Sunshine/Lollipops
The FSB [Russian intelligence] said in statement carried by Russian news agencies that [US diplomat Ryan] Fogle was carrying ‘special technical equipment, written instructions for recruiting a Russian citizen, a large sum of money and means for changing a person’s appearance.’
Russia detains US diplomat over ‘spy’ charge
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, ended nervous Washington and Pentagon speculation today by telling the ITAR-TASS news agency that the Kremlin isn’t actually going to sell the S-300 air defense missile to Assad. Whatever other arms deals Russia will honor with Syria, the S-300 won’t be included.
Nyet! Now Russia Won’t Sell Badass Missile to Syria
› Syria to receive advanced Russian air defense: report | Al Akhbar
Syria has already began payments for a $900 million purchase of an advanced air defense system from Russia and an initial delivery was due within three months, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday citing US officials.
Israel has asked Russia not to sell Syria the S-300, which could help President Bashar al-Assad fend off foreign military intervention, Israeli officials said on Thursday.
“We have raised objections to this (sale) with the Russians, and the Americans have too,” an Israeli official told Reuters.
There was no immediate comment from Moscow or Damascus.
› Russia Bans 18 Americans After Similar US Move | NYTimes.com
This is hilarious:
Russia on Saturday named 18 Americans banned from entering the country in response to Washington imposing sanctions on 18 Russians for alleged human rights violations.
The list released by the Foreign Ministry includes John Yoo, a former U.S. Justice Department official who wrote legal memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques; David Addington, the chief of staff for former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney; and two former commanders of the Guantanamo Bay detention center: retired Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Adm. Jeffrey Harbeson.
Here’s a collection of news stories for February 9, 2013 that you may not otherwise have a chance to see/learn about.
Dozens of security vehicles blocked the intersections of two streets Saturday where the demonstrations were taking place. North of Riyadh in the city of Buraydah, around 30 people — mostly women related to the prisoners — held a similar rally.
In past years, a small number of Saudis have demonstrated in Riyadh to demand the release of thousands of people detained without charge or trial on suspicion of involvement in militant activity. Some have been held for up to 15 years.
Turkish officers are resigning en masse to avoid arrest and sentencing for conspiracy against the government. The cabinet of PM Erdogan is winning the decade-long battle with the country’s once almighty generals.
Mass detentions of both serving and retired officers have been taking place in Turkey over the last decade. The country’s media is closely following a number of trials against top brass accused of plotting against the ruling government. Over at least the past half a century, the Turkish armed forces have been notorious for regular interference in domestic politics, organizing several coups to displace governments and generally having great influence on the political landscape.
In late January 2013 the exodus of Turkish officers from the army was given a new push. Turkey’s number-two naval commander Admiral Nusret Guner resigned, allegedly over the detention of hundreds of his colleagues. His premature voluntary retirement sparked yet another wave of resignations.
Mulligan “suffered a broken shoulder blade and facial fractures requiring several surgeries at the hands of police officers after they stopped him in the city’s Highland Park neighborhood and forced him to check into a local motel and stay there against his will,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Mr. Udaltsov, the leader of the radical socialist Left Front movement, faces a charge of conspiracy to incite mass disorder, under a statute that can bring a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. According to Saturday’s ruling, he may not leave his house, use the Internet, receive letters or communicate with anyone outside his family and legal team until April 6, the current date for the end of the investigation of his case.
The ruling seemed to signal a new stage in the government’s effort to bring criminal cases against well-known critics of President Vladimir V. Putin.
Soldiers on Saturday destroyed tents that were being erected in two different areas near the southern West Bank town of Yatta and forced activists to leave, the Palestinian witness said.
At the first site no arrests were made, but soldiers used a cannon that shoots what is commonly referred to as “skunk” water because of its foul smell to disperse activists.
Six people were arrested at the second site, including two photographers.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection act (CISPA) will be reintroduced before the US House next week following a spate of cyber espionage and hacking attacks. Civil liberties advocates have criticized the bill for violating privacy laws.
The House Intelligence Committee’s Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) will attempt to breathe new life into CISPA on Wednesday.
The bill will be identical to the version of CISPA that passed the House last spring, but was defeated on the Senate floor in August mainly because the upper house was hammering out its own cyber security bill.
› Russia 'not concerned' about fate of Assad | Al Jazeera English
› Questions on why Iraq stopped $4.2 billion Russian arms deal - UPI.com
› Russia, Syrian opposition slam US calls for new leadership against Assad | The Hill
Russia joined Syria’s main exiled opposition group on Friday in accusing the Obama administration of picking and choosing the people it wants to run Syria if President Bashar Assad falls.
The comments come after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday said the United States will propose its own list of individuals and organizations as part of a multinational conference in Doha, Qatar, next week aimed at trying to create a unified rebel front. Clinton said the main exiled opposition group, the Paris-based Syrian National Council, was made up of people who haven’t been in the country in decades and does not represent the various groups currently fighting on the front lines against Assad.
The Syrian National Council denounced Clinton’s statement on Friday, the Agence France-Presse wire service reported.
“Any discussions aimed at passing over the Syrian National Council or at creating new bodies to replace it,” the group said in a statement, “are an attempt to undermine the Syrian revolution by sowing the seeds of division.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry also lambasted the United States, the AFP reported, saying Clinton’s comments violated an agreement reached with Russia and others over the summer to support a transition government approved by the Syrian people.
› Turkish F16s intercept Syrian civilian flight from Moscow to Damascus
Turkey has sent F16 fighter jets to force a Syrian airline passenger plane to land in Ankara over suspicions it was carrying arms, says the Turkish Foreign Ministry. The Damascus-bound plane, which had departed from Moscow, is now being inspected.
The plane was forced to land in Ankara’s international airport at 5:15 pm local time, reports CNN-Turk. The Airbus A-320 was carrying 35 passengers.
The Airbus was intercepted on its way from Moscow by F-16 jets as it entered Turkish airspace. A Turkish Foreign Ministry official confirmed that a Syrian plane was forced to land at the capital’s Esenboga Airport, and that authorities were “inspecting the plane” but would not provide further information.
According to some reports, the plane might have been transporting heavy weapons.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has called for three members of the punk band Pussy Riot to be freed, saying further prison time would be ‘unproductive.’
Breaking: Pussy Riot to be freed from jail | Death and Taxes
› Clinton Says US May Lift Cold War-Era Sanctions on Russia
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Saturday that the United States would soon lift Cold War-era trade sanctions on Russia, in an example of how hostile Washington has been more than two decades later, although it was unclear whether the move has support in Congress.
Following Russia’s inclusion into the World Trade Organization, Clinton said the US should now normalize trade relations with Russia so that American businesses can benefit from trade with one of the world’s leading economies.
The sanctions have origins in a 1974 law known as Jackson-Vanik and are waived each year, but the fact that they’re still around shows how confrontational Washington still is long after the end of the Cold War. Legislation, once on the books, almost never goes away, especially when it can be used as leverage over other states.
Mitt Romney, and many Republicans in Congress, are pushing back against normalized trade relations with Russia – unless Congress passes legislation that punishes Russian officials accused of human rights abuses, as if that were Congress’s responsibility.
The urge to discipline misbehaving Russian officials in order to further America’s geopolitical hegemony is ill-served by discordant rhetoric and economic warfare.
As Clinton said, “We are grateful for this and other opportunities to work more closely with Russia on areas of common concern that will deliver benefits to the people of both our nations.” Instead, the US has chosen bellicosity, nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War.
(Source: jayaprada, via sarahlee310)
The Russian oil industry spills more than 30 million barrels on land each year — seven times the amount that escaped during the Deepwater Horizon disaster — often under a veil of secrecy and corruption. And every 18 months, more than four million barrels spews into the Arctic Ocean, where it becomes everyone’s problem.
So, I came across an article this morning about an odd oil-rig protest as part of my morning read. A handful of activists are protesting the first ever oil rig in the Arctic sea. They’ve literally tied themselves to the side of big tanker ship in the Arctic.
Yeah, bizarre but it’s true. Greenpeace is live blogging it now. The Russian Coast Guard has been called in and the protesters will be in big trouble, I’m sure of it.
The oil rig is run by the largest natural gas company in the world, called Gazprom. It’s also Russia’s largest company. They’re also one of the most pollutive, hazardous companies on planet Earth. I didn’t know any of this until this morning. What do you think can be done?
(via climateadaptation)
(via randomactsofchaos)
› Realpolitik blurs US red line on Syria | Pepe Escobar
“Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) are back. It’s like we never left Dubya’s glory days. No, they didn’t find the non-existent Saddam stash on eBay. This is about the existent Bashar al-Assad’s. And it’s not WMDs as the pretext for an invasion and occupation, but WMDs as a pretext for whatever euphemism the Obama administration comes up with to define ‘kinetic military activity.’”
The key Syria question is how Russia and China see Obama’s red line. Here’s the Russian response. Its bottom line is that the US should respect the “norms of international law”; no to “democracy by bombs”; and only the UN Security Council has the power to authorize an attack on Syria. Once again; Russia and China, three times already, have said no to war.
Here’s the Chinese response. Not via diplomacy, as in Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, but as a Xinhua editorial, which in the Chinese context means Beijing’s official version. The headline says it all; “Obama’s ‘red line’ warnings aimed to seek new pretext for Syria intervention.”
Arguably this is the money quote — a summary of US foreign policy according to Beijing; “It is not difficult to find that, under the disguise of humanitarianism, the United States has always tried to smash governments it considers as threats to its so-called national interests and relentlessly replace them with those that are Washington-friendly.”
All the key players here — the US, Russia and China — know Damascus won’t commit the folly of using (or “moving”) chemical weapons. So no wonder Moscow and Beijing are extremely suspicious this “red line” gambit may be yet another Obama deception maneuver, as in “leading from behind” in Libya (this is nonsense; in fact the attack on Libya started with Africom and then was transferred to NATO).
As Asia Times Online has been reporting for over a year, once again the big picture is clear; this is a titanic battle between NATO-GCC and BRICS members Russia and China. At stake is nothing less than the rule of international law, which has been steadily going down the drain since at least Agent Orange being sprayed all over Vietnam, through Dubya’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, and with the Libyan “humanitarian bombing” reaching an abysmal low. Not to mention Israel daily threatening to bomb Iran — as if this was a trip to a kosher deli.
Well, one can always dream of the day a multipolar world will give a pink slip to those issuers of red lines.
Pussy Riot and Massacres: Why We Cover What We Cover
Last week when news broke that a Russian court sentenced members of Pussy Riot to two years in jail, The New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner asked whether the case was getting too much coverage in the Western press.
In his article, Chotiner compared the guilty verdict coverage to the lesser coverage given to 22 Shias pulled off a bus in Pakistan and executed by the Taliban.
I don’t want to undercut the reporters who have chronicled Russia’s long, miserable record on free speech. Locking up a band for criticizing the president, or the church, is terrible. But I can’t help but think there’s something a little off-kilter in the sheer amount of attention Pussy Riot is getting. The coverage is morphing into the human-rights equivalent of the blanket coverage afforded to the lone white girl who goes missing on a tropical vacation.
Of course, you can’t measure every story by whether it is more or less outrageous than the slaughter of 22 bus passengers who happened to come from the wrong religious sect. But the media frenzy does make me think that for many people in the news business, the story of the band is appealing in large part because of its name and the camera-friendliness of its members–not to mention the celebrity of Pussy Riot defenders like Madonna, Sting, and Paul McCartney.
While apples and robots, the critique reminds me of something The New York Times’ Samuel Freedman wrote a week earlier about the killing of six Sikhs near Milwaukee.
In it, he notes that immediate media reaction was that the killings were most likely a case of mistaken religious identity. That the killer, Wade M. Page, thought the Sikhs were Muslim. But then he asks this important question:
Yet the mistaken-identity narrative carries with it an unspoken, even unexamined premise. It implies that somehow the public would have — even should have — reacted differently had Mr. Page turned his gun on Muslims attending a mosque. It suggests that such a crime would be more explicable, more easily rationalized, less worthy of moral outrage.
“Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims — not excuse it, but expect it,” said Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American writer and scholar on religion. “And that’s happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in this country devoted to making Americans think there’s an enemy within.”
As a Sikh, Vishavjit Singh has found himself wrestling with the subject these past few days. “If this had happened at a mosque, would our reaction be different?” asked Mr. Singh, a software engineer in suburban New York who also publishes political cartoons online at Sikhtoons.com. “I hope not, but the answer might be yes. You’d have the same amount of coverage, but you might have more voices saying, ‘Well, you know, it’s understandable, we’re at war, we’ve been at war.’ That’s an unfortunate commentary on our society today.”
These observations that violence against Muslims is expected, understandable and more explicable — yet, reminder, not excusable — gets to the crux of Chotiner’s Pussy Riot critique.
Again, it’s apples and robots, but the infatuation with the Pussy Riot case is how mundane the original protest is to Western eyes and ears, and how disproportionate the punishment is to the original “crime”. Wouldn’t a simple fine and some community service have done the trick?
The absurdity of the Pussy Riot case encapsulates a wide swath of what’s happening in Russia today. It provides an easy peg to explore the return of Vladimir Putin to official power in Russia’s strange political landscape, the country’s tenuous straddling between East, West and somewhere in between, its desire to still be considered a superpower and the fledgling democracy movement within the country.
Here’s Julia Ioffe, also writing in The New Republic:
[T]he case of Pussy Riot had become an easily consumable image of good and evil: Three young women against an Evil Empire. The heretofore little-known punkettes received such unanimously positive international publicity that one began even to pity the Kremlin and the Church a little: They had clearly and severely miscalculated.
As is so often the case with the Russian government, it was Putin himself who dramatized the pathos. Just before Putin’s departed for the London Olympics—halfway through the trial—London mayor Boris Johnson spoke up for Pussy Riot; upon his arrival, Prime Minister David Cameron broached the issue with Putin in their private meeting. Putin took notice of these slights; as swaggering and rude as he is (he’s been late to meet just about every foreign leader, including the Queen), he very much cares about his image in the West. It is where, after all, all his friends and subjects have their money. It is also important to Putin to be the leader of a world superpower, which is what he thinks Russia still is. He cannot be an Assad or a Qaddafi; it is very important for him to be what the Russians call “handshakeable” abroad. And so, while his instinct is often to hit first and think later, Putin knows it’s in his interest to cultivate the image of a centrist.
And this, I think, makes the continued coverage legitimate. It’s a story that helps us pull back the onion peel that is Russia.
For the unfortunate in Pakistan and elsewhere in the world we aren’t necessarily learning anything “new” by the atrocities taking place. These humanitarian catastrophes have become expected, understandable and more explicable.
Deserving of coverage, always, and certainly, and not ever, excusable. — Michael
Isaac Chotiner, The New Republic. Is Pussy Riot’s Persecution Getting Too Much Coverage?
Samuel G. Freedman, The New York Times. If the Sikh Temple Had Been a Mosque
Julia Ioffe, The New Republic. How Three Young Punks Made Putin Blink
Garry Kasparov wrote an interesting op-ed contradicting (by opinion) a bit of Ioffe’s piece. Read that here.
Also, be sure to read the closing court statements by Pussy Riot for an even deeper look into Russian politics.
Mr. Putin is not worried about what the Western press says, or about celebrities tweeting their support for Pussy Riot. These are not the constituencies that concern him. Friday, the Russian paper Vedomosti reported that former Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann could be put in charge of managing the hundreds of billions of dollars in the Russian sovereign wealth fund. As long as bankers and other Western elites eagerly line up to do Mr. Putin’s bidding, the situation in Russia will only get worse. … Mr. Putin could not care less about winning public-relations battles, … or about fighting them at all. He and his cronies care only about money and power. Today’s events make it clear that they will fight for those things until Russia’s jails are full.
Garry Kasparov: When Putin’s Thugs Came for Me
