Chechen leader to men: Fire on unauthorized federal troops | После сегодняшних заявлений и приказов Кадыров должен быть немедленно арестован, — Рабинович | Кремль ознакомится со словами Кадырова о стрельбе по силовикам
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После сегодняшних заявлений, распоряжений и приказов Рамзан Кадыров должен быть немедленно арестован и отдан под суд, по обвинениям в государственной измене, в качестве государственного чиновника — главы региона — нарушающего Конституцию, УК РФ и субординацию МВД и ФСБ Российской Федерации. Его приказы и распоряжения преступны.
Об этом на страничке в ФБ написал Слава Рабинович.
«Президент Российской Федерации Владимир Владимирович Путин должен прекратить крышевание Рамзана Кадырова, снять его с занимаемой должности и потребовать немедленного правосудия в отношении арестованного обвиняемого, согласно тем законам РФ, которым подчиняются все граждане РФ, информирует еizvestia.com.
Если Путин этого не сделает сегодня же, то Путин — не гарант Конституции, а государственный преступник, который должен быть немедленно снят с занимаемой должности президента посредством импичмента и отдан под суд, за государственную измену.
Вы хотели «Чёрного Лебедя»? Возможно, он уже прилетел. Возможно, даже не сегодня, а 27 февраля 2015 года. Возможно, система уже, медленно но верно, идёт в разнос, после этого убийства.
P.S. Несколько лет назад Рамзан Кадыров, не поладив с ФСБ в своём паханате, распорядился заварить ворота ФСБ в Грозном. И это было сделано, сварщики заварили ворота Федеральной Службы Безопасности в Грозном. Московская ФСБ, и даже глава всей ФСБ РФ, просто утёрлись. Потому что Кадырова крышевал лично Путин. За очень большие деньги.»
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23.04.2015 12:43
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Пресс-секретарь президента России Дмитрий Песков. Иллюстрация: pasmi.ru
Кадыров разрешил региональным силовикам открывать огонь на поражение по работающим в Чечне правоохранителям из других регионов
23 апреля пресс-секретарь президента РФ Дмитрий Песков заявил журналистам, что ничего не знает о конфликте между силовиками Чечни и Ставрополья.
«Мне неизвестно ничего об этом», — заявил он, добавив, что комментировать этот вопрос можно будет только после ознакомления с информацией. «Тогда можно будет о чем-то говорить», — резюмировал он.
Речь идет об информации о том, что глава Чечни Рамзан Кадыров разрешил региональным силовикам открывать огонь на поражение по работающим в Чечне правоохранителям из других регионов. Данное заявление было сделано после спецоперации ставропольских полицейских и объединенной группировки в Грозном, которая закончилась убийством находящегося в розыске Джамбулата Дадаева. Кадыров счел данные действия незаконными.
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Кремль ознакомится со словами Кадырова о стрельбе по силовикам
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 Chron.com |
Chechen leader to men: Fire on unauthorized federal troops
Chron.com MOSCOW (AP) — In defiance of those in Moscow eager to curb his powers, Chechnya's strongman leader told his security forces to open fire on Russian federal troops if they tried to operate in the region without his approval. Russian law enforcement ... 'Pro-Russia' Chechen leader threatens to kill Russian cops on his turfChristian Science Monitor Boris Nemtsov's children want Chechen officials questioned over murderTelegraph.co.uk Chechen leader Kadyrov hits back over Russian shootingBBC News RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty-Kyiv Post all 69 news articles » |
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — David H. Petraeus, the highest-profile general from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will most likely be sentenced to probation here on Thursday in a leak investigation that embarrassed him and created bitter disputes inside the Justice Department about whether he was receiving too much leniency from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
In March, as part of a plea agreement with the Justice Department, Mr. Petraeus admitted that he had provided highly classified journals to a woman with whom he had an affair and who wrote his biography when he was the director of the C.I.A.
Although that charge carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison, prosecutors agreed to recommend that he be spared prison time.
The judge overseeing the case is not bound by the government’s recommendations, but judges often follow them. The sentencing is scheduled for 2 p.m. on Thursday.
Mr. Holder made the decision to recommend probation, angering F.B.I. officials and some prosecutors who said the attorney general was giving Mr. Petraeus preferential treatment, according to several law enforcement officials. They argued that the Justice Department should not agree to any deal that did not require Mr. Petraeus to face jail time, the officials said.
Not only had Mr. Petreaus disclosed classified information to his biographer, but he had also admitted to lying to F.B.I. agents who had interviewed him in connection with the case. Lying to federal agents is a felony that carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. The Justice Department has used that charge against terrorists, corrupt politicians and low-level drug dealers.
Giving special treatment to Mr. Petraeus was a double standard, some argued, particularly when the Justice Department has led an unprecedented crackdown on leaks and prosecuted several low- and midlevel officials for disclosing secrets to reporters.
By agreeing to a plea deal, Mr. Petraeus was spared what would have likely been an embarrassing trial.
But without a deal, the Justice Department would have faced the prospect of going to trial against a decorated war hero over a disclosure of secrets that President Obama himself said did not harm national security. Plus, a trial would require the government to reveal some of the classified information.
Mr. Petraeus’ lawyers insisted to prosecutors that he would not accept a deal that required prison time.
Ultimately, Mr. Holder approved the plea agreement, despite objections from federal agents.
Shortly after Mr. Petraeus’ plea deal was announced, the lawyer for an imprisoned former State Department arms contractor sent a letter to prosecutors contending that the deal given to Mr. Petraeus revealed a “profound double standard” in the way the Obama administration treats people who leak classified information.
The contractor, Stephen J. Kim, had received a 13-month sentence for disclosing classified information to Fox News about North Korea.
Mr. Petraeus had been a vocal advocate for government officials closely protecting classified information.
“Oaths do matter,” Mr. Petraeus said in October 2012 when a C.I.A. officer accepted a plea agreement for disclosing sensitive information, “and there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy.”
The officer later received a 30-month sentence.
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The headline in Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when its precursor served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”
The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.
But the untold story behind that story is one that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.
At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.
Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.
And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.
At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company’s assets to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show.
The New York Times’s examination of the Uranium One deal is based on dozens of interviews, as well as a review of public records and securities filings in Canada, Russia and the United States. Some of the connections between Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation were unearthed by Peter Schweizer, a former fellow at the right-leaning Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming book “Clinton Cash.” Mr. Schweizer provided a preview of material in the book to The Times, which scrutinized his information and built upon it with its own reporting.
Whether the donations played any role in the approval of the uranium deal is unknown. But the episode underscores the special ethical challenges presented by the Clinton Foundation, headed by a former president who relied heavily on foreign cash to accumulate $250 million in assets even as his wife helped steer American foreign policy as secretary of state, presiding over decisions with the potential to benefit the foundation’s donors.
In a statement, Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, said no one “has ever produced a shred of evidence supporting the theory that Hillary Clinton ever took action as secretary of state to support the interests of donors to the Clinton Foundation.” He emphasized that multiple United States agencies, as well as the Canadian government, had signed off on the deal and that, in general, such matters were handled at a level below the secretary. “To suggest the State Department, under then-Secretary Clinton, exerted undue influence in the U.S. government’s review of the sale of Uranium One is utterly baseless,” he added.
American political campaigns are barred from accepting foreign donations. But foreigners may give to foundations in the United States. In the days since Mrs. Clinton announced her candidacy for president, the Clinton Foundation has announced changes meant to quell longstanding concerns about potential conflicts of interest in such donations; it has limited donations from foreign governments, with many, like Russia’s, barred from giving to all but its health care initiatives. That policy stops short of Mrs. Clinton’s agreement with the Obama administration, which prohibited all foreign government donations while she served as the nation’s top diplomat.
Either way, the Uranium One deal highlights the limits of such prohibitions. The foundation will continue to accept contributions from foreign individuals and businesses whose interests, like Uranium One’s, may overlap with those of foreign governments, some of which may be at odds with the United States.
When the Uranium One deal was approved, the geopolitical backdrop was far different from today’s. The Obama administration was seeking to “reset” strained relations with Russia. The deal was strategically important to Mr. Putin, who shortly after the Americans gave their blessing sat down for a staged interview with Rosatom’s chief executive, Sergei Kiriyenko. “Few could have imagined in the past that we would own 20 percent of U.S. reserves,” Mr. Kiriyenko told Mr. Putin.
Now, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Ukraine, the Moscow-Washington relationship is devolving toward Cold War levels, a point several experts made in evaluating a deal so beneficial to Mr. Putin, a man known to use energy resources to project power around the world.
“Should we be concerned? Absolutely,” said Michael McFaul, who served under Mrs. Clinton as the American ambassador to Russia but said he had been unaware of the Uranium One deal until asked about it. “Do we want Putin to have a monopoly on this? Of course we don’t. We don’t want to be dependent on Putin for anything in this climate.”
A Seat at the Table
The path to a Russian acquisition of American uranium deposits began in 2005 in Kazakhstan, where the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra orchestrated his first big uranium deal, with Mr. Clinton at his side.
Uranium investors’ efforts to buy mining assets in Kazakhstan and the United States led to a takeover bid by a Russian state-owned energy company. The investors gave millions to the Clinton Foundation over the same period, while Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s office was involved with approving the Russian bid.
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The two men had flown aboard Mr. Giustra’s private jet to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where they dined with the authoritarian president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. Mr. Clinton handed the Kazakh president a propaganda coup when he expressed support for Mr. Nazarbayev’s bid to head an international elections monitoring group, undercutting American foreign policy and criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, his wife, then a senator.
Within days of the visit, Mr. Giustra’s fledgling company, UrAsia Energy Ltd., signed a preliminary deal giving it stakes in three uranium mines controlled by the state-run uranium agency Kazatomprom.
If the Kazakh deal was a major victory, UrAsia did not wait long before resuming the hunt. In 2007, it merged with Uranium One, a South African company with assets in Africa and Australia, in what was described as a $3.5 billion transaction. The new company, which kept the Uranium One name, was controlled by UrAsia investors including Ian Telfer, a Canadian who became chairman. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Giustra, whose personal stake in the deal was estimated at about $45 million, said he sold his stake in 2007.
Soon, Uranium One began to snap up mining companies with assets in the United States. In April 2007, it announced the purchase of a uranium mill in Utah and more than 38,000 acres of uranium exploration properties in four Western states, followed quickly by the acquisition of the Energy Metals Corporation and its uranium holdings in Wyoming, Texas and Utah. That deal made clear that Uranium One was intent on becoming “a powerhouse in the United States uranium sector with the potential to become the domestic supplier of choice for U.S. utilities,” the company declared.
Still, the company’s story was hardly front-page news in the United States — until early 2008, in the midst of Mrs. Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, when The Times published an article revealing the 2005 trip’s link to Mr. Giustra’s Kazakhstan mining deal. It also reported that several months later, Mr. Giustra had donated $31.3 million to Mr. Clinton’s foundation.
Though the article quoted the former head of Kazatomprom, Moukhtar Dzhakishev, as saying that the deal required government approval and was discussed at a dinner with the president, Mr. Giustra insisted that it was a private transaction, with no need for Mr. Clinton’s influence with Kazakh officials. He described his relationship with the former American president as motivated solely by a shared interest in philanthropy.
As if to underscore the point, five months later Mr. Giustra held a fund-raiser for the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, a project aimed at fostering progressive environmental and labor practices in the natural resources industry, to which he had pledged $100 million. The star-studded gala, at a conference center in Toronto, featured performances by Elton John and Shakira and celebrities like Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Robin Williams encouraging contributions from the many so-called F.O.F.s — Friends of Frank — in attendance, among them Mr. Telfer. In all, the evening generated $16 million in pledges, according to an article in The Globe and Mail.
"None of this would have been possible if Frank Giustra didn’t have a remarkable combination of caring and modesty, of vision and energy and iron determination,” Mr. Clinton told those gathered, adding: “I love this guy, and you should, too.”
But what had been a string of successes was about to hit a speed bump.
Arrest and Progress
By June 2009, a little over a year after the star-studded evening in Toronto, Uranium One’s stock was in free-fall, down 40 percent. Mr. Dzhakishev, the head of Kazatomprom, had just been arrested on charges that he illegally sold uranium deposits to foreign companies, including at least some of those won by Mr. Giustra’s UrAsia and now owned by Uranium One.
Publicly, the company tried to reassure shareholders. Its chief executive, Jean Nortier, issued a confident statement calling the situation a “complete misunderstanding.” He also publicly contradicted Mr. Giustra’s contention that the uranium mining deal had not required government blessing. “When you do a transaction in Kazakhstan, you need the government’s approval,” he said, adding that UrAsia had indeed received that approval.
But privately, Uranium One officials were worried they could lose their joint mining ventures. American diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks also reflect concerns that Mr. Dzhakishev’s arrest was part of a Russian power play for control of Kazakh uranium assets.
At the time, Russia was already eying a stake in Uranium One, Rosatom company documents show. Rosatom officials say they were seeking to acquire mines around the world because Russia lacks sufficient domestic reserves to meet its own industry needs.
It was against this backdrop that the Vancouver-based Uranium One pressed the American Embassy in Kazakhstan, as well as Canadian diplomats, to take up its cause with Kazakh officials, according to the American cables.
“We want more than a statement to the press,” Paul Clarke, a Uranium One executive vice president, told the embassy’s energy officer on June 10, the officer reported in a cable. “That is simply chitchat.” What the company needed, Mr. Clarke said, was official written confirmation that the licenses were still valid.
The American Embassy ultimately reported to the secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton. Though the Clarke cable was copied to her, it was given wide circulation, and it is unclear if she would have read it; the Clinton campaign did not address questions about the cable. .
What is clear is that the embassy acted, with the cables showing that the unnamed energy officer met with Kazakh officials to discuss the issue on June 10 and 11.
Three days later, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rosatom completed a deal for 17 percent of Uranium One. And within a year, the Russian government would substantially up the ante, with a generous offer to shareholders that would give it a 51 percent controlling stake. But first, Uranium One had to get the American government to sign off on the deal.
The Power to Say No
When a company controlled by the Chinese government sought a 51 percent stake in a tiny Nevada gold mining operation in 2009, it set off a secretive review process in Washington, where officials raised concerns primarily about the mine’s proximity to a military installation, but also about the potential for minerals at the site, including uranium, to come under Chinese control. The officials killed the deal.
Such is the power of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The committee comprises some of the most powerful members of the cabinet, including the attorney general, the secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce and Energy, and the secretary of state. They are charged with reviewing any deal that could result in foreign control of an American business or asset deemed important to national security.
The national security issue at stake in the Uranium One deal was not primarily about nuclear weapons proliferation; the United States and Russia had for years cooperated on that front, with Russia sending enriched fuel from decommissioned warheads to be used in American nuclear power plants in return for raw uranium. Instead, it concerned American dependence on foreign uranium sources. While the United States gets one-fifth of its electrical power from nuclear plants, it produces only around 20 percent of the uranium it needs, and most plants have only 18 to 36 months of reserves, according to Marin Katusa, author of “The Colder War: How the Global Energy Trade Slipped From America’s Grasp.”
“The Russians are easily winning the uranium war, and nobody’s talking about it,” said Mr. Katusa, who explores the implications of the Uranium One deal in his book. “It’s not just a domestic issue but a foreign policy issue, too.”
When ARMZ, an arm of Rosatom, took its first 17 percent stake in Uranium One in 2009, the two parties signed an agreement, found in securities filings, to seek the foreign investment committee’s review. But it was the 2010 deal, giving the Russians a controlling 51 percent stake, that set off alarm bells. Four members of the House of Representatives signed a letter expressing concern. Two more began pushing legislation to kill the deal.
Senator John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming, where Uranium One’s largest American operation was, wrote to President Obama, saying the deal “would give the Russian government control over a sizable portion of America’s uranium production capacity.”
“Equally alarming,” Mr. Barrasso added, “this sale gives ARMZ a significant stake in uranium mines in Kazakhstan.”
Uranium One’s shareholders were also alarmed, and were “afraid of Rosatom as a Russian state giant,” Sergei Novikov, a company spokesman, recalled in an interview. He said Rosatom’s chief, Mr. Kiriyenko, sought to reassure Uranium One investors, promising that Rosatom would not break up the company and would keep the same management, including Mr. Telfer, the chairman. Another Rosatom official said publicly that it did not intend to increase its investment beyond 51 percent, and that it envisioned keeping Uranium One a public company
American nuclear officials, too, seemed eager to assuage fears. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote to Senator Barrasso assuring him that American uranium would be preserved for domestic use, regardless of who owned it.
“In order to export uranium from the United States, Uranium One Inc. or ARMZ would need to apply for and obtain a specific NRC license authorizing the export of uranium for use as reactor fuel,” the letter said.
Still, the ultimate authority to approve or reject the Russian acquisition rested with the cabinet officials on the foreign investment committee, including Mrs. Clinton — whose husband was collecting millions of dollars in donations from people associated with Uranium One.
Undisclosed Donations
Before Mrs. Clinton could assume her post as secretary of state, the White House demanded that she sign a memorandum of understanding placing limits on her husband’s foundation’s activities. To avoid the perception of conflicts of interest, beyond the ban on foreign government donations, the foundation was required to publicly disclose all contributors.
To judge from those disclosures — which list the contributions in ranges rather than precise amounts — the only Uranium One official to give to the Clinton Foundation was Mr. Telfer, the chairman, and the amount was relatively small: no more than $250,000, and that was in 2007, before talk of a Rosatom deal began percolating.
But a review of tax records in Canada, where Mr. Telfer has a family charity called the Fernwood Foundation, shows that he donated millions of dollars more, during and after the critical time when the foreign investment committee was reviewing his deal with the Russians. With the Russians offering a special dividend, shareholders like Mr. Telfer stood to profit.
His donations through the Fernwood Foundation included $1 million reported in 2009, the year his company appealed to the American Embassy to help it keep its mines in Kazakhstan; $250,000 in 2010, the year the Russians sought majority control; as well as $600,000 in 2011; and $500,000 in 2012. Mr. Telfer said that his donations had nothing to do with his business dealings, and that he had never discussed Uranium One with Mr. or Mrs. Clinton. He said he had given the money because he wanted to support Mr. Giustra’s charitable endeavors with Mr. Clinton. “Frank and I have been friends and business partners for almost 20 years,” he said.
The Clinton campaign left it to the foundation to reply to questions about the Fernwood donations; the foundation did not provide a response.
Mr. Telfer’s undisclosed donations came in addition to between $1.3 million and $5.6 million in contributions, which were reported, from a constellation of people with ties to Uranium One or UrAsia, the company that originally acquired Uranium One’s most valuable asset: the Kazakhstan mines. Without those assets, the Russians would have had no interest in the deal: “It wasn’t the goal to buy the Wyoming mines. The goal was to acquire the Kazakh assets, which are very good,” Mr. Novikov, the Rosatom spokesman, said in an interview.
Amid this influx of Uranium One-connected money, Mr. Clinton was invited to speak in Moscow in June 2010, the same month Rosatom struck its deal for a majority stake in Uranium One.
The $500,000 fee — among Mr. Clinton’s highest — was paid by Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank with ties to the Kremlin that has invited world leaders, including Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, to speak at its annual investor conference.
Renaissance Capital analysts talked up Uranium One’s stock, assigning it a “buy” rating and saying in a July 2010 research report that it was “the best play” in the uranium markets. In addition, Renaissance Capital turned up that same year as a major donor, along with Mr. Telfer and Mr. Giustra, to a small medical charity in Colorado run by a friend of Mr. Giustra’s. In a newsletter to supporters, the friend credited Mr. Giustra with helping get donations from “businesses around the world.”
A Renaissance Capital representative would not comment on the genesis of Mr. Clinton’s speech to an audience that included leading Russian officials, or on whether it was connected to the Rosatom deal. According to a Russian government news service, Mr. Putin personally thanked Mr. Clinton for speaking.
A person with knowledge of the Clinton Foundation’s fund-raising operation, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about it, said that for many people, the hope is that money will in fact buy influence: “Why do you think they are doing it — because they love them?” But whether it actually does is another question. And in this case, there were broader geopolitical pressures that likely came into play as the United States considered whether to approve the Rosatom-Uranium One deal.
Diplomatic Considerations
If doing business with Rosatom was good for those involved with the Uranium One deal, engaging with Russia was also a priority of the incoming Obama administration, which was hoping for a new era of cooperation as Mr. Putin relinquished the presidency — if only for a term — to Dmitri A. Medvedev.
“The assumption was we could engage Russia to further core U.S. national security interests,” said Mr. McFaul, the former ambassador.
It started out well. The two countries made progress on nuclear proliferation issues, and expanded use of Russian territory to resupply American forces in Afghanistan. Keeping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was among the United States’ top priorities, and in June 2010 Russia signed off on a United Nations resolution imposing tough new sanctions on that country.
Two months later, the deal giving ARMZ a controlling stake in Uranium One was submitted to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States for review. Because of the secrecy surrounding the process, it is hard to know whether the participants weighed the desire to improve bilateral relations against the potential risks of allowing the Russian government control over the biggest uranium producer in the United States. The deal was ultimately approved in October, following what two people involved in securing the approval said had been a relatively smooth process.
Not all of the committee’s decisions are personally debated by the agency heads themselves; in less controversial cases, deputy or assistant secretaries may sign off. But experts and former committee members say Russia’s interest in Uranium One and its American uranium reserves seemed to warrant attention at the highest levels.
“This deal had generated press, it had captured the attention of Congress and it was strategically important,” said Richard Russell, who served on the committee during the George W. Bush administration. “When I was there invariably any one of those conditions would cause this to get pushed way up the chain, and here you had all three.”
And Mrs. Clinton brought a reputation for hawkishness to the process; as a senator, she was a vocal critic of the committee’s approval of a deal that would have transferred the management of major American seaports to a company based in the United Arab Emirates, and as a presidential candidate she had advocated legislation to strengthen the process.
The Clinton campaign spokesman, Mr. Fallon, said that in general, these matters did not rise to the secretary’s level. He would not comment on whether Mrs. Clinton had been briefed on the matter, but he gave The Times a statement from the former assistant secretary assigned to the foreign investment committee at the time, Jose Fernandez. While not addressing the specifics of the Uranium One deal, Mr. Fernandez said, “Mrs. Clinton never intervened with me on any C.F.I.U.S. matter.”
Mr. Fallon also noted that if any agency had raised national security concerns about the Uranium One deal, it could have taken them directly to the president.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, the State Department’s director of policy planning at the time, said she was unaware of the transaction — or the extent to which it made Russia a dominant uranium supplier. But speaking generally, she urged caution in evaluating its wisdom in hindsight.
“Russia was not a country we took lightly at the time or thought was cuddly,” she said. “But it wasn’t the adversary it is today.”
That renewed adversarial relationship has raised concerns about European dependency on Russian energy resources, including nuclear fuel. The unease reaches beyond diplomatic circles. In Wyoming, where Uranium One equipment is scattered across his 35,000-acre ranch, John Christensen is frustrated that repeated changes in corporate ownership over the years led to French, South African, Canadian and, finally, Russian control over mining rights on his property.
“I hate to see a foreign government own mining rights here in the United States,” he said. “I don’t think that should happen.”
Mr. Christensen, 65, noted that despite assurances by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that uranium could not leave the country without Uranium One or ARMZ obtaining an export license — which they do not have — yellowcake from his property was routinely packed into drums and trucked off to a processing plant in Canada.
Asked about that, the commission confirmed that Uranium One has, in fact, shipped yellowcake to Canada even though it does not have an export license. Instead, the transport company doing the shipping, RSB Logistic Services, has the license. A commission spokesman said that “to the best of our knowledge” most of the uranium sent to Canada for processing was returned for use in the United States. A Uranium One spokeswoman, Donna Wichers, said 25 percent had gone to Western Europe and Japan. At the moment, with the uranium market in a downturn, nothing is being shipped from the Wyoming mines.
The “no export” assurance given at the time of the Rosatom deal is not the only one that turned out to be less than it seemed. Despite pledges to the contrary, Uranium One was eventually delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange and taken private. As of 2013, Rosatom’s subsidiary, ARMZ, owned 100 percent of the company.
Correction: April 23, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated, in one instance, the surname of a fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is Peter Schweizer, not Schweitzer.
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WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday offered an emotional apology for the accidental killing of two hostages held by Al Qaeda, one of them American, in a United States government counterterrorism operation in January, saying he takes “full responsibility” for their deaths.
“As president and as commander in chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations,” including the one that inadvertently took the lives of the two captives, a grim-faced Mr. Obama said in a statement to reporters in the White House briefing room.
“I profoundly regret what happened,” he added. “On behalf of the U.S. government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families.”
Mr. Obama’s remarks came shortly after the White House released an extraordinary statement revealing that intelligence officials had confirmed that Warren Weinstein, an American held by Al Qaeda since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian held since 2012, died during a drone strike . The White House did not explain why it has taken three months to disclose the episode, although it typically takes some weeks after a strike to confirm the identities of casualties.
Two other Americans who belonged to Al Qaeda, Ahmed Farouq and Adam Gadahn, were also killed in American operations in the same region, the statement said. Neither had been specifically targeted and their presence at the sites of the operations was not known at the time, officials said.
Mr. Obama said he had ordered the incident declassified because the families of Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Lo Porto “deserve to know the truth.”
“The United States is a democracy, committed to openness in good times and in bad,” he said. “It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally, and our fight against terrorists specifically, that mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes, can occur.”
Mr. Obama said the operation that killed the two hostages was conducted “fully consistent with the guidelines” for such missions in the region. He said that it was conducted after hundreds of hours of surveillance had convinced American officials that they were targeting an Al Qaeda compound where no civilians were present, and that “capturing these terrorists was not possible.”
What United States officials did not know, he said, was that Al Qaeda was “hiding” the captives at the site.
He said a full review was underway to identify any changes that should be made to avoid similar errors in the future.
”We will do our utmost to insure it is not repeated,” Mr. Obama said.
Even though Mr. Obama announced that the two drone strikes had been declassified, there were limits to the White House’s transparency about the two operations. Mr. Obama did not say that the Central Intelligence Agency had carried out the strikes, nor did he say that they occurred in Pakistan.
Under the terms of a secret arrangement brokered in 2004, the C.I.A. was allowed to conduct lethal strikes inside the tribal areas of Pakistan, but neither the American nor the Pakistani government could acknowledge their existence.
One senior American official said that the deaths occurred during two separate strikes in Pakistan in January. One strike killed the two hostages and Mr. Farouq. A second C.I.A. drone strike killed Mr. Gadahn. It is unclear who else was killed in the two operations.
The pace of drone operations in Pakistan has declined sharply in recent years. But even as the American military withdraws from Afghanistan, the C.I.A. has pushed to keep several of its bases in that country open so that operatives can run missions across the border in order to gather intelligence for drone strikes.
“The president directed that the information being shared today, which was properly classified until now, be declassified and shared with the American people,” the White House statement said. “He takes full responsibility for these operations and believes it is important to provide the American people with as much information as possible about our counterterrorism operations, particularly when they take the lives of fellow citizens.”
The White House said the operation that killed the two hostages “was lawful and conducted consistent with our counterterrorism policies” but nonetheless the government is conducting a “thorough independent review” to determine what happened and how such casualties could be avoided in the future.
“Many within our government spent years attempting to locate and free Dr. Weinstein and Mr. Lo Porto,” the statement said. “The pain of their deaths will remain with us as we rededicate ourselves to adhering to the most exactly standards in doing all we can to protect the American people.”
Mr. Weinstein, 73, a resident of Rockville, Md., was a business development expert working on contract for the United States Agency for International Development when he was kidnapped in August 2011 in the Pakistani city of Lahore, just four days before he was scheduled to return to his family in the United States. Al Qaeda released videos of him, and news media reports from as recently as last week indicated that he was still assumed to be alive.
“I really don’t know why they are holding him,” his wife, Elaine Weinstein, told the Voice of America’s Deewa service last year. “He was in Pakistan doing development work. He is just an old man, a sick man who was dedicated to doing his job in Pakistan and kept staying there for the benefit of the Pakistani people.”
In a column published last August in an Urdu-language Pakistani newspaper and in Newsweek Pakistan, Ms. Weinstein said her husband had gone to Pakistan a decade earlier and immersed himself in the culture. “He learned Urdu, dressed in shalwar kameez, and took every opportunity to learn more about Pakistan’s history and customs,” she wrote.
“My husband has spent his life helping others and devoted all he had to making Pakistan a better place for its people,” she continued. “He does not deserve to be held as a bargaining chip.”
Mr. Lo Porto was a humanitarian aid worker in Pakistan and disappeared in January 2012. Italy’s foreign minister said earlier this year that the government was working to secure his release and that of another Italian who has been missing in Syria since 2013.
Mr. Lo Porto studied at London Metropolitan University and worked on projects in the Central African Republic and Haiti before traveling to Pakistan to help rebuild an area hit by flooding, according to media reports. Shortly after arriving, he and a German colleague were abducted.
Mr. Gadahn, the other American-born Qaeda figure who was reported killed, evidently died in a separate strike in January. Mr. Gadahn was better known publicly. He grew up in Southern California, converted to Islam at age 17 and was said to have left the United States in the late 1990s during a period when he was questioning the family’s religious beliefs and the American political system.
He filmed a 2011 video urging attacks by Muslims in the West. “You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card,” he told Muslims in the United States. “So what are you waiting for?”
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Blue Bell Creameries, which distributes frozen desserts to about half of the United States, said that it was voluntarily recalling all of its products after the bacteria listeria was found in two cartons of ice cream last month.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday that tests indicated Blue Bell products from plants in Texas and Oklahoma were the source of a listeria outbreak that has infected five adults in Kansas, three of whom died. Three adults in Texas were also sickened in the last four years.
“This is a complex and ongoing multistate outbreak of listeriosis occurring over an extended period,” the C.D.C. said.
Paul Kruse, Blue Bell’s chief executive and president, apologized in a video posted on the company’s website.
“We’re committed to doing the 100 percent right thing, and the best way to do that is to take all of our products off the market until we can be confident that they are all safe,” Mr. Kruse said in a news release.
Listeria bacteria, which can be present in raw milk, can cause severe infections in children, the elderly, pregnant women and others with weakened immune systems.
Blue Bell, which is based in Texas, said it recalled the products after two half-gallon containers of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, produced on March 17 and 27, tested positive for the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes.
Five people in Kansas appear to have been sickened from January 2014 through January 2015 while they were hospitalized for unrelated conditions, the C.D.C. said. Of the five, four are known to have had milkshakes at the hospital made with a Blue Bell ice cream called Scoops and two other products made at Blue Bell’s plant in Brenham, Tex.
The Texas patients also developed listeriosis, the condition of being sickened by listeria, after being hospitalized for unrelated reasons from 2011 through 2014. Tests on the genome of the strains with which they were infected “were nearly identical” to strains found at Blue Bell’s plant in Broken Arrow, Okla., the C.D.C. said.
Tests are being conducted to see whether three other patients infected with listeriosis between 2010 and 2012 were related to the Blue Bell outbreak, the C.D.C. said.
Blue Bell began removing ice cream products from the market on March 13 after the health authorities reported that they suspected a connection between the Kansas infections and products made by Blue Bell’s Texas plant, the Food and Drug Administration said.
“At this point, we cannot say with certainty how listeria was introduced to our facilities,” Mr. Kruse said. The company is continuing to investigate the source of the contamination.
On March 23, Blue Bell began a second voluntary recall after listeria strains were found in products made at its Oklahoma plant, the F.D.A. said. The company’s products include ice cream, frozen yogurt, sherbet and frozen snacks.
Blue Bell said it was expanding its cleaning and sanitizing of equipment and surfaces, with samples sent daily to a lab for testing. The company is also putting into effect a “test and hold” system, with products released to the market only after tests show they are safe.
The recalled products were distributed to about two dozen states, as well as international locations, the company said. Two distributors of Blue Bell products in the Philippines said they were participating in the voluntary recall.
Correction: April 21, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the city in which strains of listeria were found at a Blue Bell plant. It is Broken Arrow, Okla., not Broken Bow.
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