Peter Presland Wrote:I'm impressed with Paul's Essay too - talk about prescient. The trajectory of global US/NATO policy wrt to Russia really is crystal clear to anyone prepared to remove the blindfold.
Speaking of which,
this article by William Engdahl illustrates that the 100+ year old chess game over Central Asia is still at the heart of US/UK/NATO policy towards Russia.
It's too long to post in full but shows that, despite everything, Russia's position is rather better than may be supposed. It seems that the much vaunted Nabucco pipline project aimed at side-lining Russia in the 'Gas supplies to Europe' stakes, is close to collapse. There is a growing realisation in Europe (if not in the Baltic countries and Poland) that relations with Russia need very delicate handling indeed if the security of its energy supplies are to be assured - must be galling in the extreme for the US/UK Establishments.
BUT - in a startling - even ominous - illustration of Mackinder's original analysis brought utd - even to the extent of Germany being the most reluctant Russia-basher, the following paragraph leaps off the page:
Quote:In addition to Serb Bosnia, Gazprom’s partners now include Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. It almost retraces the Balkan route of the controversial Berlin-to-Baghdad railway which played such a decisive geopolitical role in British machinations that ultimately led to World War I following the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand.
In view of the unravelling of US/UK/NATO plans for the region - Ukraine election result especially - it does make the question "why an upsurge of Russia-Targeted terrorist attacks right now?" pointed and deserving of special attention - especially when Chechnya appears to be at its most tranquil in decades.
It would appear that it’s not only the Russians who need to update their MO. Look how eerily reminiscent of 9/11 is the sequence of denial-acceptance in the case of the Moscow bombings. As with “Al Qaeda,” so with the Chechens: Neither knew they’d done it until Langley’s fiction factory uploaded a video on the web. Ho hum.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8597792.stm
Chechen rebel says he ordered Moscow Metro attacks
Quote:Earlier on Wednesday, Doku Umarov's spokesman had told Reuters that his militant group "did not carry out the attack in Moscow, and we don't know who did it".
Peter Presland Wrote:BUT - in a startling - even ominous - illustration of Mackinder's original analysis brought utd - even to the extent of Germany being the most reluctant Russia-basher, the following paragraph leaps off the page:
Quote:In addition to Serb Bosnia, Gazprom’s partners now include Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. It almost retraces the Balkan route of the controversial Berlin-to-Baghdad railway which played such a decisive geopolitical role in British machinations that ultimately led to World War I following the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand.
In view of the unravelling of US/UK/NATO plans for the region - Ukraine election result especially - it does make the question "why an upsurge of Russia-Targeted terrorist attacks right now?" pointed and deserving of special attention - especially when Chechnya appears to be at its most tranquil in decades.
Engdahl's a diamond in a field of coal: I think the railroad-pipeline comparison inspired; and it's going to take an event (or rather, sequence of them) of similar magnitude to the assassination of the Archduke for the Anglo-Americans to transform their position. Stand-by for the return of the high-level assassination in Europe? Think Germany.
Ed Jewett Wrote:From Times Online
March 29, 2010
At least 40 dead in Moscow metro explosion
At least 40 people have been killed and scores more injured as two explosions ripped through the Moscow metro at the height of rush hour this morning.
The first blast at the Lubyanka station in central Moscow happened at 0756 (0356 GMT) killing 22 people.
The headquarters of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the Soviet-era KGB, is located above the station which is just yards away the Kremlin.
In fact, a venerable method of discrediting your opposition:
Quote:On the evening of May 30, 1884, bombs planted by Clan-na-Gael “erupted outside the Junior Carlton Club and a politician’s house (the wrong target), both in St. James’s Square. No one was killed. But the most injurious to the pride of the forces of order was the clockwork-fused bomb left in the public urinal beneath their very own stronghold,”* the Scotland Yard headquarters of the Special (Irish) Branch.
*Christy Campbell. Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria (London: HarperCollins, pbk, 2003), p.147.
Peter Presland Wrote:Speaking of which, this article by William Engdahl illustrates that the 100+ year old chess game over Central Asia is still at the heart of US/UK/NATO policy towards Russia.
Above, serious analysis. Below, atrocity propaganda from the best liberal British daily CIA money can buy. One explains the stakes and defines the real players; the other reduces geopolitics to an exchange of massacres. The former offers reason and a way out of the bloody mess. The latter prepares the ground for more mass murder:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr...scow-metro
Quote:Massacre in woods that brought war to Moscow's metro
Luke Harding in Ingushetia reports on the murder of four teenagers that inspired bombings
guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 April 2010 19.54 BST
Movsar Dakaev, 17, photographed on the garlic-picking expedition in the woods between Chechnya and Ingushetia that led to his death.
When the shooting started Adlan Mutsaev and his friends were in the woods picking garlic. They had arrived in the forest earlier that day, together with a group of neighbours travelling in a battered coach. The plan had been straightforward: stuff their sacks, enjoy the countryside, and then head back home to the Chechen town of Achkoi-Martan.
Without warning, Russian commandos hiding behind a hillock opened fire.Adlan, 16, was with his brother Arbi, 19, and their friends Shamil Kataev, 19, and Movsar Tataev, 19. Shamil and Movsar were both wounded. Adlan was shot in the leg, but managed to hobble into a ditch. He hid. Arbi also attempted to flee, but men in camouflage fatigues caught up with him.
According to the human rights group Memorial, Arbi was forced to drag his two wounded and bleeding friends across the snow. Shamil begged for his life. But the solders were impervious. They placed a blindfold over Arbi's eyes. And then they opened fire: executing Shamil and Movsar on the spot. At least two other garlic pickers suffered the same fate: Ramzan Susaev, 40, and Movsar Dakaev, 17. According to his relatives, Dakaev had pleaded to be allowed on the trip with the others. Wearing a bright green fleece, he took a photo of himself in the woods with his mobile phone. It shows him proudly posing against a craggy backdrop of cliffs and trees covered in snow. A little over 48 hours later his body was discovered.
The misfortune of the four garlic pickers was to have unwittingly strayed into a "counter-insurgency operation" conducted by Russian forces in the densely wooded border between Chechnya and Ingushetia. The soldiers, apparently looking for militant rebels who are waging their own violent campaign against the Russian state, came across the unarmed group, brutally killing them amid the picturesque massif of low hills.
Normally this atrocity on a cold day in February would have raised barely a ripple of attention had it not been for the terrible events in Moscow this week. In a video address on Thursday, Chechnya's chief insurgent leader, Doku Umarov, said Monday's suicide attacks on the Russian capital's metro were in revenge for the killings of the garlic pickers near the Ingush village of Arshaty. He claimed federal security service (FSB) commandos had used knives to mutilate their bodies of the dead boys.
Forty people died and more than 70 were injured when two suicide attackers from the North Caucasus set off their devices at stations outside the headquarters of the FSB and Park Kultury.
Russia's counter-terrorism committee yesterday named the Park Kultury bomber as Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, saying she was also known as Dzhanet Abdullayeva. Born in 1992, she came from Dagestan. Kommersant newspaper published a photo of her dressed in a black Muslim headscarf holding a pistol. It named the second bomber as 20-year-old Markha Ustarkhanova from Chechnya, describing her as the widow of a militant leader killed last October.
Linked or not, human rights groups say it is undeniable that the brutal actions of Russia's security forces have fuelled the insurgency raging across the North Caucasus region of Russia and the ethnic republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya and Kabardino-Balkaria. This largely invisible war has now reached the Kremlin's doorstep.
"People are abducted. People are killed. There are no guarantees of security," Magomed Mutsolgov, a human rights activist, told the Guardian yesterday, speaking from Nazran, Ingushetia's chief town. Law enforcement and security agencies have committed dozens of summary and arbitrary detentions, acts of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, as well as extra-judicial executions, rights groups say.
Typically, armed personnel wearing masks encircle a village or district in a "sweep operation". They force their way into homes, beat residents and damage property. Suspected militants are taken away. Many never return. Others are simply shot, and fake weapons planted on them, rights groups allege, citing interviews with victims and relatives.
According to Mutsolgov, the Kremlin's counter-terrorism methods have proved entirely counter-productive: "Violence produces more violence. It drives people to the militant underground."
The nature of the armed conflict in the North Caucasus has also mutated. From 1994 to 1996 Boris Yeltsin fought a war against mainly secular Chechen separatists who wanted – like the newly independent Georgians over the mountains – their own constitution and state. In 1999-2004 president Vladimir Putin fought a second Chechen war. The aim was to crush Chechen separatism.
Now, however, the Kremlin is battling another kind of enemy. The new generation of insurgents have an explicitly Islamist goal: to create a radical pan-Caucasian emirate with sharia law, a bit like Afghanistan under the Taliban. In February Umarov vowed to "liberate" not only the North Caucasus and Krasnodar Krai but Astrakhan – on the Caspian Sea -and the Volga region as well.
The rebels' tactics have also grown more fanatical. Umarov has seemingly revived the suicide squads used by his assassinated predecessor Shamil Basaev. Last summer a suicide truck bomber blew up Nazran's police station. Another bomber succeeded in ramming the car of Ingushetia's president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. Monday's attack in Moscow was the first in the capital for six years.
Increasingly, the rebels are also exploiting a new weapon: the web. On 2 March special forces launched a massive operation in Ekashevo, a suburb on the outskirts of Nazran. There they killed Said Buryatsky, a Siberian-born convert whose jihadist messages on YouTube had attracted a following among disaffected Muslims. Under fire from Russian artillery, Buryatksy recorded a final message for his global disciples.
Yesterday Russian forces had sealed off Ekashevo. But video footage obtained by Memorial shows a picture of devastation: pulverised houses, wrecked cars and alleyways strewn with bricks. After the battle Russian forces displayed a haul of weapons seized from the rebels – together with a blown-off human hand.
Human rights groups are critical of both sides. They accuse the rebels and government of failing to respect human life. Timur Akiev, the head of Memorial's Nazran office, said: "The government's methods have led to a radicalisation of the underground. The rebels now have only one goal: to beat Russia at any price. The rebels and the security forces behave in the same way towards each other. The civilian population is caught in the middle."
Like its imperial tsarist predecessors, who subdued the Caucasus in a sustained and savage campaign of tree-felling and village-burning, today's Russian leadership has little understanding of the region or its habits, Akiev suggested.
He also condemned Monday's bombings. "I don't understand how you can kill Russian civilians in revenge for the killing of Chechen civilians. It's absurd. The people who died in the metro had nothing to do with the conflict."
The Kremlin's response to the metro bombings has been, predictably, vengeful. Vladimir Putin has called for those responsible to be "scraped from the sewers". Dmitry Medvedev, the president, visited Kizlyar on Thursday, a day after twin suicide bombers killed 12 people and injured 28 others.
Security forces should "get more cruel", he recommended. "Quite a lot has been achieved in fighting terrorism lately," Medvedev said. "We have twisted the heads off the most odious bandits. But that, by all accounts, is not enough. We will track them down and punish all of them. We must deal sharp dagger blows to the terrorists, and destroy them and their lairs."
Before Monday's Moscow bombings, Medvedev had taken a few tentatively creative steps in the region, including appointing a new federal envoy. But the key problems remain. There are numerous socio-economic factors driving the insurgency: poverty, unemployment (running unofficially at around 75% in Ingushetia), police brutality, and corruption.
Back in Achkoi-Martan, it took relatives two days to discover what had happened to their loved ones. After hiding for 48 hours in a hole, fed by a spring, Adlan Mutaev crawled out of the forest. Local people discovered him alive on the edge of the wood. His brother Arbi was released by Russian commandos after two days. Human rights workers from Memorial arrived on 14 February, interviewing dozens of witnesses and taking photographs of corpses heaped up in the snow.
Those of Shamil Kataev revealed that he had been shot in the temple from close range. Someone had stolen his mobile phone and passport, as well as a letter from the head of Achkoi-Martin, granting the garlic pickers permission to be in the area. The body of Movsar Tataev was covered in gunshot wounds. In addition there were knife wounds to his spine and groin. Ramzan Susaev had been shot in the chest. His brother eventually found his body lying in the forest.
Unusually, Ingushetia's president Yevkurov quickly acknowledged that several innocent civilians had been killed in February's special operation. He added, however, that security forces had succeeded in killing 18 rebels, and said that the operation had served to increase the stability of the region. Both Chechnya and Ingushetia's rulers have paid the families of the dead teenage boys compensation.
Quote:Thereafter, on the 31st of March Doku Umarov, who is supposedly the ‘Emir of the North Caucasus’, claimed responsibility for the attack.
There was also a denial by Shemsettin Batukaev, a spokesman for the ‘Caucasus Emirate’ organization who said that “We did not carry out the attack in Moscow, and we don’t know who did it. (Reuters)
On searching for the obvious & deep links that Chechen terrorists have with the CIA, one will find that Doku Umarov’s links to the CIA have been removed from the Internet!!
Shades of David Headley & Ken Haywood in India, I must add.
But fortunately Umarov's links to the Saudis are even deeper!!
Doku Umarov was named amongst the most influential Muslims of the world in the 2009 list of 500 compiled by the Prince Al-Valid ben Talyalya American Centre of Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) at the Georgetown University (USA).
Umarov is presented in the list as "the head of Ichkeria Caucasian Emirate". The BBC adds that the title of the most influential Muslim of the world was awarded by the ACMCU, which is funded by the Prince Al-Valid ben Talyalya, to the King of Saudi Arabia. (Nov 28 2009).
The whereabouts of Mr. Umarov are not known & nobody seems to be asking the question. Is he in the Caucasus or in Riyadh or in Miami . . . ??
Doku Umarov is also very closely connected to Brigadier General Ruslan Saidov (head of the Istanbul Bureau of the External Agencies of the Republic of Ichkeria & the FAR WEST LTD, a front company based in Dubai). Ruslan Saidov was himself closely connected to the late Turki bin Faisal, who was the head of Saudi Intelligence & ambassador to the US. Saidov was also actively associated with al-Walid who was the Saudi intelligence operative in the Caucasus (Anton Baumgarten, editor of Left.ru).
Last September, Russian-backed Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said that he had good reason to believe the US and Britain were covertly aiding the Chechen rebels: "We are fighting U.S. and British special services in the mountains.” (Reuters)
For more on Far West LLC, see Prof Peter Dale Scott's pioneering work here:
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...php?t=1958
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e25119.htm
What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous?
By By ROBERT A. PAPE, LINDSEY O'ROURKE and JENNA McDERMIT
April 01, 2010 "New York Times"
Ignore the worthless article cited above – the obvious answer, “the CIA,” can’t be given in the Agency’s paper of record – and instead take a look at the excellent reader comments, three of which I reproduce extracts from below, contributed by “hayate.” It is difficult to imagine a better illustration of why the US kleptocrats so loathe the internet; and why the CIA et al devoted so much time and narco-money to establishing controlled “liberal” entities like the Daily Kos and Huffington Post.
Quote:Pushing Russia comprehensively out of the Caucasus, and humiliating her, requires victory for the Chechens. An independent Chechnya may also be the prelude to the longer-term break-up of Russia herself: the CIA predicted that oil-rich Siberia might escape Moscow's control in its report, Global Trends 2015, published in April.
Quote:One of the articles, perhaps inadvertently, spilt the beans. The Chechen leader Ahmed Zakayev wrote in The Wall Street Journal on 29th September 2004 that
Quote:"The West has a clear choice. It can continue to support the KGB dictatorship of Mr. Putin, which sooner or later will turn against the West and side with its enemies through its strategic goal of undermining the "unipolar" world order and keeping oil prices high. Or it can change course and insist on resolving the Chechen conflict through negotiated settlement." (my italics).
In other words, the "negotiated settlement" in Chechnya, which the US Secretary of Defence, Colin Powell, has instructed the Russian government to seek, is the way to prevent Russia from ever counter-balancing the United States in world affairs, and to get the oil price down.
(new york times, wall street journal, both plugging for Chechen terrorists. see a pattern? Let's all continue the mantra now: Iraq has wmds, Iran is a nuke threat, terrorism in Russia is the work of "freedom fighters" trying to gain independence.)
Quote:Gaining control of Russian Oil, by John Laughland
Sanders Research 18 October 2004, http://www.globalresearch.ca 25 October 2004
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/LAU410A.html
The fax-back service for pre-written newspaper articles must have been working overtime these last few weeks at Langley, Virginia. A flood of articles has appeared in the press attacking the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, especially in the wake of the Beslan massacre. They all have the same structure. Whenever you read the words, "Nothing can excuse the murder of children," you know that a big "But" is looming. Such articles invariably go on to explain why the murder of children is indeed understandable, and the reason usually given is Russian authoritarianism, against which the Chechen rebellion is natural and legitimate.
y John Laughland
Sanders Research 18 October 2004, http://www.globalresearch.ca 25 October 2004
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/LAU410A.html
The fax-back service for pre-written newspaper articles must have been working overtime these last few weeks at Langley, Virginia. A flood of articles has appeared in the press attacking the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, especially in the wake of the Beslan massacre. They all have the same structure. Whenever you read the words, "Nothing can excuse the murder of children," you know that a big "But" is looming. Such articles invariably go on to explain why the murder of children is indeed understandable, and the reason usually given is Russian authoritarianism, against which the Chechen rebellion is natural and legitimate.