to cooperate with the Austrian investigators. Kadyrov ignored the incident.

On September 24, 2008, Ruslan Yamadaev, who was reportedly being considered as Kadyrov’s replacement, was shot dead in Moscow. After the murder, one of Ruslan’s brothers, Sulim Yamadaev, fled to the United Arab Emirates where he, too, was fatally shot on March 28, 2009. He died two days later. A third Yamadaev brother, Isa, accused Kadyrov of ordering the murders. An attempt to assassinate Isa failed.

The assassination of Boris Nemtsov, the prominent Russian opposition politician, marked the most significant recent attack on a Kadyrov opponent. Nemtsov was shot directly across from the Kremlin on February 27, 2015. Chechen criminals have been accused in the assassination.

The person who ordered the shooting has so far not been identified. Ilya Yashin, a close friend and colleague of Nemtsov’s, and many others are convinced that the trail leads to Kadyrov.

Russian politicians are too terrified to talk about Kadyrov’s alleged connection to such crimes. Still, many popular liberal bloggers, politicians and journalists publicly support Senchenko’s statement that Kadyrov is the shame of Russia. They are showing their support by using the hashtag #KadyrovShameofRussia (#КадыровПозорРоссии).

The movement is gaining momentum and the attention of Chechen elites. A day after the hashtag was launched, Chechen elites started their own, #KadyrovPrideofRussia (#КадыровГордостьРоссии).

The head of the Chechen parliament and Kadyrov’s close ally, Magomed Daudov, posted a photo on Instagram of Kadyrov’s guard dog Tarzan, who, according to Daudov, is ready to tear to pieces all enemies of the people. In the same post, Daudov listed the names of journalists and politicians that he considers traitors to Russia.

In a lighthearted response, opposition members posted on their social networking accounts photos of their own pets, including furry cats, ostensibly ready to face Tarzan head on.

This barrage of threats has been taking place under the Kremlin’s nose. No one in Moscow—not Putin, not Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, not Duma Chairman Sergei Naryshkin, not Federal Assembly Speaker Valentina Matviyenko—has commented publicly on Kadyrov’s behavior. Kadyrov appears to be untouchable in Russia today.

Experts offer several explanations for the harassment of the opposition by Kadyrov and his inner circle. According to one explanation, Chechnya’s economic crisis is driving its leadership to prove its loyalty to the Kremlin. But this argument overlooks Kadyrov’s wild card: a massive personal army that is loyal to Kadyrov alone.

In these circumstances, Moscow’s support and influence is increasingly irrelevant in Chechnya. If federal authorities attempt to arrest Kadyrov, a third Chechen War will break out—a conflict that the Kremlin can ill afford. Putin has become a prisoner of his own creation.

Another argument, and one that is closer to the truth, states that Kadyrov is trying to see how much he can get away with. He acts and waits to see what the Kremlin’s reaction will be, or more preciselywhether the Kremlin will react at all. Kadyrov is testing Putin, making sure that his own power is truly uncontested.

Opposition figure Alexei Navalny offers another convincing theory on Kadyrov. He proposes that as the first anniversary of Nemtsov’s murder approaches, the Chechen leader is trying to divert attention away from his own implication in the case by starting a war of words with the liberal opposition.

Considering that there has been no information so far on whether Kadyrov is included on any sanctions lists (with the exception of one report in 2013 that said he was on a “classified list” of targets of U.S. sanctions), the odious politics out of Chechnya may not just be a problem for Russian opposition leaders: Nobody knows who Kadyrov will consider an enemy tomorrow.

Despite threats, the opposition is not backing down. Last week, Yashin announced that he and his team had completed a new report on Kadyrov, tentatively titled, “Kadyrov: A Threat to National Security.” Yashin will launch the report on February 23, a symbolic day in Russia as it celebrates the “Defenders of the Fatherland”—veterans and those who have served the country.

So far, few Western media outlets have reported on the ongoing threats to the Russian opposition and the men and women brave enough to stand up to Russia’s Chechen mafia. As the anniversary of Nemtsov’s murder approaches, this must change before more brave Russians fall to the same fate.

Aleksandra Garmazhapova is a journalist with Novaya Gazeta, St. Petersburg, and a columnist with the Free Russia Foundation.

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New BBG CEO John Lansing is having a positive impact, but is it enough?
Saturday January 30th, 2016 at 2:42 PM

BBG Watch

BBGWatcher January 29, 2016

Puerto Rico Non-Profit’s Tax Filings Raise Questions
Friday January 29th, 2016 at 11:35 AM

Washington Free Beacon

Alejandro Javier Garcia Padilla / AP

BY: Alana Goodman

Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla urged the public this week to ignore concerns about a corporate-funded charity that lists his brother as the sole employee, even as the media and ethics watchdogs have raised questions about the group’s finances and backers.

The Washington Free Beacon reported last week that corporations with business interests in Puerto Rico have been pouring money into a newly renamed non-profit group called the Sociedad Economica De Amigos Del Pais. The group’s governing director is Antonio Garcia Padilla, the brother of the embattled Puerto Rico governor, who earned $70,000 from the Sociedad Economica in 2014.

Governor Garcia Padilla came under fire in December after several members of his administration and his top fundraiser were indicted after a sweeping bribery and extortion probe. According to the indictment, the fundraiser leveraged his relationship with another brother of the governor in order to steer lucrative contracts to favored companies.

Earlier this week, Governor Garcia Padilla dismissed criticism of the Sociedad Economica, saying he had “no relationship” with the group, other than that he knew its board members and that it was run by his brother.

The governor also blasted the Free Beacon as “right wing,” echoing a memo drafted last week by the lobbying group SKD Knickerbocker, which serves as the public relations firm for the Puerto Rico government.

SKD Knickerbocker, which told the Free Beacon that it was also hired last week by an official at the Sociedad Economica, has declined to respond to questions about the non-profit’s tax filings.

According to Sociedad Economica’s 2014 financial disclosures, Antonio Garcia Padilla worked 40 hours per week for the group and earned $70,000.

The 40-hour claim has raised eyebrows at the University of Puerto Rico, where Garcia Padilla serves as a full time law school professor.

The student council is calling on the administration to investigate whether Garcia Padilla violated law school faculty bylaws prohibiting full-time professors from working more than 12 hours per week for outside employers. They are also calling for an audit of other professors who hold outside positions.

“We are discussing this issue with the student council of the Law School,” said Guillermo Guasp Perez, president of the UPR student council. “They are going to have their dean certify if this professor Garcia Padilla is complying with these bylaws or not.”

University of Puerto Rico President Uroyoan Walker did not respond to a request for comment. Garcia Padilla also did not respond to request for comment.

The Sociedad Economica was founded a decade ago by former New York SEIU chief Dennis Rivera and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson as a Hispanic legal rights group called the “Hispanic Education and Legal Fund.” In 2014, the group changed its name to the “Sociedad Economica De Amigos del Pais” with the revised mission of “support[ing] economic development in Puerto Rico.”

Garcia Padilla was named governing director in 2014. That year, the group received $275,000 in donations from a handful of top corporations in Puerto Rico—more than twice the amount it had received over the previous six years combined.

One of the group’s directors told the Free Beacon that the organization does not operate programs but instead works to attract corporations into doing business in Puerto Rico.

Sociedad Economica’s board secretary, Kathryn Wylde, said the group received free rent from Banco Popular, the largest bank in Puerto Rico and major donor to the Sociedad Economica. The head of Popular Inc., which owns the bank, sits on the Sociedad Economica’s board.

However, the Sociedad Economica listed over $30,000 in rent payments in its 2014 financial disclosures. A spokesperson for Banco Popular did not respond to request for comment about the rent payments.

The Sociedad Economica, under its previous name, the “Hispanic Legal and Education Fund,” was allegedly used to funnel over $1 million to a charity run by former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson that was said to be a “vehicle for kickbacks,” the New York Post reported in November.

The group recently caught the eye of the National Legal and Policy Center, a watchdog organization that monitors government ethics issues.

“Anytime a non-profit close to a political figure gets major funding from companies or individuals who can benefit from the actions of that politician, it raises ethical red flags,” Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, told the Free Beacon last week. “When the non-profit also employs a family member of the politician, the situation raises improper influence or pay-to-play issues. The public is entitled to complete transparency.”

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Zika Virus Is Spreading ‘Explosively,’ WHO Chief Says
Thursday January 28th, 2016 at 1:58 PM

The head of the World Health Organization said Thursday she would form an emergency committee that will meet in Geneva Monday to discuss the Zika virus, which she said is spreading “explosively.”

“The level of alarm is extremely high,” WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said in remarks to a regularly scheduled meeting of the public health agency’s executive board. “Questions abound. We need to get some answers quickly.”

As many as 1.5 million Brazilians may have been infected with the mosquito-borne Zika virus and now the U.S. and other countries are also reporting new cases. But what is the Zika virus? And why does it pose a threat to pregnant women? Dipti Kapadia explains. Photo: Getty Images

The announcement by WHO underscores the alarming speed with which a virus that began as an obscure tropical malady afflicting Africa and then several remote Western Pacific islands has transformed into a major international health threat, particularly within the Americas. More than 20 countries in the hemisphere, including Mexico, Panama, El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, as well as the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, have registered cases of active Zika transmission, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

No country has been hit harder than Brazil, where health officials estimate as many as 1.5 million people may be infected by Zika. More puzzling and concerning to health officials is that Brazil uniquely has registered thousands of suspected cases in which the Zika virus is believed to be causing babies to be born with microcephaly, or underdeveloped skulls and brains.

More than 4,100 cases of what was initially suspected of being Zika-related microcephaly have been recorded in Brazil, and nearly 70 babies have died. the role of Zika in some of those cases has been discounted but the vast majority of them are still under investigation. In all of 2014, the country recorded 147 microcephaly cases.

Although the link isn't yet proven, medical authorities believe that Zika can be transmitted from pregnant women to fetuses through the placenta. The CDC has warned pregnant women to avoid travel to Zika-infected countries. It has also urged women who are trying to become pregnant to talk with their doctors about the planned trip, and to protect themselves from mosquitoes if they do go.

Pregnant women are likely most at risk during their first trimester, when brain development is occurring, the CDC says, but adds there is evidence the risk continues into the second trimester as well.

The WHO committee will meet Monday to decide what measures are needed to stem the spread of the virus and to prioritize research areas. Among the possible measures could be to declare the spread of Zika to be a “public health emergency of international concern,” a designation intended to denote international public health risk and to corral political and financial support to fight epidemics. The WHO has declared them rarely: for the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009, for polio in May 2014, and for Ebola in August the same year.

The agency was criticized for declaring Ebola to be a public health emergency months after the epidemic began, and only when it was already spreading rapidly in West Africa.

Dr. Chan said she was prompted to call the meeting for Monday because of the potential for further international spread given the wide geographic distribution of the aedes mosquito that transmits Zika, a lack of immunity in people who are exposed, and the absence of vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tests. Also of concern, she said, were the virus’s suspected links to microcephaly and Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks the nervous system.

“Conditions associated with this year’s El Niño weather pattern are expected to increase mosquito populations greatly in many areas,” she added.

The spread of Zika has raised concerns in the U.S., where 31 cases have been reported in 11 states and the District of Columbia since 2015 in travelers returning from countries where Zika is circulating, according to the latest CDC data. Another 19 laboratory-confirmed cases have occurred in Puerto Rico, and one in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the CDC said. Most have been mild illnesses, said Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal deputy director.

The CDC has warned pregnant women to avoid travel to 23 countries and territories, most in the Americas, where Zika is circulating. It has also urged women who are trying to get pregnant to talk with their doctors before travel, and to protect themselves from mosquito bites.

“The virus is spreading throughout the Americas and we expect more countries to be affected,“ Dr. Schuchat said.

Zika isn’t spreading in the continental U.S., Dr. Schuchat said. “We have not yet seen local transmission of Zika in the continental U.S.,” she said.

While U.S. outbreaks are possible and “even likely,” she said, since the aedes mosquito is common in the U.S. South, they are expected to be limited in scope, since U.S. urban areas aren’t as densely populated as in other countries in the Americas and the U.S. has “stronger mosquito control.”

WHO’s action is the latest and so far most visible signal of the international health community’s growing anxiety, amplifying the concerns of world governments. This week, U.S. President Barack Obama urged cooperation between the U.S. and Brazil in speeding development of a Zika vaccine, which health authorities say is still three to five years from development.

Some Brazilian health authorities welcomed WHO’s announcement, saying Brazil and the rest of the hemisphere would benefit from the heightened global attention to slowing the Zika virus’s advance.

“WHO recognizes that this is an international emergency, and not a problem of one country,” said Carlos Fortaleza, an infectologist at the university of São Paulo state, UNESP. “The response time of international authorities to combat the epidemic should be faster, since with international support there is an exchange of experiences, and also more investment in research.”

Rafael Cortez, a political scientist at São Paulo-based consultant Tendencias Consultoria, said Brazil’s struggle with an economic recession and political turmoil has hindered its ability to stem the Zika outbreak. Brazil also is battling epidemics of two other similar mosquito-borne viruses, dengue and chikungunya.

“This combination of factors leads to a lack of adequate answers to the problem, by the politician system,” Mr. Cortez said.

Zika, a tropical disease like yellow fever and dengue, is spread to people through mosquito bites, not person to person. About one in five people who are infected with Zika virus will develop symptoms, the most common of which are fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis, or redness in the eyes. Other symptoms are muscle pain and headache. It is usually a mild disease lasting a few days or a week, and rarely requires hospitalization.

The virus was first identified in Uganda in 1947, and has caused outbreaks in Africa, Southeast Asia and on several Pacific islands. It is believed to have crossed the Pacific and been introduced into Brazil in 2014.

Zika is spread primarily by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, commonly known as the yellow-fever mosquito. In the U.S., its range extends from South Carolina and Florida along the Gulf Coast to Texas, as well as Hawaii and some parts of Arizona. Zika is also spread, perhaps to a lesser extent, by the Aedes albopictus mosquito, whose range in the summer can reach as far north as New York and New Jersey, as well as parts of Illinois and Indiana.

Several U.S. airlines in recent days have offered passengers planning travel to destinations where Zika has spread such options as changing to alternative destinations, switching travel dates or canceling and receiving refunds. In most cases, the travelers must be pregnant or attest to trying to become pregnant. Delta Air Lines Inc. DAL -3.15 % said customers may make fee-waived changes to future tickets if they are made by Feb. 29. United Continental Holdings Inc. UAL -2.78 % said customers should contact its call centers to rebook or receive refunds. United, on its website, included a link to the CDC’s information on Zika.

American Airlines Group Inc., AAL -4.21 % probably the largest U.S. carrier to Latin America, initially said it would refund customers who provided doctor’s notes saying they were unable to travel due to pregnancy, and only to four destinations in Central America. But American later this week expanded the policy to include pregnant women and their companion travelers, who still would need a doctor’s note related to the woman’s pregnancy. The company didn’t disclose how many countries would be covered but said it would review travelers’ situations on a case-by-case basis. JetBlue Airways Corp.JBLU -6.90 % joined in this week as well with a refund and rebooking policy.

Hotel chain Hilton Worldwide, HLT -2.87 % which has 25 properties in Latin America and the Caribbean, said cancellations were being considered on a case-by-case basis. “Hilton Worldwide is working closely with local health departments and its properties to follow CDC prevention recommendations for Zika virus,” it said.

—Susan Carey, Rogerio Jelmayer and Ryan Dube contributed to this article.

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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tuesday January 26th, 2016 at 7:13 PM

The news agency Adnkronos reported in 2009 that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, under an assumed name, had traveled to Bosnia in 1995, as a humanitarian aid worker for Egyptian Relief.[20]Adnkronos quoted the Sarajevo paper Daily Fokus, reporting that local intelligence officials confirmed Mohammed had obtained Bosnian citizenship in November 1995.[20] Those officials told Daily Fokusthat Egyptian Relief was a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.

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Alexander Litvinenko inquiry: Friend of murdered spy sent T-shirt threatening him with polonium poisoning
Monday January 25th, 2016 at 11:16 AM

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A friend of Alexander Litvinenko received a T-shirt appearing to threaten him with polonium poisoning four years after the murder of the former spy.

One of Mr Litvinenko's alleged killers sent a T-shirt bearing the words "nuclear death is knocking on your door" to be delivered at the London office of billionaire Boris Berezovsky, the inquiry heard.

Andrei Lugovoi was said to have given the top to an associate in Moscow and asked for it be delivered as a "gift" to Mr Berezovsky, a friend of the poisoned spy, in 2010.

The front of the black T-shirt had the words "POLONIUM-210 CSKA LONDON, HAMBURG To Be Continued", while "CSKA Moscow Nuclear Death Is Knocking Your Door" was printed on the back.

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Inquiry chairman Sir Robert Owen's final report said the writing was "in extraordinary terms".

It said: "Taken on its own (and without, of course, the benefit of oral evidence from Mr Lugovoi), it would be difficult to know what to make of this T-shirt.

"On any view, it demonstrates that Mr Lugovoi approved of Mr Litvinenko's murder. It was also, clearly, a threat to Mr Berezovsky.

"Further than that, the T-shirt could be seen as an admission by Mr Lugovoi that he had poisoned Mr Litvinenko, made at a time when he was confident that he would never be extradited from Russia, and wished to taunt Mr Berezovsky with that fact.

"Alternatively, it could, perhaps, be seen as an extraordinarily tasteless joke."

Berezovsky died at his Berkshire home in 2013.

The murder of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London was carried out by the country’s secret service “probably” on the orders of President Vladimir Putin, an inquiry concluded today.

Kremlin-critic Litvinenko, 44, was poisoned with a radioactive isotope slipped into his tea in a posh hotel in 2006.

After 34 days of evidence to a public inquiry over seven months, a 328-page report out today found it was likely his death was a state-sponsored assassination with the trail leading all the way to the top.

Two former Russian agents, Andrei Lugovoy and Dimitri Kovtun, carried out the hit, the inquiry found, but have refused to be extradited or help the Met Police in their investigation.

Inquiry judge Sir Robert Owen found: “I am sure that Mr Litvinenko did not ingest the polonium 210 either by accident or to commit suicide. I am sure, rather, that he was deliberately poisoned by others.

“The FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by [FSB leader] Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin.”

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Alexander Litvinenko assassination theories - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sunday January 24th, 2016 at 3:48 PM

Several theories on the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko were circulated following his death from polonium 210 poisoning on 23 November 2006. Litvinenko was a former officer of Russian Federal Security Service who escaped prosecution in Russia and later received a political asylum inGreat Britain. Litvinenko wrote two books throughout his career, Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within and Lubyanka Criminal Group, where he accused Russian secret services of staging Russian apartment bombings and other terrorism acts to bring Vladimir Putin to power in 2000. On 1 November 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill and was hospitalised. He died three weeks later, and becoming the first known victim of lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome.[1][2]According to his doctors: "Litvinenko's murder represents an ominous landmark: the beginning of an era of nuclear terrorism".[3][4][5] Litvinenko's allegations about the misdeeds of the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB) and his public deathbed accusations that the Russian government was behind his unusual malady resulted in worldwide media coverage.[6]

Exploring Al-Qa’ida’s Russian Connection | The XX Committee
Sunday January 24th, 2016 at 2:49 PM

The XX Committee

[Note: This is an unusually controversial piece, even for my blog, for reasons that will quickly become obvious. Linkages between Al-Qa’ida and Russian intelligence have been discussed in hushed tones among spies in many countries, for years, and this matter has been a “hobby file” of mine for some time. Here is a think-piece on it, in the hope of spurring additional discussion and research into this important yet murky matter. This is particularly necessary given rising tensions between Moscow and the West at present. Considering the subject, I have eschewed my usual hyperlinks in favor of proper end-notes.]

“There are two histories: The official history, mendacious, which is given to us; and the secret history, where you find the real causes of events, a shameful history.”

– Honoré de Balzac

The history of al-Qa’ida has been extensively documented in many languages. Since the 9/11 attacks on the United States, massive research has been devoted to uncovering the origins of the global jihad movement, its strategies, concepts of operations, and ultimate aspirations.[1] Such works have been assisted by the willingness of al-Qa’ida to talk openly about some parts of its narrative. While many aspects of al-Qa’ida’s almost thirty-year history have been examined in impressive detail, other parts of the story remain shrouded in mystery. In some cases, gaps are caused by a lack of information available to analysts and researchers. However, other underreported stories in the development of the global jihad movement remain untold, or unexplained, by apparent design.

No greater example exists of this “blank page” in the al-Qa’ida story than its connections to foreign intelligence services. While it is generally known that bin Laden’s legionaries have fostered ties, at times, with secret services as varied as the Saudi, Pakistani, Sudanese, Iranian, Iraqi, and Bosnian, few details have emerged, thanks to the desire on all sides to keep the saga out of the media spotlight.[2] The murkiest of these relations, however, has been the connection between al-Qa’ida and Russian intelligence. While the outlines of the story have been known for years, and even admitted by Moscow and the mujahidin, details remain elusive. Moreover, asking important questions about this relationship seems to be an issue few appear interested in probing deeply, even in the United States.

That Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s right-hand man and the leader of the global jihad movement since bin Laden’s death in May 2011, spent almost a half-year in the mid-1990s in the custody of Russian intelligence is admitted by both sides and is a matter of public record.[3] Just as significant, Zawahiri’s Russian sojourn occurred at a pivotal point in the development of al-Qa’ida; the shift in strategy, resulting in attacks on the “far enemy” (i.e. the United States), the road leading to 9/11, occurred after Zawahiri’s imprisonment by the Russians.

The outline of the story is clear.[4] At about 4 am on December 1, 1996, Zawahiri was detained in southern Russia while attempting to enter Chechnya, the breakaway province of Moscow recently roiled by war. Accompanying the doctor in the van were two other radicals from Egypt and a Chechen guide. The Egyptians, wanted men in their home country and several others, were traveling under aliases; Zawahiri was “Abdullah Imam Mohammed Amin,” according to the Sudanese passport he carried, which had stamps from many countries – among them Yemen, Malaysia, Singapore – he had visited in the 20 months before his arrest.

Zawahiri’s two Egyptian companions were veteran mujahidin from Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), the group Zawahiri had been associated with for years and had headed since 1993. Ahmad Salama Mabruk ran EIJ’s activities in Azerbaijan under the cover of a trading firm called Bavari-C, while Mahmud Hisham al-Hennawi had extensive experience on jihad in parts of Asia.

The three Arabs were extensively interrogated by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), which noted the inmates’ religious fervor, and the surprising support they received from Islamic organizations around the Muslim world. Twenty-six imams signed an appeal for the release of the three “businessmen”; others denounced Russian authorities of doing “the devil’s work” by detaining the hard-praying Muslims.

The FSB had ample reason to doubt the Arabs’ cover story. Among the items confiscated from the trio included details about bank accounts in Hong Kong, mainland China, Malaysia, and the U.S. (specifically St. Louis), plus substantial cash in seven currencies. Their laptop computer was seized and subjected to forensic analysis by the FSB. “Mr. Amin,” whose Sudanese passport depicted a Western-dressed middle-aged man with a very short beard, arrived in Russia possessing two forged graduation certificates from Cairo University’s medical faculty, with differing dates. FSB investigation of Bavari-C, the EIJ front company in Baku, quickly determined that no such firm existed in Azerbaijan.

Radical Muslims in Russia, including one member of the Duma, pleaded for their release, explaining that the Arabs had come to Russia to “study the market for food trade.” Various activists from across the region likewise wrote letters on the men’s behalf, claiming they embodied “honesty and decency”; the advocates included leading Arab mujahidin, among them Tharwat Salah Shehata, later head of EIJ. When Shehata got permission to visit “Mr. Amin” in his prison cell, he was given an encrypted letter by the inmate; after the visit, the FSB claimed to have found $3,000 in the cell occupied by the Arabs.

When the case finally went to court in April 1997, “Mr. Amin” prayed hard and lied effectively, claiming that he had entered Russia “to find out the price for leather, medicine, and other goods.” Rejecting the prosecution’s request for a three-year sentence, the judge gave them six months each; almost immediately they were released, time served. The FSB returned the men their possessions, including the cash, communications gear, and the laptop. After their release, Zawahiri spent ten days clandestinely meeting with Islamists in Dagestan, which presumably had been the original purpose of his trip to the region. Shortly thereafter, he headed for Afghanistan to establish his fateful alliance with bin Laden, which was cemented in the mid-February 1998 announcement of a new partnership between the men and their organizations in a Global Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders. Thus was al-Qa’ida officially born and the path to 9/11 was established.

Zawahiri has been tight-lipped about his half-year in Russia; his numerous writings and pronouncements about his life barely mention the tale. “God blinded them to our identities,” he explained. The FSB agrees that they failed to identify the leading holy warrior. “In 1997, Russian special services were not aware of al-Zawahiri,” elaborated an FSB spokesman in 2003: “However, later, using various databases, we managed to identify this former detainee.”[5]

There are many reasons to doubt the official story told by both sides in the affair. In the first place, Zawahiri was one of the world’s most wanted terrorists in 1996, having played a leading role in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981; the doctor’s role in the subsequent public trial was televised in many countries. He was hardly a secret mujahid. Furthermore, it is difficult to believe that a security service as proficient and thorough as the FSB did not have its interest piqued by the appearance of three Arab mystery men, bearing multiple identities and cash, in the middle of a warzone. It is equally difficult to accept that the FSB was unable to uncover the mysteries contained in Zawahiri’s laptop – as the Americans would do after many such laptops belonging to al-Qa’ida leadership were captured in Afghanistan after 9/11 – had the Russians really wanted to. Last, it can be assumed that the FSB would have tortured the Arabs to obtain information, had that been deemed necessary; and Zawahiri’s breaking by the Egyptian security service through torture in the 1980s is a matter of public record, and a subject of some remorse by the al-Qa’ida leader.

What, then, is to be made of Dr. Zawahiri’s Russian sojourn? Few have bothered to ask the question in any detail.[6] While some conspiracy theorists have touched the issue, they have shed little light on the real story.[7] While the idea that Russian intelligence may have developed a relationship with Zawahiri sounds fantastic to most in the West, the notion is far from implausible, and is consistent with known Soviet/Russian espionage practices. During the Cold War, the KGB had robust ties with many terrorist groups, including several from the Middle East. Its links to the PLO, including arms and training for cadres, were substantial for decades, while Palestinian groups like PFLP-GC were, in effect, wholly owned subsidiaries of the KGB. It would be naïve to think such ties evaporated with the Soviet Union.

Moreover, anyone acquainted with the Russian practice of provokatsiya (provocation) as Moscow’s preferred counterterrorism technique, finds the idea of a Russian relationship with al-Qa’ida to be entirely plausible. Indeed, such is the easiest explanation for Zawahiri’s six months in Russian custody and sudden release back to wage jihad.

Hard evidence about what Zawahiri was doing in Russian custody has not been forthcoming. Dissident FSB Colonel Aleksandr Litvinenko made explosive claims. In a 2005 interview, Litvinenko asserted that Zawahiri actually underwent training by the FSB in Dagestan during his half-year in Russian custody, and that Russian intelligence then dispatched him to Afghanistan to become bin Laden’s right-hand man. “I worked in the same division [of the FSB],” he stated, “I have grounds to assert that al-Zawahiri is not the only link between the FSB and al-Qa’ida.”[8]

Litvinenko’s assertions are impossible to substantiate, though his assassination in London a little over a year after giving that interview, apparently at the hands of Russian intelligence, gives the claims perhaps more believability than they might otherwise warrant.[9] Just as important, it is known that Russian intelligence had ties to Islamist extremists in Chechnya long before Zawahiri entered the region. From the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian intelligence formed discreet ties with radical Islamists in the Caucasus, including men who would later become leading mujahidin.

In perhaps the best example, Shamil Basayev, the long-serving emir of the mujahidin in Chechnya, was an agent of Russian military intelligence (GRU) in the 1990s. In 1992-93, he and his brother Shirvani fought in Abkhazia against Georgian forces, leading fighters as surrogates for Moscow’s policies in the breakaway region.[10] Although Basayev was for many years Russia’s most wanted man and alleged to be behind dozens of terrorist attacks on Russian soil, his collaboration with Russian intelligence has long been something of an open secret. Not long before Basayev’s death in July 2006, apparently at the hands of the FSB, a GRU officer cryptically noted to the media, “We know everything about him.”[11]

Secular elements of the Chechen independence movement have long alleged collaboration between Moscow and the mujahidin, with the aim of discrediting the nationalist cause by tarring it with extremism and terrorism. Moderate imams in Chechnya have been reluctant to have ties to more radical Muslims, fearing them to be Russian agents provocateurs.[12] Collusion between radical Islamists and Russian special services in the Caucasus would be fully consistent with traditional Soviet/Russian counterterrorism techniques; it also adds a very different dimension to understanding the Chechen wars of the last fifteen years, and their links to the global jihad.

The mujahidin-led invasion of Dagestan in August 1999 in brigade strength that helped trigger the Second Chechen War was led by Shamil Basayev. Moscow publicly blamed “Al-Qa’ida-Wahhabite aggression” for that event, using it as justification to restart the war on terms more favorable to Moscow. But what, then, is to be made of Basayev, who has been memorably described as “a GRU staff member with a great deal of work experience?”[13] The other direct cause of the Second Chechen War, the bloody apartment bombings around Moscow in August 1999 that killed over 300 civilians, likewise remain shrouded in mystery. Basayev was blamed for those atrocities, too, but what really happened continues to be hotly controversial. The case for some FSB involvement in the bombings, always strong, has grown stronger over the past decade, yet remains a highly taboo topic in Russia.[14]

What, then, can we conclude about al-Qa’ida’s murky Russian connection? Unsurprisingly, Dr. Zawahiri has had little to say about his half-year adventure with the FSB. He has often criticized Russia and its policies, sometimes in vehement terms. Yet he speaks of Iran with equal venom, and al-Qa’ida’s discreet yet detectable relationship with Iranian intelligence goes back to at least 1996, and apparently continues to the present day.

His two Egyptian cellmates aren’t available to add details. Mahmud Hisham al-Hennawi stayed in the Caucasus, was convicted in Egypt in 1998 on terrorism charges in absentia, receiving a ten year sentence, and was reportedly killed in action in Chechnya in 2005.[15] Ahmad Salama Mabruk was arrested in Azerbaijan in 1998 on terrorism charges, and was extradited to Egypt, where he was convicted on numerous charges and sent to prison.[16] The FSB, to no one’s surprise, has said nothing publicly about this case except for a brief press release in 2003.

It is fanciful to suggest that any formal alliance exists between Moscow and al-Qa’ida; bin Laden’s mujahidin have worked with several foreign security agencies in the service of the jihad, but have never been willing to put themselves fully at the disposal of any of them.[17] Nevertheless, it seems justified, based on the available evidence, to suggest that Dr. Zawahiri reached a quid pro quo with Moscow while he was in FSB custody. That he underwent FSB training appears plausible; that there may be some kind of relationship even today between Russia and al-Qa’ida exists within the realm of possibility. Russia, with its large, growing, and potentially restless Muslim minority, would have ample motivation to reach terms with al-Qa’ida, in the hope of stemming radicalism.

Might Moscow have suggested that it would look the other way about al-Qa’ida’s activities in Chechnya as long as bin Laden and Zawahiri left Russia alone otherwise? It surely appears significant that Zawahiri led bin Laden down the path of global jihad, and direct confrontation with the United States, after emerging from his half-year as a guest of the FSB. As President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly made clear, a unipolar, American-led global system is not in Russia’s interests. To this day, Russia has endured many attacks by Chechen militants, but no confirmed acts of terrorism perpetrated by al-Qa’ida Central. This vexing issue continues to offer more questions than answers, and needs additional research, particularly considering the state of relations between Moscow and the West.

SOURCES:

[1] For a detailed example based on research of what al-Qa’ida thinks about these issues, see this author’s The Terrorist Perspectives Project: Strategic and Operational Views of al-Qa’ida (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2008), co-authored with Mark Stout and Jessica Huckabey.

[2] The most information is available about the robust ties between al-Qa’ida and Bosnian intelligence, with Iranian assistance, in the 1990s; see this author’s Unholy Terror: Bosnia, al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad (Zenith Press, 2007).

[3] Agentsvo Voyennykh Novostey (Moscow), 23 Apr 2003.

[4] The most detailed account is an article by Andrew Higgins and Alan Cullison, “A Terrorist’s Odyssey,” The Wall Street Journal, 2 Jul 2002. For a Russian perspective see the article by Yuriy Tyssovskiy, “Bin Laden nomer 2 sdelalo vremya v nashykh tyur’makh,” in the weekly newspaper Vek(Moscow), Vol.22, 12 Jul 2002.

[5] Agentsvo Voyennykh Novostey (Moscow), 23 Apr 2003.

[6] An exception is Evgenii Novikov, “A Russian Agent at the Right Hand of bin Laden?” Terrorism Monitor (Jamestown Foundation), Vol.2, No.1, 15 Jan 2004, which provides more questions than answers.

[7] For examples see the articles by Michel Elbaz of Axis Information and Analysis (<a href="http://axisglobe.com" rel="nofollow">axisglobe.com</a>), specifically “Russian Secret Services’ Links with Al-Qaeda” (18 Jul 2005), and “Russian Secrets of Al-Qaeda’s Number Two” (19 Jul 2005).

[8] Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich, “Drogi terroryzmu – Kto wspiera napastnicy?,” Rzeczpospolita(Warsaw), 16 Jul 2005.

[9] See Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko, Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB (Free Press, 2007).

[10] Patrick Cockburn, “Russia ‘planned Chechen war before bombings’,” The Independent (London), 29 Jan 2000.

[11] Svetlana Meteleva, “Chechnya: my mozhem ubit’ Basayeva, no nikto ne dolzhen,” Moskovskiy Komsolmolets (Moscow), 21 Mar 2005.

[12] For a detailed examination of this viewpoint see the declaration of Chechenpress, 10 Jul 2009, available in both Russian and English at chechenpress.info.

[13] This murky relationship is explained well by Boris Kagarlitskiy, “My ne govorim, chtoby terroristy, no my pomoch’ im?” Novaya Gazeta (Moscow), 23 Jan 2000.

[14] The best case for the “FSB did it” hypothesis remains David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 24-33. In September 2009, GQ magazine refused to run in its Russian edition an article by investigative journalist Scott Anderson entitled “Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power,” which added details to the FSB role in the 1999 apartment bombings, based on testimony by Mikhail Trepashin, a former KGB/FSB officer – see David Folkenflik, “Why GQ Doesn’t Want Russians to Read its Story,” National Public Radio (<a href="http://npr.org" rel="nofollow">npr.org</a>), 4 Sep 2009.

[15] “Death of Senior EIJ Member Mahmud Hisham al-Hennawi Reported in the Caucasus,” 17 Apr 2005, at <a href="http://globalterroralert.com" rel="nofollow">globalterroralert.com</a>.

[16] “Razvedyvatel’naya sluzhba bor’by protiv Islamskovo dzhikhada,” Ekho (Baku), 13 Oct 2001.

[17] Efforts to depict such an “alliance” are overstated, e.g. Konstantin Preobazhensky, “Russia and Islam are not separate: Why Russia backs al-Qaeda,” Intel Analyses, 31 Aug 2007.

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Chechen Nuclear Bomb Explodes in Renewed Litvinenko Inquest
Sunday January 24th, 2016 at 2:26 PM

Russian And Eurasian Politics Gordon M. Hahn

by Gordon M. Hahn

Two years ago I suggested that the alleged November 2006 murder of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovskii’s associate and former Russian corruption police officer Alexander Litvinenko was more likely the result of a mishandling of the dangerous substance polonium-210 during a smuggling operation. It “probably had more to do with Berezovskii, Litvinenko, and Akhmed Zakaev’s running weapons and polonium to the Caucasus Emirate (CE) jihadists and/or their Al Qa`ida or other jihadi allies.”[1] It is well-known that polonium-210 is needed to create a trigger for a nuclear weapon. At the time of the alleged murder, the CE was called the Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya (ChRI), and, as I discuss below, Berezovskii’s and Litvinenko’s Chechen associate Akhmed Zakaev was the ChRI’s official foreign minister.

The New Inquest

Testimony in the re-opened inquest into the Litvinenko case strengthens this line of investigation. On February 9th, during questioning by the prosecution one Garym Evans testified: “The reason that I met him was that during 2004, two Chechnyan nationals, who were later identified as Vakha Dusheyev and Russlan Aboukhanov, also known as Russlan Baysarov, also known as Zakhar, had been attempting to extort money from Boris Berezovsky. This was because one of them, Zakharov, was alleging that he had been instructed by Berezovsky to go [to] Paris and hand over either a floppy disk or a CD ROM that allegedly contained the plans for a ‘nuclear suitcase bomb’. Zakhar’s contention was that Berezovsky should have paid him for doing this and had not done so.”[2]

Who is Akhmed Zakaev

Zakaev is a known radical nationalist guerrilla who fought against Russian forces in the first post-Soviet Chechen war. He was wounded in the second Chechen war and then fled to Britain for safe haven. Russian prosecutors say he was involved in the Al Qa`ida-Chechen hostage-taking industry aided and abetted by criminals and other unsavory elements. However, Zakaev’s checkered history did not stop with the end of the conventional phase of the second war waged by the ‘Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya’ (ChRI).

Next, the Chechens went underground and came under even greater influence from Chechnya jihadists, AQ and other North Caucasus republics––and Zakaev went with them. As the jihadists’ gained the upper hand, Zakaev refused to break with them. Personal ambition to maintain some foothold in the resistance back home held sway over the ChRI’s connections with the perpetrators of horrific October 2002 Dubrovka theatre hostage-taking in Moscow, the August 2004 twin passenger plane hijacking and explosions over Moscow, and the September 2004 Beslan school massacre in North Ossetia––along with hundreds of other attacks on Russian soil between 2001-2007. Zakaev maintained official positions within the ChRI leadership while living in London throughout all of these events.

Only in late 2007 did Zakaev and the ChRI part ways at the latter’s initiative after it finally rebranded itself the ‘Caucasus Emirate’ (CE) to reflect the reality of its jihadist orientation. Moreover, when the Chechen network briefly split in 2010, Zakaev came out and declared his allegiance to the breakaway wing, even though the latter explicitly stated that they had broken with CE amir Doku Umarov because of his bad leadership (not because they rejected global jihadism). Zakaev also acknowledged that he had maintained contact with the CE’s Chechen network and maintained fighters attached to them who were attacking Russians in the North Caucasus. Since the CE split was patched up in July 2011 and Umarov (2010) and the CE (2011) were included finally on the U.S. State Department’s list of international terrorist organizations, Zakaev has quieted down but remains in London.

The difference now is that amirs commanding some 70 percent of the CE mujahedin recently declared their loyalty to ISIS, and the rest of the CE is allied with Al Qa`ida.

The Upshot

None of this excludes the possibility that officials in Moscow might have been involved in the murder of Litvinenko and/or the smuggling to the Chechen terrorists that Berezovskii was likely engaged in. However, it does strongly suggest that someone among the Chechens was trying to build a bomb or help others to do so and that Berezovskii was assisting them. Shamil Basaev, who in 1995 planted a vile of cesium in a Moscow park and then held a press conference to announce it, died in June 2006 just months before Litvinenko’s demise. Thus, the smuggling operation could have been the continuation of a Basaeyev operation to acquire a nuclear bomb. Litvinenko may or may not have been fully aware of Berezovskii’s operations.

The larger issue is that it is now confirmed that less than 9 years ago there were and today there likely remain circles within the Caucasus branch of the global jihadi revolutionary movement pursuing a nuclear capability.

[1] Gordon M. Hahn, “Edward Snowden and the History of Post-Soviet Russian-American Relations,”Russia – Other points of View, 11 July 2013, www.russiaotherpointsofview.com/2013/07/edward-snowden-and-the-history-of-post-soviet-russian-western-relations.html.

[2] Litvinenko Inquest Transcript, 9 February 2015, p. 38, http://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/lit090215.pdf.

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The Real Crime of M. Khodorkovsky, by F. William Engdahl
Saturday January 23rd, 2016 at 7:50 PM

شبكة فولتير


The Obama administration, in an unusual public rebuke, condemned a Moscow court for finding oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his former partner guilty of embezzling, saying it appears to be “an abusive use of the legal system for improper ends.”

Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s real crime was not stealing Russia’s assets for a pittance in the bandit era of Yeltsin. His real crime is that he was a key part of a Western intelligence operation to dismantle and destroy what remains of Russia as a functioning state. When the facts are known the justice served on him is mild by comparison to US or UK standard treatment of those convicted of treason against the state. Obama’s torture prison at Guantánamo is merely one example of Washington’s double standard.

According to the politically correct sanitized account in Wikipedia, “Yukos Oil Company was a petroleum company in Russia which, until 2003, was controlled by Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky…Khodorkovsky was convicted and sent to prison…Yukos was one of the biggest and one of the most successful Russian companies in 2000-2003. In 2003, following a tax reassessment, the Russian government presented Yukos with a series of tax claims that amounted to $27 billion. As Yukos’s assets were frozen by the government at the same time, the company was not able to pay these tax demands. On August 1, 2006, a Russian court declared Yukos bankrupt. Most of Yukos’s assets were sold at low prices to oil companies owned by the Russian government. The Parliamentary Council of Europe has condemned Russia’s campaign against Yukos and its owners as manufactured for political reasons and a violation of human rights.”


Prior to his arrest in 2003 Khodorkovsky (in the photo with first Russian President Boris Yeltsin) funded several Russian parties, including the Communist Party, most of which were in competition with each other.

If we dig a little deeper however we find a quite different case. As he stepped out of his private plane in Siberia in October 2003 Khodorkovsky was arrested. He was arrested, as Wikipedia correctly states, for tax crimes. What they did not say is that he at the tender age of 40 had risen to become the richest man in Russia worth some $15 billion by fraudulent acquisition of state assets during the lawless Yeltsin era. In an auction run by his own bank, Khodorkovsky paid $309 million for Yukos. In 2003 the same company was assessed as worth $45 billion, and not owing to Khodorkovsky’s management genius.

In 1998, Khodorkovsky had been let free in a US case where he was charged with helping launder $10 billion with his own bank and the Bank of New York. He had very influential friends in the US it appeared. The then head of the Republic National Bank of New York, Edmund Safra, was murdered some months later in his Monaco apartment reportedly from members of an alleged “Russian mafia” whom he had cheated in a drug money laundering scheme.

But there was more. Khodorkovsky built some impressive ties in the West. With his new billions in effect stolen from the Russian people, he made some powerful friends. He set up a foundation modeled on US billionaire George Soros’ Open Society, calling it the Open Russia Foundation. He invited two powerful Westerners to its board—Henry Kissinger and Jacob Lord Rothschild. Then he set about to develop ties with some of the most powerful circles in Washington where he was named to the Advisory Board of the secretive private equity firm, Carlyle Group where he attended board meetings with fellow advisors such as George H.W. Bush and James Baker III.

However, the real crime that landed Khodorkovsky behind Russian bars was the fact that he was in the middle of making a US-backed coup d’etat to capture the Russian presidency in planned 2004 Russian Duma elections. Khodorkovsky was in the process of using his enormous wealth to buy enough seats in the coming Duma elections that he could change Russian laws regarding ownership of oil in the ground and of pipelines transporting same. In addition he planned to directly challenge Putin and become Russian President. As part of the horse trade that won Putin the tacit support of the wealthy so-called Russian Oligarchs, Putin had extracted agreement that they be allowed to hold on to their wealth provided they repatriate a share back into Russia and provided they not interfere in domestic Russian politics with their wealth. Most oligarchs agreed, as did Khodorkovsky at the time. They remain established Russian businessmen. Khodorkovsky did not.

Moreover, at the time of his arrest Khodorkovsky was in the process of negotiating via his Carlyle friend George H.W. Bush, father of the then-President George W. Bush, the sale of 40% of Yukos to either Condi Rice’s former company, Chevron or ExxonMobil in a move that would have dealt a crippling blow to the one asset left Russia and Putin to use for the rebuilding of the wrecked Russian economy: oil and export via state-owned pipelines to the West for dollars. During the ensuing Russian state prosecution of Yukos, it came to light that Khodorkovsky had also secretly made a contract with London’s Lord Rothschild not merely to support Russian culture via the Open Russia Foundation of Khodorkovsky. In the event of his possible arrest (Khodorkovsky evidently knew he was playing a high-risk game trying to create a coup against Putin) the 40% share of his Yukos stocks would pass into the hands of Lord Rothschild.

The crocodile tears of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the violations of Khodorkovsky’s human rights hide a far deeper agenda that is not being admitted. Washington used the Russian to try to reach its goal of totally destroying the only power left on the earth with sufficient military strike power to challenge the Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance strategy—control of the entire planet. When seen in that light the sweet loaded words “human rights” take on a quite different meaning.

At the author’s request, Voltaire Network is reproducing a letter correcting a reference he made in this article:

Friday, January 14, 2011

Dear Mr. Engdahl,

I am writing to you on behalf of the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation and Mrs. Lily Safra concerning an article which you published on the website http://www.voltairenet.org/, on January 5, 2011, entitled "The Real Crime of M. Khodorkovsky."

The article contains the following reference which is false:

"The then head of the Republic National Bank of New York, Edmund Safra, was murdered some months later in his Monaco apartment reportedly from members of an alleged "Russian mafia" whom he had cheated in a drug money laundering scheme."

In fact, Mr. Safra’s death was ruled by a court to be arson by one individual. Mr. Ted Maher confessed to the crime and was convicted by the Court of Monaco in 2002. He was sentenced to a prison term, which was served in its entirety. There was never a question of any other person’s or group’s involvement.

We would appreciate your posting this correction of the erroneous information on your site.

Should you need any further information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Best Regards,

Seth Goldschlager
Safra S.A.

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Putin's Russia Is More Stable Than It Seems
Saturday January 23rd, 2016 at 7:02 PM

By Steven L. Hall

A quick scan of the press, social media and even some scholarly literature reveals significant discussion about the prospects for instability that are facing Russia. The general theory usually goes something like this: The dramatic drop in world oil prices, coupled with Western economic sanctions in the wake of Russia's annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, will cause enough economic and social unrest in Russia to become a threat to President Vladimir Putin's government. In support of this theory, observers point to recent protests (such as those by Russian long-haul truckers because of increased tolls), anti-Putin rhetoric authored by Russian opposition bloggers on the Internet, and even incidents such as the still-unsolved murder of opposition figure Boris Nemtsov. Some claim these are examples of how instability is growing in Russia, and the extent to which the Kremlin needs to go to stifle it.

While it is tempting (and for some, emotionally satisfying) to predict the beginning of the end for Putin, or at least a slow downward spiral that might result in political change in Russia, such theories suffer from a pervasive problem in reporting and analysis of Russia: They analyze Putin, the Kremlin and events in Russia from an overly Western perspective. In fact, Putin's hold on power in Russia and his command over the Russian people remains strong, despite circumstances that would normally spell disaster for a Western leader. Ultimately, significant instability in Russia is unlikely. The trick to more accurately predicting unrest there is to get past Western assumptions and premises that simply do not hold true in Russia.

Leaving Behind the Western Perspective

The first flawed assumption people usually make is that Putin is actually very concerned about what the Russian population thinks or does. It is worth remembering that Putin's power does not emanate from the people he governs in the way of Western democracies. Putin relies much more (albeit not exclusively) on coercive measures to control his country. Some pundits overemphasize the importance of Putin's former career with the KGB, and it is certainly true that there is much more to Putin than simply his background in Russian intelligence. But being a member of the KGB, or its successor organization, the FSB, or any of the previous iterations of the security organs of Russia, does carry with it a certain view of the world. Current and former members of what Russians refer to as "the special services" consider themselves Chekists, that is, in the direct lineage of the Cheka, the secret police created by Lenin. This worldview fully embraces the use of coercive measures against one's own population when needed. Both Putin and the Russian citizenry understand this, and it frees Putin from having to be overly concerned about popular uprisings over the price of food or other commodities.

The second assumption follows from the first, namely, that Putin is concerned about how Russians express their displeasure, such as demonstrations, protests, riots and the like, and that such expressions have an effect on his decisions. Western commentators and reporters sometimes allude to protests in Russia as harbingers of change or barometers of discontent, but it is important to remember how carefully protests in Russia are monitored, and how much work by the security services goes into controlling, penetrating and extracting information on the organizers for later use. (Witness the immense presence of the security apparatus during the Bolotnaya Square protests in 2011.) Putin understands it is highly unlikely that protests will reach a level that his security services (or, in a more serious scenario, the Russian military) can no longer control. In fact, Putin actually sees value in allowing some protests, since it enables him to paint a picture of a democratic Russia, a place where opposition forces are allowed to manifest. This can be useful in international forums such as the United Nations, the European Union and so forth.

The final assumption is that if economic conditions continue to deteriorate in Russia, the Russian people will finally reach the point of a significant uprising that would threaten the current status quo. While such a premise is completely reasonable in the West, most Russians do not view scarcity the same way Westerners do. Russians take great pride in suffering (an interesting trait that extends to other Slavic cultures but is less prominent elsewhere). When the Russian government explains economic hardship in a nationalistic fashion and blames external forces such as the European Union or the United States, tolerating scarcity becomes almost a national sport, and certainly a matter of great national pride. It is another way for Russians to stand up to an international community portrayed by the Kremlin as fundamentally anti-Russian. This explains some of Putin's actions that confound Western economists, such as Russia enacting counter-sanctions against Western trading partners, which actually creates more suffering for the average Russian family.

Many commentators believe that at some point, when things get bad enough economically in Russia, Putin's popularity will drop, no matter how much the country loves him now. In the first place, this premise has already been shown to be faulty in that it presupposes Putin cares about his popularity in a political sense. (Given what we know of Putin, it is of course likely that he finds his popularity personally gratifying, but less likely that it is an important factor in his political calculus.) As noted above, even if his popularity drops significantly, Putin still has the resources of his security services available to make this matter moot. Putin would not hesitate to use intimidation and coercion to undermine opposition forces; the persecution of the girl band Pussy Riot and the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya are good examples. Interestingly, Russians differ from many in the West in another way that speaks to this issue. Russians have traditionally shown a strong preference for stability over what they often refer to as the "chaos" of real democracy. Most Russians are more than willing to sacrifice what many in the West would consider basic rights in the name of stability — even if that stability means fewer goods, less services and limited liberties. And of course Putin is widely seen by Russians as the first strong leader Russia has had in post-Soviet times, making it that much more unlikely that his popularity will drop in any event.

The Real Threat to Putin's Power

What, then, would significantly increase the likelihood of instability in Putin's Russia? Actions taken to unseat Putin by Russian oligarchs and perhaps the leadership of the security services would be much more seriously destabilizing than the threat of a popular uprising. Putin of course realizes this and has taken several prophylactic measures.

First, he made a strong example of prominent oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who made the near-fatal mistake of challenging Putin politically. Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest businessman, was subsequently sentenced to a lengthy term in a Siberian prison, followed by exile from Russia. Current oligarchs certainly must understand a similar fate would await them should they move strongly against the Russian president. They would also immediately understand that even exile does not provide complete protection should they break with Putin, as the numerous murders of high-profile Russians outside of Russia, including Alexander Litvinenko, shows.

Second, it is likely Putin closely compartmentalizes his relationships with oligarchs and those with strong ties to the security services (the "siloviki"), thus making it that much harder for them to collude against him. Putin most likely learned the importance of controlling his senior lieutenants during the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev that occurred during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin was a mid-level KGB officer in St. Petersburg in 1991 when several Soviet hard-liners — including senior KGB officials — made an abortive attempt to oust Gorbachev because of his plans to increase the autonomy of the Soviet republics (which subsequently led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union).

Lastly, Putin and the oligarchs understand that both sides will continue to benefit under the current arrangement. This makes it less likely that anyone will make a serious attempt to change the political status quo.

In sum, perhaps the greatest impediment to understanding the prospects for instability in Putin's Russia is the West's strong tendency to project Western values and rationale onto a Russian system where Western assumptions simply do not hold. What is worse is that Putin and the Kremlin recognize this tendency, view it as a quaint element of the West's worldview and work actively to exploit it. Putin aggressively asserts that Russia is a democracy, with elections, a parliament, laws, judges and yes, even protests against the government. Putin understands that these claims will cause Western world leaders to make certain assumptions, such as, "Putin would never do X, because the Russian people would not stand for it". What is often overlooked is that neither Putin nor the Russian population would make anything like such an assertion. And while some will call it a return to the Cold War days, perhaps the best way to assess the plans and intentions of the Kremlin is almost purely in realpolitik terms. Putin will always act first in his own interest, and then in what he perceives to be Russia's interest. This is something Westerners can understand, but what they often miss is how it translates in a Russian context. As a senior Russian official once commented off the record,

"We are not Westerners. It is one of the biggest mistakes you Americans make. You don't make that same mistake with the Chinese, do you? It is because they do not look European, while we do."

While Putin and Russia may appear on the surface to be Western-oriented, just as Russia appears somewhat democratic with a parliament and occasional protests, they are only appearances. To accurately assess the prospect of instability inside the Russian Federation, one must first see the world — and more important, Russia itself — through a Russian lens.

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Page 4

How Russia Manipulates Islamic Terrorism
Friday January 22nd, 2016 at 11:19 PM

The Syrian Intifada

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 8, 2015

Shamil Basayev and Murad Margoshvili (a.k.a. Muslem al-Shishani)

Shamil Basayev and Murad Margoshvili (a.k.a. Muslem a-Shishani)

Last year I wrote about the murky role Russia was playing in the Syrian war, bolstering the Assad tyranny while facilitating the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) and other Salafi-jihadists as a means of dividing and discrediting the Syrian opposition. Moscow’s action were in line with the strategy it had used to defeat the separatist movement in Chechnya, infiltrating the insurgency, driving it into extremism, and facilitating the arrival of al-Qaeda jihadists who displaced the Chechen nationalists. In Syria, Russia’s actions accord with the strategy adopted by the regime and its Iranian masters to present Assad as the last line of defence against a terrorist takeover of Syria and a genocide against the minorities. New evidence has emerged to underline these points.

Chechnya, Dagestan, and Abkhazia

To recap. Shamil Basayev, a participant in the fighting in Chechnya since the early 1990s and the leader of the Chechen Salafi-jihadists between 2003 and 2006, was once described as “a GRU staff member with a great deal of work experience,” GRU being Russian military-intelligence. Basayev, with his brother Shirvani, also a GRU agent, led an incursion into the Georgian province of Abkhazia in 1992 that—at the very least—Moscow did nothing to stop. Basayev’s Chechen division helped the Abkhazians expel the Georgian military, and a Russian “peacekeeping” (occupation) force moved in and remains in Abkhazia.

In August 1999, Basayev led an attack into Dagestan, using weapons from GRU stocks in Moscow, not jihadist stores in Chechnya, reigniting conflict with Moscow. Six weeks later, Basayev would be blamed for the apartment bombings in Moscow that killed three-hundred people.

With the Dagestan War in the background, plus the apartment bombings, the then-new Russian premier, Vladimir Putin, had casus belli to restart the war in Chechnya, which he did on October 1, 1999, and with public outrage behind him there were no restraints on Putin; “anti-terrorist” action became the destruction of Grozny.

The Second Chechen War provided a key pillar of popular legitimacy to Putin as he cemented his dictatorship. It is a long-standing accusation that this is no accident. There is clear evidence that members of the Russian government knew in advance that the bombings were coming, and the curious incident in Ryazan on September 22, 1999, which gives every appearance of being the FSB caught in the act of placing a bomb in an apartment.

Many independent analysts, numerous Russian journalists, and at least two former officers of the FSB, the primary successor to the KGB, have come to the conclusion that the apartment bombings were orchestrated by the Russian regime.

Mikhail Trepashkin, who served with the KGB and then the FSB from 1984 until his arrest and imprisonment in 2003 on deeply politicized charges, said the lead organizer of the apartment bombings was Vladimir Romanovich, an FSB agent who was known for his connections to organized crime during the 1990s.

Alexander Litvinenko, who began as an informant of the KGB in 1986, joining as an officer two years later, before defecting to Britain in 2000 after registering complaints of criminal conduct against his employer, said the Russian government bombed those apartment buildings in a false-flag operation to justify the attack on Chechnya and secure Putin and his retainers in power. That Putin felt the need to assassinate Litvinenko—in London, at great political cost—gives Litvinenko’s accusations additional weight.

In the conduct of the Second Chechen War, outside of unrestrained brutality, Russia bet onprovokatsiya (provocation), which simply means “taking control of your enemies in secret and encouraging them to do things that discredit them and help you.” Specifically, this meant strengthening the jihadist trend of the Chechen insurgency against the more nationalist/separatist forces, identifying the Chechen independence cause with al-Qaeda and terrorism, and framing Moscow’s war—and its ancillary effects of making Putin master of Russia—under the rubric of the War on Terror.

Prodding politico-military opponents into doing criminal things they would not otherwise have done to justify a legal or military crackdown and to discredit their cause, and manipulating terrorist movements for the same reason, are tactics Russia has been using for over one-hundred years, against opposition internal and external.

Moscow and Islamist Terrorism in the Soviet Days

Russia’s history of fabricating and enabling Islamist radicals is lengthy.

From the 1960s onward, there was scarcely a “national liberation movement” from Latin America to East Asia that did not receive Soviet support, if not instigation and direction. Moscow’s history of involvement with Middle Eastern terrorism is deep and broad. From Assad’s Syria, Saddam’s Iraq, and military-run Egypt (until Cairo defected to the Western camp after 1973), the Soviets waged political warfare against the West.

Soviet efforts against the West in the Arab World included starting the campaign of delegitimation against Israel, now associated with the BDS movement and the propaganda about Israel being a Nazi and/or Apartheid State, and nurturing innumerable terrorist groups, most of which took on Islamist overtones. A notable example is the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had been formed before the 1967 Six-Day War but rose to prominence afterward when the Soviets installed an Egyptian KGB asset, Yasser Arafat, as leader. Moscow’s relationship with Clerical Iran, which lasts to this day, should also be seen in this light.

As the Soviet Union began to open up in the late 1980s and some limited opposition parties were allowed, the KGB carefully infiltrated existing parties and fabricated other “scarecrow” parties to make the Communist Party look like the most reasonable alternative.

In February 1990, a riot in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, was organized by the opposition Islamic Rastokhez (Rebirth) Party, which killed twenty-two people and injured five-hundred more. One of the things Rastokhez had played on was the presence of Christian Armenians, refugees from a pogrom in Azerbaijan two years before. Against this, the Communists looked quite reasonable. Butthree witnesses—Abdul Nazarov, a then-officer of Tajik KGB; Kakhar Makhmarov, a senior official in the Tajik S.S.R., and Makhmadali Khait, a then-activist for Rastokhez and now a member of an opposition party in Tajikistan—say the KGB instigated the mayhem to prevent a repeat of the (nearly) peaceful secession of the Baltics and Ukraine.

In June 1990, in Astrakhan, the U.S.S.R. Islamic Revival Party (IRP) was founded. One IRP founder was Geydar Dzhemal, a fiery agitator for Islamist extremism and against Putin to this day, who is the chairman of Russia’s Islamic Committee. Curiously, Dzhemal never meets with the legal trouble of, say, Aleksey Navalny. (Analogies with men like Abu Qaqa in Syria will occur to some.) Dzhemal might also be insulated from official retribution by his long relationship with Aleksandr Dugin, the fascist propagandist who made himself famous by calling for a “genocide” of Ukrainians in August 2014. Dugin began spreading his fascist ideas in the early 1980s, supposedly underground. A more convincing explanation of Dugin’s long immunity is that he is a GRU agent. Dugin’s father, Gelyi, was a senior GRU officer.

Chechnya

Movladi Udugov, a leader of the Chechen radical wing in the 1990s, declared the Caucasus Emirate in October 2007 as al-Qaeda’s local branch. “Prior to Udugov’s statements, most Americans did not regard the Chechen resistance as part of the global terrorist movement,” Dmitry Shlapentokh, associate professor at Indiana University-South Bend, writes. Chechen nationalists condemned Udugov’s announcement, asking: “Who could benefit from the provocation entitled the Caucasus Emirate”?

Akhmed Zakayev, an exiled leader of the unrecognised Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Aslan Maskhadov, a former Chechen president, and other representatives of the more secular wing of Chechen separatism consistently called the leaders of the religious radicals in Chechnya agents of the Russian special services designed to discredit their cause. Zakayev levelled this accusation against Udugov; against the ideological leader of the Caucasus Emirate idea, Isa Umarov; andagainst Isa’s brother, Dokka Umarov, who succeeded Basayev and was the Caucasus Emirate’s leader between 2007 and 2013.

Supyan Abdullayev, another founder of IRP, was one of the major Russian ideologists of Wahhabism/Salafism in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, was a KGB agent from the 1980s. Abdulayev was one of the founders of IRP and was appointed as “President of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria” in March 2007 by Umarov, a “post” that was abolished with the formation of the Caucasus Emirate. Abdullayev was killed in March 2011.

Adam Deniyev was the other major post-Soviet Wahhabist/Salafist ideologue. Deniyev had long been known for Islamist agitation and showed up on the radical wing of the Chechen insurgency. Deniyev went to Iraq in 1992 to study at a time when Saddam Hussein’s regime was intensifying its Islamism. That same year, Dzhokhar Dudayev, the president of the “Chechen Republic of Ichkeria”—which was then exercising some actual authority—went to Baghdad and told the Iraqi regime that their guest was a tool of Russian intelligence, according to Nezavisamaya Gazeta. This can hardly have bothered Saddam, whose intelligence services were trained by the KGB and whose regime trained thousands of Islamist terrorists of all backgrounds in the 1990s. By the time Deniyev was killed in 2001, his being a Moscow agent was hardly a secret.

Russia and Al-Qaeda’s Leader

One of the most curious episodes of all is the arrest of Ayman az-Zawahiri in Russia in December 1996 as he tried to visit the Chechen Salafi-jihadists. Zawahiri, now al-Qaeda’s leader, was at the time planning to “scope out Chechnya as a possible sanctuary” for Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), the terrorist group he led at the time which would later merge with Osama bin Laden’s group. EIJ’s cause was on the ropes inside Egypt—not least because Cairo had killed or (as in Zawahiri’s case) exiled EIJ’s leadership. Chechnya at that time was effectively independent, beset by chaos, and infested with Muslim radicals: a perfect hideout.

Carrying a fake medical degree and claiming to be interested in the possibilities of the food trade, Zawahiri travelled on a false Sudanese passport, under the name “Abdullah Imam Mohammed,” in the company of two veteran jihadists, Ahmad Salama Mabruk and Mahmud Hisham al-Hennawi. In Zawahiri’s possession was “$6,400 in cash, a fake identity as a businessman, a laptop computer, a satellite phone, a fax machine and a small library of medical textbooks.” The laptop was sent to Moscow and an outcry began from the Muslim world, including Muslim leaders in Russia, demanding Zawahiri’s release.

Moscow released Zawahiri in May 1997—with his laptop, “its mostly Arabic-language documents nearly all unread”—and allowed him to travel to Chechnya, where he met various holy warriors, including Ibn al-Khattab (a.k.a. Samir Saleh Abdullah as-Suwailem), over the next ten days. Zawahiri then decamped to Afghanistan. Incredibly, Moscow claimed not to know who it had in its possession until years later. This is ridiculous on its face.

There is no way Zawahiri’s laptop will have resisted Moscow’s efforts to read it. Moreover, there is every reason to think there would have been Russian intelligence officers who recognized Zawahiri by sight. In the 1970s, after Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat halted the Soviet colonization of his country and turned West, the KGB initiated Active Measures to try to topple Sadat and began sponsoring Egyptian oppositionists, including the Communists and Islamists—the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and EIJ. Zawahiri was very publicly rounded up in the dragnet after Sadat was assassinated in 1981, and it was public record that Zawahiri broke under torture, giving up the name of a more senior conspirator, and felt guilty about it. It beggars belief that none of this led to Zawahiri’s discovery and Moscow making use of him, according to Evgenii Novikov. “Zawahiri would have had to agree to cooperation with Russian intelligence to save his life and to buy his freedom,” Novikov writes.

Zawahiri’s subsequent actions are also noteworthy. Zawahiri’s EIJ was a “national-revolutionary” movement, so much so that a large slice of EIJ left in 2001 when Zawahiri formally joined al-Qaeda, only returning to the fold to oppose the “Crusaders” after the invasion of Afghanistan. Zawahiri had been a leading proponent of the “near enemy” school of jihad, which said that the Islamists needed to focus on attacking the local regimes and forming a base of operations. In 1995, at the height of the violent insurgency EIJ led against the Egyptian State, Zawahiri even wrote an article saying that the struggle against Israel must wait until Islam reigned over Egypt. But Zawahiri quite suddenly changed after his release in Russia and his move to Afghanistan.

In February 1998, Zawahiri signed onto Osama bin Laden’s fatwa declaring global holy war against Americans and Jews. Now Zawahiri, regarded by many as the brain behind bin Laden, would become the lead espouser of the “far enemy” school of jihadism, which prescribed attacks on America as the primary goal since she stands behind the local tyrannies, which will fall if America is driven out of the region. The road to 9/11 had opened; with al-Qaeda’s switch in policy and the attacks on the African Embassies later that year, Khaled Sheikh Muhammad would be convinced that bin Laden meant business and finally consented to meet bin Laden in Afghanistan, presenting him the idea for the “Planes Operation”.

Russia and the Chechens in Syria

In June 2013, speaking to Radio Liberty at a time when Umarov had been reported dead, Zakayev said:

According to our sources, the information about Umarov’s death is false … Russia, its special services and Vladimir Putin are once again preparing a surprise for their Western partners who are involved in intense negotiation on Syria’s situation. … Russia is interested in delaying or overall preventing the process of Assad’s [overthrow]. To do so, according to our information, Kremlin made a decision to transfer Umarov to Syria. … Russia claims that for Assad opposition is … the so-called Islamic radicals … Can you imagine what position the Western leaders, who made the decision to lift embargo of arms for the opposition, will be put in?

Umarov was not dead; he died either in late 2013 or early 2014. (One source says September 2013 from poisoning.) And Zakayev’s prediction has come to pass: Assad has borrowed the Russian playbook and provocation has done its work; most Westerners now think the Islamic State (ISIS) are “rebels” and therefore Assad, and his Iranian and Russian backers, are the side we should choose in Syria.

As in Chechnya, the beleaguered Syrian population that rose in revolt against repression is squeezed between the tyranny and the fanatics, and the West looks on, identifying the population with the fanatics the tyranny has facilitated into being. Creating problems to solve them is an old Kremlin trick; it worked in Chechnya, the KGB-trained military-intelligence services in Algeria did the same, and Russia was instrumental in what appears to be another victory for this tactic in Syria.

As I pointed out last year, Russia’s involvement in Syria is extensive. Russia not only provides diplomatic protection and weapons to the Assad dictatorship, but provides Assad’s strategic framework (provocation) in fighting his war and Russian intelligence has helped Assad track and kill individuals—including rebels and Western journalists—with sophisticated capabilities like signals intelligence (SIGINT) that the Assad regime would not otherwise have. Now we have new evidencethat Russian troops are directly involved in fighting for the Assad dictatorship around Latakia.

3,000 or more Salafi-jihadists from the Caucasus—Chechnya and Dagestan mostly—have gone to fight for their cause in Syria and Iraq since 2011. The Qaeda-ISIS schism among the Caucasian Salafi-jihadists has left the leadership of both camps in the hands of men with odd histories with Russian intelligence.

The pro-ISIS faction of the Chechen holy warriors in “Syraq” is led by Tarkhan Batirashvili (pseudonym: Abu Omar a-Shishani). ISIS has not allowed foreigners into its senior military positions, keeping them in the hands of former military and intelligence officers of the Saddam Hussein regime (see 1/2/3/4/5/6/7). Foreigners have instead been used in ISIS’s media and shari’a departments. The Chechens have been the one exception, and Batirashvili is the most public such exception, holding a senior military position and being a member of ISIS’s Shura Council, which among other things picks the leader and has a very strong influence on policy.

Batirashvili was born to an Orthodox family in Georgia in 1986. When Joana Paraszczuk, the British blogger who keeps the closest eye on the Chechens in Syria, denounces the “ridiculous conspiracy theory in which [Batirashvili] is actually a KGB agent,” she has a point. Batirashvili is too young to have been recruited by the Soviet Union. But Batirashvili is reported by his father to have fought with Ruslan Gelayev’s terrorist group, at age fourteen, during a little-remembered crisis in Abkhazia in October 2001 when Gelayev’s forces invaded Abkhazia from the Georgian side.

In late 2001, Gelayev’s Chechen forces were ostensibly fighting against Moscow’s allies in Abkhazia, but the net result of the incursion was to provide Moscow the space—while the world was distracted by NATO’s invasion of Afghanistan—to clear the enclave of Chechens and other anti-Moscow insurgents. Since Gelayev was, like Basayev, with whom he fought in Georgia in 1992-3, a barely-concealed GRU agent, this might not have been wholly accidental. In 2009, Irakli Alasania, a former Georgian defence minister, stated plainly that Gelayev and his group were a “weapon against Georgians in GRU hands” during the 2001 events in Abkhazia.

Batirashvili continued after 2001 to help “Chechen rebels cross secretly into Russia and sometimes he joined the fighters on missions against Russian-backed troops, his father said.” From school, Batirashvili joined the Georgian army, serving from 2006 to 2010, and fighting on Tbilisi’s side during the August 2008 war with Russia. Afterward, Batirashvili “appeared to be helping Islamist rebels inside Russia, and asked [his] former commander for help finding some military-grade maps of Chechnya.” Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 2010, that September Batirashvili was arrested for possession of illegal weapons and imprisoned for sixteen months. Upon release in January/February 2012, Batirashvili had been radicalized and soon moved to Syria.

Who knows the truth? Batirashvili would not necessarily be an agent just because Gelayev was—provocation works by annexing the leadership and prodding the True Believers in the ranks below into self-destruction. If Batirashvili had GRU connections at one stage, he might easily have broken them off since. The question of ultimate loyalty is always difficult to determine—look at the trouble even now of determining who Evno Azeff was working for at what time—and ISIS now is in a radically different predicament to 2012-13; under these conditions an infiltrator could have been swayed by ISIS’s vision becoming a reality. But it wouldn’t alter the fact that ISIS is serving Russia’s and Assad’s interests by associating the anti-Assad forces with cruelty and fanaticism, and if Moscow pushed one of ISIS’s media stars into their ranks, it would only restate the point in a different way.

The pro-Qaeda Chechens are led by Murad Margoshvili (pseudonym: Muslem Abu Walid a-Shishani). Margoshvili’s story is somewhat simpler than Batirashvili’s. Involved with the Chechen jihad since 1995, including being associated with Basayev, Margoshvili was arrested in 2003. Margoshvili was—incredibly—acquitted on terrorism charges in 2006, and then managed to get free of an FSB attempt to nab him actually in the courtroom after the verdict. Margoshvili absconded to the Caucasus where he set up a Salafi-jihadist organization in 2008, before moving to Syria in 2012. There is simply no way this happens without the assistance of Russian intelligence. The only question is when Margoshvili began his relationship with Russia’s special services, what exactly it was, and what it is now.

Additionally, Batirashvili and Margoshvili are helping radicalize Chechens in the West, specifically Germany and Austria. Creating internal security problems for Western States—especially ones where Moscow can pose as part of the solution—is part of Russian tradecraft going back to the 1870s. A classic case is that of Arkadiy Harting (a.k.a. Landezen) in 1890. Landezen, a member of the Paris-based Russian opposition, organized a meeting, telling a group of his comrades to bring their bomb-making equipment with them, and had the oppositionists met by French police. Landezen was anOkhranka officer. The resultant public outcry soured French opinion, official and popular, on the Russian opposition, and led to a significant thaw in relations between autocratic Russia and republican France that contributed to formation of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1891.

Last October, I concluded by noting that Moscow was not opposed to large numbers of “Caucasus jihadis [who] are professionalised and militarily effective” removing themselves from Russia to the Fertile Crescent. “The Chechens are ostentatiously frightening, even among the takfiris, discrediting the insurgency locally and internationally, making Assad look like the lesser evil,” which makes a nice fit with the Assad-Iran-Russia policy in Syria. The question leftover was: “How many Chechen jihadists in Syria and Iraq are under Moscow’s sway? … Some of the Chechens’ military effectiveness surely comes from the long struggle against the Kremlin. Just as surely some of it comes from long experience for the Kremlin.” Serious people were—and are—proposing Assad, Iran, and Putin as allies against ISIS, but these are actors who have an interest in, and play some active part in, making the terrorism problem worse.

This was all, to some extent, old news, however.

New Evidence of Russian Assistance to ISIS

Michael Weiss, writing in The Daily Beast, provides new evidence that Putin’s Russia is playing a double-game with Islamic terrorism. Moscow is encouraging and facilitating Chechen radicals to go do holy war in Syria and Iraq, solving a Russian security problem—terrorism in the Caucasus has decreased fifty-percent since the Syrian crisis began—and not incidentally helping Russian politico-diplomatic policy by weakening the Syrian opposition and strengthening ISIS, to whom Russia’s ally Assad can be proposed as the only solution.

Weiss notes the recent investigation by Novaya Gazeta journalist, Elena Milashina, of the village of Novosasitili in Dagestan’s Khasavyurt district, where, since 2011, nearly one-percent of the 2,500 residents have gone to Syria for jihad. “Milashina has concluded that the ‘Russian special services have controlled’ the flow of jihadists into Syria,” Weiss writes. “The FSB established a ‘green corridor’ to allow [the Caucasian zealots] to migrate first to Turkey, and then to Syria.”

Rather than killing Salafi-jihadists, Russia is pushing them to emigrate, with both carrot and stick, offering to help zealots to serve their holy cause—just not in Russia—and accompanying it with a systematic campaign of harassment for those who try to do jihad locally.

Milashina spoke to the “negotiator” who came to Novosasitili and he told “her of his role as an intermediary between the FSB and local militants in arranging the latter’s departure to the Levant.” In 2012, the “negotiator” helped move the “emir of the northern sector” from Dagestan to Turkey and thence to Syria. “The FSB gave the emir a passport and acted as his travel agent. The condition was that he’d deal exclusively with the FSB and not inform any of his confederates of his true sponsor.” This one “negotiator” sent at least five other men to Syria under the same arrangement.

Whether this is a local policy—security officials seeking to impress Moscow by bringing down the figures for terrorism in their areas—or a central government policy isn’t wholly clear, though the chances that Moscow is unware of what is happening, especially now after three years, seem remote. Moscow might have “deniability,” but only by intention: it sets broad policy and then remains adequately (officially) uninformed about how it is being carried out down the chain of command.

Russia Never Was a Counter-terrorism Partner

These revelations underline the fact that “counterterrorism cooperation between Russia and the U.S. is more a comforting legend of the post-Cold War order,” as Weiss puts it.

Even if Russia were not playing a double-game with terrorists, Moscow is not exactly forthcoming with intelligence related to terrorism. The Boston bombing is the most recent case in point.

“On the Tsarnaev brothers, [Russian intelligence] did tell [the United States] once, and then they stopped,” said Mike Rogers, the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee. “When the FBI made further inquiries, they stopped cooperating. I thought that was really interesting because clearly they knew the Tsarnaevs were being radicalized.”

Whatever additional information the FSB has about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, it is not sharing it with America. This is standard.

Jose Rodriguez, the chief of staff of the Counterterrorism Centre at the CIA immediately after 9/11, wrote in his memoir:

Dealing with the Russians was quite a chore. They were always in the “receive mode,” happy to take whatever information we were willing to share with them on terrorist threats but generally reluctant to offer much in return.

Rodriguez’s superior, Cofer Black, put on a dramatic display at one meeting, slamming a heap of papers several feet high on the desk and telling the Russians, “This is the intelligence information the United States has shared with you.” Black then threw a small handful of papers in the air and announced: “This is what we have gotten from you.” This had “little effect on subsequent performance,” Rodriguez reports.

The fact that the U.S. is constantly on-guard against Russian espionage—now at its highest levels since the Cold War—also complicates any security co-operation with Moscow.

Beyond provokatsiya and spies, the corruption and incompetence of Moscow’s security services would make Russia a dangerous partner to rely on in the fight against Islamic terrorism. When holy warriors can bribe their way past border officials in Russia, there is no security in relying on Russia.

As ever, Russia’s approach to the West is deeply schizophrenic. On the one hand, Moscow wishes to sell itself as a peer of the remaining superpower and a source of invaluable information for the U.S. intelligence community. On the other hand, Moscow puts out propaganda saying the terrorism against America is the work of the U.S. government, as happened over Boston, and barely a day goes by when RT doesn’t suggest that ISIS is the creation of the U.S. (and/or Israel) in a war against the Assad regime—despite the U.S. being actively at war with ISIS and Russia facilitating ISIS’s recruitment.

Conclusion

These revelations should change the conversation about Islamist militancy, ISIS specifically, and its State supporters and enablers.

Questioning whether American has collaborated with Islamist extremists goes well beyond the fringe, from the old myth about the U.S. supporting Osama bin Laden against the Soviets in Afghanistan to the more serious questions about U.S. policy vis-à-vis the mujahideen in Bosnia. The accusation that various governments of the Gulf States support Islamist terrorism are well-circulated and freely debated.

But somehow, the accusation that Russia, which has used the infiltration and manipulation of terrorism as a strategy to defeat internal and external enemies for more than a century, might be up to its old tricks with al-Qaeda and now ISIS gets nothing like the attention it deserves and tends to be associated with the term “conspiracy theory” when it is raised.

A further benefit, if the conventional wisdom about Russia as a partner against ISIS can be dispelled, is that it might perhaps catalyse an assault on the final frontier of misconception—and help us recognize that Iran is no an ally against ISIS.

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Башни Кремля спорят за пост начальника ГРУ
Friday January 22nd, 2016 at 4:14 PM

Аргументы.Ру

Как стало известно «Аргументам недели», в высших эшелонах российской власти развернулась серьёзная борьба за кандидатуру на освободившийся пост начальника Главного разведуправления Генштаба. В связи с войной в Сирии он стал стратегическим.

Последний руководитель ГРУ ГШ генерал-полковник Игорь Сергун, по официальным сообщениям, скоропостижно скончался 3 января в Подмосковье. По данным частного американского разведывательного центра Stratfor, который называют «теневым» ЦРУ, смерть Сергуна произошла 1 января в Ливане. Как рассказали «АН» военные источники, бывший начальник ГРУ действительно перед Новым годом был с рабочей поездкой на Ближнем Востоке, в частности в Сирии и Ливане, но на праздники вернулся домой.

Так или иначе, но военная разведка уже почти три недели остаётся фактически обезглавленной. И это в условиях непрекращающихся боевых действий в Сирии. Именно ГРУ сейчас обеспечивает наши ВКС, наносящие удары по террористам, полноценной и достоверной развединформацией. Причём не только со спутников, но и с помощью российских военных советников, находящихся в передовых частях сирийской армии на земле. Недаром с началом сирийской операции начальнику ГРУ было возвращено право прямого докладаВерховному главнокомандующему – президенту В. Путину, которое отменено ещё Анатолием Сердюковым.

Сейчас различные группы рекомендуют Путину своих кандидатов на этот стратегический для страны пост. Как говорят военные источники, «с вероятностью 90% это будет один из заместителей Сергуна по работе в разведке. Во всяком случае это мнение министра обороны С. Шойгу». Всего у Сергуна было четыре зама. Это генералы: Сергей Гизунов, Игорь Лелин,Вячеслав Кондрашов и Игорь Коробов. Именно Коробова называют наиболее вероятным новым руководителем российской военной разведки, т.к. его активно поддерживает Шойгу и начальник Генштаба Валерий Герасимов.

«Однако у президента может быть и своя кандидатура. Причём необязательно выходца из ГРУ. Например, никто не ожидал внезапного назначения его бывшего начальника службы безопасности Виктора Золотова на должность заместителя Главкома ВВ МВД России», – говорит источник. Судя по тому, что решение до сих пор не принято, аппаратная война за должность главного военного разведчика ещё в самом разгаре

Did Putin Strike in the Heart of Washington, D.C.?
Friday January 22nd, 2016 at 2:51 PM

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Did Putin Strike in the Heart of Washington, D.C.?

With the release of the British report into the role of the Russian government in the death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London, some attention is returning to how President Vladimir Putin murders his perceived enemies. Last November, in one of the most sensational cases, the Russian creator of the propaganda channel, Russia Today (RT), Mikhail Lesin, was found dead in a Washington D.C. hotel room.

Former FBI agent John Whiteside, who handled Russian espionage cases, told me in an interview that it wouldn’t surprise him if Putin had engineered the death of Lesin. “Putin is a KGB guy through and through,” he noted. Since the evidence implicates the Putin regime in the murder by poisoning of former KGB agent Litvinenko, Whiteside found it reasonable to assume that he could do the same in America. He said, “Could Putin reach out to the United States? Absolutely. I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute.”

The KGB is now called the FSB.

The speculation in the media is that Lesin was in Washington, D.C. to cooperate with the FBI, and expose corruption and other misdeeds by the Putin regime.

A one-time Putin ally, Lesin had served as Russia’s Minister for Communications and Mass Media from 1999 to 2004. He had also been Director-General of Gazprom Media Holding, Russia’s largest media group that includes television, radio, printing press, cinema production, advertising, movie theaters and Internet assets. Gazprom Media was owned by Gazprombank, the financial arm of the Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom.

Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence agent, was targeted for death because he had blown the lid off one of the KGB’s most closely-guarded secrets—the Russian hand in global Islamic terrorism. Litvinenko revealed that al-Qaeda terrorist leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had been trained by the KGB and was an agent of the Russian security services. Litvinenko died in 2006 in London—where he had fled from the Russian regime—after being poisoned by a Russian official. A film, “Poisoned by Polonium,” examines how the highly radioactive substance Polonium was used to kill him.

Robert van Voren, Professor of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas (Lithuania) and Ilia State University in Tbilisi (Georgia), has written an article on the poisoning of Russian journalists and political figures. When poisoning doesn’t work, the perceived political enemies of the Putin regime are usually shot and killed, such as the case with journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Van Voren notes that she was hospitalized after drinking tea on a Russian flight, but the toxin was never identified because the medical staff was instructed to destroy her blood tests. She survived, but in 2006 she was assassinated in the doorway of her Moscow apartment. Among other things, she had been investigating human rights violations in Russia and Putin’s war in Chechnya.

However, GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump says he is not convinced that Putin murders journalists or political opponents.

Van Voren tells me an increasing number of people from Russia “are dying under rather suspicious circumstances,” noting that “Recently two top generals died at a relatively young age, even for Russian standards, one of them being the head of the GRU—the military intelligence service. Both had been involved in military operations in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine and thus had detailed, inside knowledge of what happened and how.” The head of the GRU was Igor Sergun. His and other deaths are usually called “unexpected.”

“At the same time,” he adds, “I am very hesitant to ascribe everything that happens to opponents to the FSB [as the work of the Putin regime]. People do die or wind up in car accidents, and do have terminal illnesses or sudden deaths—even when Putin doesn’t like them.”

RT is carried in the U.S. by such giant media companies as Comcast and DISH Network, and uses Americans such as former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief Michael T. Flynn in its propaganda broadcasts.

“Russia has reorganized and intensified its international propaganda machine so effectively over the past decade that some Western lawmakers and diplomats say Washington now is badly losing a global messaging war to the increasingly modernized blitz of anti-U.S. content from Moscow-backed news operations,” reported Guy Taylor of The Washington Times. “As of this year, RT claimed to be available to an audience of some 700 million across more than 100 nations, where viewers can soak in its Fox News-style 24-hour television content in English, Arabic and Spanish.”

But in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the channel is not carried in the U.S. with disclaimers identifying the material as foreign propaganda. Hence, it is disguised as real “news,” on the same level as privately-funded U.S. media properties, but with the benefit of foreign state funding.

RT immediately called Lesin’s death a “heart attack,” a dubious assertion. This claim came from the Russian embassy, which sent an official to identify him, before an autopsy was conducted.

The death followed revelations that he was under investigation by the Department of Justice, based on allegations that Lesin may have engaged in money laundering and corruption.

In a letter to the Justice Department, Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) said that he understood that Lesin had “acquired multimillion dollar assets in Europe, including an estate reportedly purchased through a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, during his tenure as a Russian civil servant.” Wicker added, “I also understand that following his government service, Mr. Lesin moved his immediate family to Los Angeles, California, where he acquired multiple residences at a cost of over $28 million. That a Russian public servant could have amassed the considerable funds required to acquire and maintain these assets in Europe and the United States raises serious questions.”

Van Voren told me that the Lesin case is also “rather suspicious, and one has increasingly the feeling that Putin is getting rid of people who know too much.” He added, “It is not unusual behavior: being the Al Capone of a gangster state, he must be constantly worried about everything people know about him, his past and his corrupt businesses.”

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Vladimir Putin asked Bashar al-Assad to step down
Friday January 22nd, 2016 at 2:38 PM

General Igor Sergun, left, was asked by Vladimir Putin to assess whether Bashar al-Assad would be willing to step aside. The answer was an emphatic no

©Getty Images; AFP/Getty Images

Igor Sergun was asked by Vladimir Putin in 2015 to propose to Bashar al-Assad that he step down. The answer was no

Just weeks before his death on January 3, Colonel-General Igor Sergun, director of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, was sent to Damascus on a delicate mission.

The general, who is believed to have cut his teeth as a Soviet operative in Syria, bore a message from Vladimir Putin for President Bashar al-Assad: the Kremlin, the Syrian dictator’s most powerful international protector, believed it was time for him to step aside.

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Mr Assad angrily refused.

Two senior western intelligence officials have given the Financial Times details of Sergun’s mission. The Russian foreign ministry referred a request for comment to the defence ministry, which said it was unable to comment.

But on Friday, in response to a question from a journalist, asking if the Russian leader had asked Mr Assad to step down, a spokesman for Mr Putin said: “No, that’s not so.”

Russia’s failed gamble in Damascus left Mr Assad more entrenched than before, and hopes for a diplomatic solution to the vicious civil war appear again to be ebbing away.

UN officials have spent the past week lowering expectations that the talks between the warring factions planned for January 25 in Geneva will go ahead, let alone produce a breakthrough.

It is a dramatic reversal of fortunes. News of the secret proposal delivered by Sergun — a choreographed transition of power that would maintain the Alawite regime but open the door to realistic negotiations with moderate rebels — added to a growing mood of optimism among western intelligence agencies in late 2015.

For the US-led coalition fighting Isis, it seemed that accommodating Moscow could break years of diplomatic deadlock over Mr Assad’s removal — a move Washington views as a precondition to cooling the sectarian tensions in Syria and Iraq that have fed the jihadi insurgency.

Moscow’s military intervention in the conflict in support of Damascus in late September, many in Europe and the US reasoned, had reached its limit. “Mr Putin had taken a look under the bonnet of the Syrian regime,” one senior European intelligence official told the FT “and found a lot more problems than he was bargaining for.”

However, Russia overplayed its hand, the official said, and Mr Assad made clear to Sergun that there could be no future for Russia in Syria unless he remained as president.

In his dealings with the Kremlin, Mr Assad has adopted a strategy of playing one foreign power off against another. His trump card on this occasion was Iran. Russia has been nervous of Tehran’s growing regional influence at the cost of its own leverage for months.

People close to the Syrian regime say suspicions about Russia’s intentions have been growing in Damascus for some time. “That mood of elation when Russia first got involved lasted for a while, but then people got more pessimistic,” said one Damascus businessman. “Assad’s people started to realise that having the big brother defending them meant he could also demand things of them too.”

Mr Assad has also been scrupulous in rooting out any powerful figures who might one day stand as an alternative to his leadership.

The disappearance of Abdel Aziz al-Khair, an Alawite dissident, was a striking example, said Joshua Landis, a Syria analyst from the University of Oklahoma.

Mr Khair, a leading member of the National Co-ordinating Body, a political grouping dedicated to negotiating with Mr Assad to achieve democratic change, was from a prominent family in Mr Assad’s home town, said Mr Landis.

“He went to Moscow in 2012 and then he went to Beijing. It seemed clear to everyone they were checking him out as a potential Alawite replacement to the current regime that could assure the Alawite community,” Mr Landis said. On his return to Damascus he was taken from the airport by security agencies.

“That seemed to be a sign that Assad was not going to allow Russia to pick the next president,” Mr Landis added.

Moscow is frustrated. “It has become quite clear that part of an eventual political solution is that Assad has to step aside at some point, although we don’t think that it has been decided yet when that should be,” said a Russian authority on Syria who is involved in Moscow’s diplomacy. “Ever since President Assad was flown in to be received by our president last year, his attitude has been less than satisfactory, and this does interfere with our efforts towards a political solution.”

But the Kremlin is also pragmatic, note many foreign policy experts, and its intervention is as much about projecting itself on the international stage as it is about determining Syria’s leader.

Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said: “For Putin, the intervention in Syria was never about keeping Assad in power, it is about getting the Americans to acknowledge Russia’s key role in settling this conflict, and that’s being achieved through the Vienna process.

“But it looks premature to engineer a coup in Syria — I don’t see how that would help the political process as there are not enough opposition people who can accept the regime if it gets just a different figurehead.”

Meanwhile, says one British diplomat, with no palatable strategy for withdrawal, Russia appears to be doubling down on its military intervention, leaving the prospect of a negotiated peace as far from reality as it has ever been.

1944: Syria allies with the Soviet Union after formalising diplomatic relations

1950s onwards: Many Russians relocate to Syria while thousands of Syrians, including military officers, study at Russian schools

1956: The Suez Crisis in Egypt helps Soviet influence in the Middle East grow further

1957: The two countries sign an aid pact that includes an agreement to exchange Soviet weapons for Syrian grain

1971: Russia opens a naval military base in the Syrian town of Tartus, which remains Russia’s only port on the Mediterranean

1980: Hafez al-Assad visits Moscow to meet Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Syria and Russia sign a 20-year Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation with automatic five-year extensions

1987: Muhammad Faris, left, joins two Soviet cosmonauts on a mission to the Mir space station. He is the first Syrian in space

2000: Hafez al-Assad dies and is replaced by his son Bashar al-Assad

2007: Russia accounts for 78 per cent of Syria’s weapons purchases between 2007 and 2012, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

2008: Dmitry Medvedev, left, meets Bashar al-Assad at the presidential palace in Sochi

2011: Russia remains supportive of the Assad government as unrest during the Arab Spring leads to civil war; Moscow vetoes proposed UN sanctions against Syria.

2015: Russia conducts air strikes in Syria. Moscow says it is targeting Isis but most attacks appear to be on areas held by anti-Assad rebels.

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Shifting and Uneasy Alliances Dot the Mideast Landscape
Wednesday January 20th, 2016 at 11:02 AM

The Middle East once had two types of countries: America’s allies, who usually abstained from fighting one another, and America’s foes, whom the U.S. helped contain or defeat. Today, after years of American disengagement, those distinctions have increasingly blurred.

In short, it’s a frenemy world out there.

The Obama administration’s successful push for a nuclear deal with Iran is paving the way to the lifting of sanctions and the resumption of trade with what used to be America’s most determined enemy in the region. At the same time—and in part because of that deal—America’s relations with its historic allies in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Turkey to Israel, have reached new lows.

Such an erosion of a decades-old architecture of regional alliances makes these countries’ behavior increasingly unpredictable—creating new potential for costly mistakes that could spark fresh conflicts or intensify existing wars. Meanwhile, mutual suspicion and hostility have blunted the fight of greatest concern to the West: defeating the Islamic State.

The U.S. is navigating this new Middle East with much-diminished leverage. On one hand, Washington’s outreach to Iran hasn’t demonstrably moderated the Islamic Republic’s conduct. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its local proxies have continued their involvement in conflicts across the region, most notably in Syria.

But traditional American allies’ growing mistrust of the U.S. has made them less susceptible to influence from Washington. That’s most visible in the Persian Gulf.

In the past, when the Saudis knew they could count on the U.S. to defend them, they tended to listen to Washington. Now, feeling spurned, Saudi leaders believe they should do whatever it takes to survive—a mindset that prompted Riyadh to launch the costly war against pro-Iranian Houthi forces in Yemen. And that mindset is behind Saudi officials’ plans to have a (so-far civilian) nuclear program of their own.

The latest Saudi-Iranian crisis, in which Iranian protesters stormed and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran following the execution of a prominent Saudi Shiite cleric, only deepened this gap. The U.S. attempted to appear even-handed in this spat, which prompted Saudi Arabia’s Sunni ruling family and all the other Gulf monarchies except non-Sunni Oman to either sever or downgrade diplomatic relations with predominantly Shiite Iran.

“The U.S. is trying to place itself as almost a mediator, assigning equal blame. This is not going to sit well. America’s traditional allies in the region expect America to be on their side,” said Emile Hokayem, senior fellow for Middle East security at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in Bahrain.

A Saudi Arabia that feels isolated in front of the much more powerful Iran isn’t likely to be of great help against ISIS, a militant group that is even more hostile to Iran. Its gains in Syria and Iraq have cut in half the so-called Shiite crescent that runs from Tehran to Beirut.

Then there’s Turkey, unlike Saudi Arabia a formal North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally. The Turks feel they have been betrayed by the U.S. decision in 2013 to abort military action against the Assad regime in Syria, and, unlike the U.S., also consider defeating that regime more important than—and a necessary precondition to—routing ISIS.

Even more important for Turkey is the war against the PKK Kurdistan Workers Party, a powerful armed group that seeks to carve out a separate Kurdish homeland. But, while the U.S. still officially considers the PKK a terrorist organization, to Ankara’s fury it provides military assistance to the PKK affiliate that is combating ISIS in Syria.

Iraq also now falls in the frenemy camp. Formally, its prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, is a U.S. ally, and the U.S has sent troops there to train and equip the Iraqi army after ISIS advances in mid-2014. But, in fact, much of Iraq’s security apparatus is under the control of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. So any significant victory by Iraqi forces would only expand Iran’s regional writ.

It’s increasingly uncertain whether the government in Baghdad—like many others in the region—is a friend or a foe, argues Ali Khedery, a political analyst who advised U.S. ambassadors in Iraq: “It’s a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothes phenomenon.”

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

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High court raises doubts over Puerto Rico sovereignty
Friday January 15th, 2016 at 10:21 AM

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday raised doubts about whether Puerto Rico should be treated as a sovereign state with powers that go beyond its status as a territory of the United States.

The justices considered the question during arguments in a criminal case involving two men who claim that Puerto Rico and the federal government can't prosecute them for the same charges of selling weapons without a permit.

The double jeopardy principal prevents defendants from being tried twice for the same offense. But there is an exception that allows prosecution under similar state and federal laws, since states are considered separate sovereigns.

Several justices said Puerto Rico's power to enforce local laws really comes from Congress, which in theory could take it away.

The case has broad political and legal implications that could affect Puerto Rico on issues ranging from taxation and bankruptcy to federal benefits. It comes as the high court prepares to hear a separate dispute later this year over whether the financially struggling Puerto Rican government can give its municipalities the power to declare bankruptcy.

The Caribbean island of 3.5 million people is a U.S. territory acquired in 1898 following the Spanish-American War. But it gained a measure of autonomy in 1952, when it adopted its own constitution with the approval of Congress and was allowed to pass its own local laws.

Justice Elena Kagan said that history means the ultimate source of the island's legal power is Congress.

"If Congress is in the driver's seat, why isn't Congress the sole source of authority?" she asked Christopher Landau, the lawyer representing Puerto Rico.

Landau said that under Puerto Rico's constitution "the political power of the commonwealth emanates from the people." He said Congress had essentially relinquished control over Puerto Rico's internal affairs when it allowed the island to create its own laws and government.

But Justice Antonin Scalia said that doesn't mean Congress couldn't change the law.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the daughter of Puerto Rico-born parents, seemed sympathetic to the argument that Congress meant to confer sovereignty when it approved the island's constitution — even if Puerto Rico is not quite equivalent to a state.

"Before 1952, Congress could veto Puerto Rico's laws," Sotomayor said. "It has relinquished that right."

The case involves Luis Sanchez Valle and James Gomez Vazquez, who pleaded guilty in federal court to selling illegal firearms. When Puerto Rican officials later charged them under local laws, they moved to dismiss the charges on double jeopardy grounds.

The Puerto Rico Supreme Court ultimately sided with the men, ruling that the island is not a separate sovereign.

Arguing for Valle and Vazquez, lawyer Adam Unikowski said the issue is simple: "States are sovereign, territories are not."

Some justices appeared to search for a middle ground. Justice Stephen Breyer said an opinion saying Puerto Rico is sovereign would have "enormous implications." But he suggested the court could find that the island has some aspects of sovereignty that would apply more narrowly to double jeopardy.

"There are different kinds of territories," Breyer said.

The Obama administration has angered Puerto Rican officials by insisting that the island remains a territory subject to the control of Congress.

Justice Department lawyer Nicole Saharsky told the justices that Congress has allowed "increasing self-government" in Puerto Rico and there is no reason to think lawmakers change that. But she said Congress could revise the arrangement because the island remains a territory.

"Congress is the one who makes the rules," Saharsky said.

Politics & Government
Government
Puerto Rico

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Page 5

Human Traffickers Found to Exploit U.S. Visas and Data-Sharing Failures
Tuesday January 12th, 2016 at 4:46 PM

WASHINGTON — Human traffickers used fiancé and work visas to bring dozens of victims to the United States, exploiting a lack of data sharing between immigration offices within the Department of Homeland Security, according to the agency’s internal watchdog.

In a report released on Monday, investigators found that from 2005 to 2014, 17 of the 32 known traffickers they examined used the visas to bring in victims who were exploited for either forced labor or prostitution. In addition, the report found that 274 suspected traffickers successfully petitioned federal officials to bring 425 family members or fiancés into the United States.

The report, by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, comes as Congress is beginning to examine the visa program after the mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 people dead and 22 wounded.

Tashfeen Malik, one of the attackers, was granted entry to the United States under a K-1 visa, also known as a fiancé visa. Her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, was an American-born citizen. Both died in a shootout with the police.

The attack has added to fear that terrorist groups like the Islamic State could exploit gaps in the visa system.

Homeland Security auditors say human traffickers were able to exploit the work and fiancé visa system because the two agencies responsible for immigration enforcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services, did not always share data that was collected on human traffickers.

Auditors found that Citizenship and Immigration Services did not always collect the names and other information that the victims of human trafficking provided in their visa applications. In one case, auditors found that children who had been sold and brought to the United States and forced into involuntary servitude had identified the human trafficker by name, as well as other victims, to immigration officials, but the information was not entered into agency databases.

In addition, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office had problems with the quality of the data it maintained on people investigated, arrested or prosecuted for immigration law violations, the report found.

The report said that after more than a year, the agency was unable to provide auditors with a complete set of data containing basic information such as names and dates of birth for suspected traffickers. And each time the agency provided the data, the results varied widely, auditors said.

“Without concerted D.H.S. efforts to collect and share information, the risk exists that some human traffickers may remain unidentified and free to abuse other individuals,” the report said.

Homeland Security auditors also found that some victims of human trafficking had overstayed their visitor visas.

Visa overstays also have become a major focus of Congress. Nearly 20 years ago, Congress passed a law requiring the federal government to develop a system to track people who overstayed their visas.

Since then, the federal government has spent millions of dollars on the effort, yet officials can only roughly estimate the number of people in the country illegally after overstaying visas because the United States does not routinely collect biometric information — fingerprints, iris scans and photographs that can be used for facial recognition — of people leaving the country. Nearly three dozen countries, including many in Europe, Asia and Africa, collect such information.

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Majority of Americans Disapprove of Obama’s Job As President
Tuesday January 12th, 2016 at 4:12 PM

Washington Free Beacon

Ahead of SOTU, low approval for president in final year

BY: Morgan Chalfant

Hours before the final State of the Union address of President Obama’s career, a majority of Americans disapprove of the way the current commander-in-chief is handling his job.

According to an NBC News/Survey Monkey poll released Tuesday morning, 54 percent of U.S. adults disapprove of the way Obama is doing his job as president while 45 percent approve.

Furthermore, a plurality of Americans say they “strongly” disapprove of Obama’s handling of his job, with 42 percent of respondents saying so. Only 22 percent “somewhat” approve of the president and 23 percent “strongly” approve.

Obama’s approval ratings have appeared to decline as terrorism fears increased following the deadly Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, according to a review of weekly data collected by Gallup. Indeed, terrorism remains a top concern among Americans following the coordinated bombings and shootings in France and the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino, California.

When asked what issue matters most to them, respondents were most likely to list jobs and the economy (28 percent) and terrorism (23 percent) as top concerns.

The poll, which was conducted between Jan. 4 and 10, comes just as Obama prepares to address the nation in his final State of the Union speech. Obama is expected to focus on his purported accomplishments during the speech, including the Iran nuclear deal and Obamacare, according to apreview released by the White House.

The preview does not make mention of international terrorism or the president’s campaign to fight ISIS, the terror group Obama once described as a “JV team” that now controls large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris and is also believed to have inspired the gun attack in San Bernardino.

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In his final State of the Union address, President Obama seeks to stay relevant
Tuesday January 12th, 2016 at 4:07 PM

Speaking to Democratic donors recently in his hometown of Chicago, President Obama took some delight in recalling how long it had been since someone reminded him he was a "lame duck" president.

"We've been flapping our wings a lot," he said, noting a Pacific Rim trade agreement, a deal to rein inIran's nuclear program, positive economic trends and new actions on climate change.

In that spirit, White House officials have said for weeks that Obama's final State of the Union addressTuesday will be a "non-traditional speech." That's a well-worn line from second-term administrations entering their final year as they try to stay relevant in the national debate.

The relatively early date for the president's annual address to Congress is indicative of the need to avoid being overshadowed by the campaign to succeed Obama, with the Iowa caucuses less than three weeks away. But Obama and his team nonetheless see a rare opportunity for the president to not just be part of the 2016 debate, but to set its terms.

"This one moment where the country sort of acknowledges that the president gets an hour to assess the condition of the country and to offer up a prescription for confronting the challenges and capitalizing on the opportunities is as important as ever," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday.

Hoping to amplify the president's argument to the country, the White House has tried to make the State of the Union address more than just a speech in the House chamber. It's the launching pad for Snapchat messages, YouTube forums, and yes, even some good old-fashioned barnstorming.

The speech itself, aides say, will be built around one central theme of optimism, as the president seeks to highlight the progress he sees the nation having made since he first took office at the height of the Great Recession, and what more can be done to leverage the strengths of the American people in the future.

"There is no country in the world that is better positioned to capitalize on the kind of opportunities we see, whether it relates to our national security or it relates to our economy, than the United States of America," Earnest said.

It's not clear that the country shares the president's positive view of the state of the nation. A Fox News poll released last week found that 61% of Americans were not satisfied with how things were going in the country, the highest number in two years. But Earnest attributed that in part to the "avalanche of negativity" from the Republicans looking to take his place.

"The willingness of those candidates to exploit people's fears and insecurities and anxieties has infected the political debate," he said.

Throughout the week, the White House will be working to remind Americans of what the president has accomplished since taking office, while pointing to 2016 as the year to "push a bunch of big pieces over the finish line in the next year," as one official, who was not authorized to speak publicly in advance of the president's speech, put it. That includes closing the military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, giving final approval to the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, and enacting reforms to the criminal justice system.

Those priorities ensure that even as the tumultuous presidential race dominates the nation's attention, the candidates will spend "a lot more time responding to us" than the other way around, as the official put it.

Whether it's to his party's political benefit or detriment is unclear. When Obama first addressed Congress in 2009, Democrats dominated both the House and what was briefly a 60-seat supermajority in the Senate. On Tuesday, he speaks to the largest Republican House majority in generations, one built largely through midterm election years when Obama's agenda was deeply unpopular.

But the story has been different in presidential election years, as Obama reminded lawmakers in his 2015 State of the Union address.

"I have no more campaigns to run," he said then, drawing some sarcastic cheers. "I know because I won both of them."

Follow @mikememoli and @cparsons on Twitter for more news out of Washington.

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· · ·

Balancing Terror and Reality in State of the Union Address
Tuesday January 12th, 2016 at 4:04 PM

WASHINGTON — When President Obama speaks to the nation in his final State of the Union address on Tuesday night, he will offer a familiar reassurance that the country is expending enormous effort to protect Americans against international terrorism.

Here is what he probably will not say, at least not this bluntly: Americans are more likely to die in a car crash, drown in a bathtub or be struck by lightning than be killed by a terrorist. The news media is complicit in inflating the sense of danger. The Islamic State does not pose an existential threat to the United States.

He will presumably not say this, either: Given how hard it is for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to detect people who have become radicalized, like those who opened fire at a holiday party in San Bernardino, Calif., a certain number of relatively low-level terrorist attacks may be inevitable, and Americans may have to learn to adapt the way Israel has.

By all accounts, Mr. Obama is sympathetic to this view, which is shared by a number of counterterrorism veterans who contend that anxiety has warped the American public’s perspective. But it is also a politically untenable argument at a time when polls show greater fears about terrorism than at any point since the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. As it is, critics contend that Mr. Obama does not take the threat seriously enough and has not done enough to guard the nation against attack.

“Do we overemphasize terror? Yes,” said Juliette Kayyem, who served as an assistant Homeland Security secretary under Mr. Obama. “But there’s not much government can do about that. It’s a different kind of violence. It’s meant to elicit fear. So the fact that it does elicit fear is hard to refute.”

The effect on the public psyche is inherently more powerful than other dangers Americans accept every day. “Comparing it to shark attacks is apples and oranges,” she said, “and that’s the challenge for anyone trying to communicate risk.”

That dynamic frustrates Mr. Obama as he struggles to explain his approach to the threat. In a recent off-the-record meeting with columnists, he emphasized that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, did not threaten the United States in a fundamental way, according to people who were in the room.

As a result, he said, the danger does not merit an all-out military response involving American ground troops. He would send significant numbers of those forces to the Middle East, he added, only in the event of a terrorist attack in the United States so catastrophic that it all but paralyzed the country with fear.

The president is more careful about expressing such an analysis in public, acutely aware that his past comments have made him look as if he was underestimating the threat. When Mr. Obama at first called emerging groups like the Islamic State the “J.V. team” of terrorism, he looked as though he did not grasp its lethal reach after it seized parts of Iraq and Syria. When he more recently said the group had been “contained,” he looked as if he was out of touch, given the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino that followed.

His initial measured — some said passive — public response to those attacks further undermined public confidence, and even Democrats complained his strategy was inadequate. Polls afterward showed that most Americans disapproved of his handling of terrorism, once a political asset.

“While there are many things I disagree about the president’s approach, I understand that balance he’s trying to find,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, a counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush, “I just think he’s tilted too far in that direction.”

She continued: “He condescended about the fears — ‘you shouldn’t be afraid, you just don’t understand the strategy.’ That doesn’t work.”

Mr. Obama acknowledged to the columnists that he was slow to respond to public fears after the Paris and San Bernardino attacks. He said he might not have fully recognized the anxiety because he was overseas at first and in general does not watch much cable television — as much a jab at the news media as an admission on his part.

Here is a look back at some of the issues President Obama addressed in his annual speeches before a joint session of Congress and the actions, or inaction, that followed in those areas.

OPEN Interactive Graphic

He later tried to modify his public response with tougher language and more events to demonstrate resolve. He has tried to make a nuanced argument, but it has drawn scorn on the campaign trail among Republicans who portray him as woefully weak. While Republicans vowed to destroy the enemy, Mr. Obama argued against overreaction, as with Donald J. Trump’s proposal to temporarily bar the entry of foreign Muslims.

In an interview last month with NPR, Mr. Obama urged Americans “to keep things in perspective” about the Islamic State.

“This is not an organization that can destroy the United States,” he said. “This is not a huge industrial power that can pose great risks to us institutionally or in a systematic way. But they can hurt us, and they can hurt our people and our families. And so I understand why people are worried.”

In a New York Times-CBS News poll last month, 44 percent of respondents said they thought it was very likely that the United States would suffer a terrorist attack in the next few months, the highest figure since the weeks after Sept. 11. An additional 35 percent said it was somewhat likely. In the latest Gallup poll, 51 percent said they were worried that they or someone in their family would be a victim of terrorism, the highest proportion since just after Sept. 11.

Never mind that only a relative handful of people have been killed in terrorist attacks in the United States since Sept. 11. The annual risk of dying in a terrorist attack in the United States between 1970 and 2007 was one in 3.5 million, according to data presented by John Mueller, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who has written extensively on what he considers the exaggeration of the terrorist threat.

“He’s afraid if he pushes this very far it’s going to possibly blow up in his face,” Mr. Mueller said of Mr. Obama. “And it doesn’t seem to work. He has tried to say it’s not an existential threat, which is so banal it’s a no-brainer, and he can’t even get that to go down.”

Juan Carlos Zarate, another of Mr. Bush’s counterterrorism advisers, said that in some ways Mr. Obama “is right to not overplay the sense of threat” to avoid playing into the hands of the terrorists. But he added that Mr. Obama seemed to have retreated to a pre-Sept. 11 mind-set, and that waiting until a more devastating attack to make a more serious effort would be too late.

“We run the risk for ourselves and our allies that we’re not dealing aggressively enough from the outset with the adaptation of this group, which could become catastrophic,” Mr. Zarate said.

Ms. Kayyem has taken on this subject in a memoir, “Security Mom,” to be published in April. “As a society we’re irrational about it, but government has to accept that irrationality rather than fight it,” she said. “You’re not going to fight it.”

She noted that in military campaigns, Americans historically had accepted some losses. Terrorism, she said, does not work the same way. “When you’re talking about my three children, there’s no acceptable losses,” she said. “We don’t want to hear that you view it that way. That’s the challenge for the government.”

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Pathankot attack: India says talks only if Pakistan acts
Thursday January 7th, 2016 at 12:16 PM

BBC News - Home

India has said that planned talks with Pakistan would go ahead only if Islamabad took action against militants that Delhi said were behind the deadly assault on the Pathankot air base.

A foreign ministry spokesman said the "ball is in Pakistan's court" and the "immediate issue" was their response.

Indian troops killed six militants during a four-day battle at the base in Punjab, close to the Pakistan border.

Foreign secretaries of the two sides are due to hold peace talks next week.

Although India has not officially announced any dates, Indian media reports say the meeting is due to take place on 14-15 March in Islamabad.

The assault on the Pathankot base started on Saturday, when a group of gunmen - wearing Indian army uniforms - entered residential quarters on the air base.

Seven Indian troops and six militants were killed in the gun battle.

Hopes for Delhi-Islamabad detente were raised in late December after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid an unexpected visit to his counterpart Nawaz Sharif on his way back from Afghanistan and the two sides announced plans to resume peace talks.

But the attack has come as a blow to the peace initiative.

"Pathankot terror attack has put renewed focus on cross-border terrorism," Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Vikas Swarup told a press conference in Delhi on Thursday.

"The government's policy towards Pakistan is clear and consistent. India wants friendly relations with all its neighbours including Pakistan," he said, adding that "India will not tolerate cross-border terror".

On Tuesday, Mr Modi urged an "immediate" response to the Pathankot attack after Mr Sharif telephoned him to discuss the incident.

Mr Sharif promised that Pakistan would take "prompt and decisive action against the terrorists", Indian officials said.

India's Press Information Bureau said India had provided Pakistan with "specific and actionable" information on the attack.

Earlier in the week, the United Jihad Council - a coalition of more than a dozen militant groups fighting against Indian rule in Kashmir - claimed that its "national highway squad" was behind the attack.

The council, based in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, is headed by Syed Salahuddin who also leads Hizb-ul Mujahidin, the longest surviving Kashmiri militant group.

Some Indian security officials have suggested the Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed was to blame. India says the group is backed by Pakistan, but Islamabad denies this.

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Monkey Naruto Loses Selfie Copyright Bid
Thursday January 7th, 2016 at 11:46 AM

A monkey who took a selfie that went viral can’t be considered the copyright owner of the photo, a federal judge said Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick said that while copyright protection could be extended to animals by Congress and the president, current copyright laws do not cover animals.

The animal protection group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals brought the case to court seeking to manage all the proceeds from the photos for the 6-year-old crested macaque named Naruto and other macaques living on a reserve in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Naruto snapped a famous photo in 2011 when he snagged the camera of a British nature photographer who sought to dismiss the case, saying his company, Wildlife Personalities Ltd., owned the copyright.

The company published a book of animal photos, including the monkey selfie. It has been circulated widely, with some contending that since photo was taken by a monkey, no one owns the copyright.

PETA vowed to keep fighting for the copyright.

“We have the moral imperative to continue the evolution of the law that has proved so vital to the progress and betterment of our society,” the group wrote in a press release. “All animals deserve basic legal rights that reflect their complex traits and needs.”

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Page 6

Attacker killed at Paris police station one year after Charlie Hebdo massacre
Thursday January 7th, 2016 at 11:40 AM

The Paris prosecutor's office announced Thursday that it was opening a terrorism investigation after police shot and killed a knife-wielding man outside a police station in northern Paris on the anniversary of the terror attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

Paris prosecutors said the man's body was found with a cell phone and a piece of paper with an emblem of the Islamic State group and a claim of responsibility written in Arabic. The statement did not provide more details about the claim.

Police shot the unidentified man, who a police union official said was shouting "Allahu Akbar" as he tried to enter the police station.

Alexis Mukenge, who saw the shooting from inside another building, told the network iTele that police told the man, "Stop. Move back." Mukenge said officers fired twice and the man immediately dropped to the ground.

The Goutte d'Or neighborhood in Paris' 18th arrondissement, a
multi-ethnic district not far from the Gare du Nord train station, was locked down, as were two metro lines running through the area, though they later reopened.

Police cleared out hundreds of people who had gathered at a subway station and along nearby streets. Shops were ordered shuttered along neighboring streets, and shop owners hastily rolled down metal shutters.

Nora Borrias, who lives in the area, could not get home because of the barricades. Shaken, she said "it's like the Charlie Hebdo affair isn't over."

Pictures posted on social media showed a man in jeans and a grey jacket lying with his arms out at his sides on the pavement, yards from the entrance to the police station.

Two French officials told The Associated Press that the man had wires extending from his clothing and an explosives squad was on site. But police later said an explosive vest the man was wearing was fake.

A Paris police official said police were investigating the incident as "more likely terrorism" than a standard criminal act. The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be publicly named according to police policy.

Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told The Associated Press that at this stage of the investigation, police believe only one person was involved and are not looking for other suspects.

The attack came minutes after French President Francois Hollande warned that the threat of terrorism will continue to weigh on the country amid an ongoing state of emergency.

On Jan. 7, 2015, two French-born brothers killed 11 people inside the building where Charlie Hebdo operated, as well as a Muslim policeman outside. Over the next two days, an accomplice shot a policewoman to death and then stormed a kosher supermarket, killing four hostages. All three gunmen died.

In a speech to police forces charged with protecting the country against new attacks, Hollande said the government was passing new laws and ramping up security, but the threat remained high.

Hollande especially called for better surveillance of "radicalized" citizens who have joined ISIS or other militant groups in Syria and Iraq when they return to France.

"We must be able to force these people --and only these people-- to fulfill certain obligations and if necessary to put them under house arrest ... because they are dangerous," he said.

Following the January attacks, the government announced it planned to give police better equipment and to hire more intelligence agents.

France has been on high alert ever since, and was struck again Nov. 13 in a series of coordinated attacks by ISIS extremists that killed 130 people.

Survivors of the January attacks, meanwhile, are continuing to speak out.

Cartoonist Laurent Sourisseau, the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo, who is known as Riss, told France Inter radio "security is a new expense for the newspaper budget."

"This past year we've had to invest nearly 2 million euros to secure our office, which is an enormous sum," he said. "We have to spend hundreds of thousands on surveillance of our offices, which wasn't previously in Charlie's budget, but we had an obligation so that employees feel safe and can work safely."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from Sky News.

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· · ·

Talks uncertain as India says Pakistan must first hunt militants
Thursday January 7th, 2016 at 11:24 AM

By Krista Mahr and Douglas Busvine

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India called on Pakistan on Thursday to take "prompt and decisive" action against militants it blames for an attack on an air base, days before fraught peace talks between the nuclear-armed neighbors are scheduled to resume.

A meeting between the foreign secretaries of both nations had been tentatively scheduled for Jan. 15, but it is unclear if it will still happen after the weekend attack on the Indian Air Force base near the Pakistan border. India's foreign ministry said Islamabad has been given actionable intelligence that those who planned the assault came from Pakistan.

"As far as we are concerned the ball is now in Pakistan's court," spokesman Vikas Swarup told reporters when asked if the talks were on. "The immediate issue in front of us is Pakistan's response to the terrorist attack."

A senior Pakistani official said India provided intelligence that included telephone numbers, call intercepts, and locations where they believe the attackers or their handlers were.

Pakistan is following up the leads, the official said, and hopes that the talks would not be canceled while it explores them.

Prime ministers Narendra Modi of India and Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan are struggling to keep their renewed dialogue on track after the militant attack killed seven Indian military personnel and wounded 22.Modi made a surprise stopover in Pakistan last month, the first time an Indian premier has visited in over a decade.