International Military Review & Analysis - Withdrawal of Russian Military from Syria

After the transparent false-flag bombing of civilians in Ankara on Sunday (see: Erdogan slaughters Turkish civilians in Ankara and takes immediate vengeance on the Kurds), Erdogan has ramped up his mad rhetoric, calling for the definition of terrorism to be broadened to anyone indirectly involved in or supporting terror activity: "It's not only the person who pulls the trigger, but those who made that possible who should also be defined as terrorists, regardless of their title." By that definition, Erdogan himself is guilty: he may not personally torture and behead innocent civilians in Syria, but he and his government provide those who do with money, arms, and logistical support.

But that's not what he means. He wants anyone who supports groups like the Kurds in their struggle for self-determination to be deemed terrorists. In other words, anyone with a conscience. The hypocrite-in-chief also had this to say:

The bloody terrorist act was directed against all of Turkey, against all 79 million citizens of the country. Through this attack, the terrorist organization has revealed its despicable face. The attack aimed to sow fear among our people, forcing Turkey to reject its principles. But they will never succeed in this. Those using terror as a tool will never make Turkey kneel. On the contrary, they will kneel themselves.

As I mentioned in my article with Joe Quinn linked above, Turkey took immediate "vengeance" against Kurds in Iraq and Turkey after the bombing. A police officer and three PKK militants are the latest victims of the Turks' blood-lust in Diyarbakir, where over 120 civilians have been murdered and almost 7,000 houses have been damaged in the last months' assault (that's the official number, local Kurds say it's much higher). The city is blockaded and under curfew. Unsurprisingly, Turkey has also continued bombing Syrian Kurdish territory since the Ankara car-bomb. The YPG informed both the Russian and American centers about the ceasefire violations. If anyone has a right to self-defense, it's the Kurds.

Retired FBI Laboratory supervisor Fred Whitehurst provided professional consultation to the Nebraskans for Justice beginning in 1999. Whitehurst, a sixteen-year FBI veteran, was for a number of years the FBI Laboratory top explosives expert. Whitehurst turned his forensic investigative skills to the Omaha Two cases of Edward Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa (former David Rice).

Whitehurst ended his career with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1998 as a whistleblower against sloppy science at the FBI Laboratory. Whitehurst's disclosures uncovered and reported scientific misconduct which forced the Bureau to adopt forty major reforms, including an accreditation process.

Mondo and Poindexter were leaders of Omaha's affiliate chapter of the Black Panther Party called the National Committee to Combat Fascism. The two men were also named targets of the clandestine COINTELPRO counterintelligence operation conducted by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. The Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division was in a fierce rivalry with the FBI over the investigation of bombings and had also targeted Mondo and Poindexter under the so-called Midwest 22 investigation.

Agents of both the FBI and ATF joined the Omaha Police Department in making a case against the two Panther leaders for the August 17, 1970 bomb murder of Patrolman Larry Minard, Sr. One of the key pieces of evidence used against the Omaha Two were purported dynamite particles in a shirt pocket of Poindexter and pants pocket of Mondo. ATF agents took custody of the clothing and sent the garments to the ATF Laboratory where the dynamite trace was allegedly found. Both Poindexter and Mondo tested clean for dynamite at the time they were booked.

Whitehurst wrote a series of email messages to the Nebraskans for Justice about the pocket particles. Whitehurst wrote, "It is strange to me that "particles" of dynamite were found in clothing."

"Dynamite is not a loose material," explained Whitehurst. "When you stick a blasting cap into a cartridge of dynamite you don't open the cartridge up. You poke a hole into the cartridge and put a cap into it....Something ain't right here."

If you thought things had much changed under Obama, think again. There has been much publicity for the news that US forces have captured an alleged ISIS chemical weapons expert, Suleiman al-Afari. There was considerably less publicity for the news that he is being held in yet another new US black prison detention site. It is situated on the territory of the USA's Kurdish allies in Irbil, Iraq, but was constructed and is run entirely by the US military. Many detainees have vanished into its gates. Very few, if any, have come out again.

Yet again the US is simply disappearing people into secret prisons on foreign soil. Obama has in effect maintained the Bush doctrine that "enemy combatants" are neither alleged criminals nor soldiers. They do not get the rights of alleged criminals to decent treatment and a fair trial, nor do they get the Geneva Convention rights of soldiers captured during a war. They are non-persons who can simply be pitched into a black hole.

Even if they actually are terrorists, that does not leave them devoid of rights. I would also argue that to treat terrorists other than as common criminals, deserving of formal criminal process, contributes to their glorification and gives them a status they do not deserve. But formal process is essential because we know for certain that they often pick up people who are entirely innocent.

I leave aside the argument that it is the United States which caused the collapse of Iraq and it is with Blair and Bush that the guilt ultimately lies. But I leave it aside with the comment that it is an argument deserving of much weight.

I never quite made up my mind whether Obama was a decent man who was corrupted/bullied into adopting the neo-con agenda, or whether he was a play-acting sociopath all along. I do know that Clinton is a hardened warmonger who positively relishes the notion of "enemies" being killed. She is just a sociopath; she doesn't bother much with the acting.

DNA profiles and fingerprints for more than 7,800 suspected terrorists are held by British police in a little-known database, according to a government watchdog.

Biometric Commissioner Alistair MacGregor QC revealed the figure, which is higher than expected, in his annual report on Friday.

The watchdog's report indicates the number of biometric records kept on the counter-terror database has risen from 6,500 identified individuals in October 2013.

MacGregor's report also revealed that errors and delays in an official drive to remove the biometric data of those never convicted of a terrorism offense resulted in the deletion of a significant number of records of terrorism that should have been kept for national security reasons.

The commissioner expressed serious concerns about the counter-terrorism database operated by police, which has been built up gradually since the Terrorism Act was passed in 2000.

He said he decided to publish the number of individuals on the database despite warnings in 2014 that doing so would be contrary to national security interests. MacGregor said he was "not wholly persuaded" by the argument.

More than half of the people identified on the list - some 55 percent, or 4,350 - have never been convicted with an offense.
MacGregor expressed concern about the delays and errors in the reviewing and deletion of biometric profiles of terror suspects who have not been convicted.

Russia's wide-reaching anti-terrorist campaign has helped to stabilize the situation on the ground in Syria and has paved the way for a ceasefire and reconciliations. RT has gathered 10 of the most dramatic videos of Russia's strikes over past six months.

Bombs out!

Some of the most jaw-dropping footage since the Russian Air Force carried out its first airstrikes in September was the cockpit view of Russian aircraft taking off from Khmeimim airfield, carrying out sorties and returning to base.


Cutting smuggling...

It was strategically important to cripple terrorists' financial flows by destroying infrastructure such as refineries, as well as tanker vehicles Islamic State used for smuggling oil to Iraq and Turkey.

Russian Aerospace Forces Commander stated that forces from the Syrian Army, the coalition, and the opposition are sufficient in destroying the Daesh terrorist organization.

Forces from the Syrian Army, the coalition, and the opposition are sufficient in destroying the Daesh terrorist organization, which is prohibited in numerous countries including Russia and the United States, as well as other terrorists, Russian Aerospace Forces Commander Col.-Gen. Viktor Bondaryov said Tuesday.

"In order to complete the destruction of terrorist groups, the Syrian Army is sufficient enough, as well as coalition forces and the opposition," Bondaryov said.

As Russia's Vladimir Putin announced the start of the withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has reported the anti-terror operation's achievements to the Commander-in-Chief.

"Backed by our aviation, Syrian forces have freed 400 populated areas and over 10,000 square kilometers [3,860 square miles] of territories," Shoigu said during a Kremlin meeting with Russia's President Vladimir Putin on Monday.

Terrorists have been forced out from Latakia and Aleppo, and Palmyra has been "blocked," the military official reported to Putin, saying that military actions to free the UNESCO heritage site from militants continue. Hama and Homs Provinces in central Syria have been largely mopped up, and Kuweires airbase that had been besieged by terrorists for over three years was retaken.

What is a pro-democracy nonprofit?
Pro-Democracy Nonprofit Is Banned in Russia

A nonprofit group that promotes democracy has become the latest American-linked group to be banned in Russia under restrictions on "undesirable" organizations signed into law by President Vladimir V. Putin in May. The office of Russia's prosecutor general on Thursday outlawed the group, the National Democratic Institute, claiming in a statement that the it posed "a threat to the foundations of Russia's constitutional order and national security." [NYT, Pro-Democracy Nonprofit Is Banned in Russia ]

The above quoted NYT piece studiously avoids to describe what the "pro-democracy nonprofit" really is. There is no mention at all of its sources of money or its relations to non-Russian governments.

The National Democratic Institute, a group promoting democracy and civil society, had operated in Russia directly since the late 1980s, but it decided to close its offices there in 2012, according to its website. It has continued to establish programs in Russia through partner organizations, however. Madeleine K. Albright, an former United States secretary of state, is its chairwoman. [NYT, Pro-Democracy Nonprofit Is Banned in Russia ]

When asked about U.S. sanctions against Iraq, Madeleine Albright once said (vid) that 500,000 killed Iraqi children were "worth it". Any organization led by her must surely be a morally good. But who pays it? And what for?

To know what exactly this "nonprofit" is, is certainly relevant [in order] to understand the Russian position. But the NYT writer hides from the readers the fact that the NDI is a U.S. government financed organization. It is a "nonprofit organization" in the same sense that the U.S. Armed Forces are a "nonprofit organization". The NDI has been involved throughout the years in dozens of right-wing "regime change" coups. Its direct parent organization is the U.S. National Endowment of Democracy:

The private, congressionally funded NED has been a controversial tool in U.S. foreign policy because of its support of efforts to overthrow foreign governments. As the writers Jonah Gindin and Kirsten Weld remarked in the January/February 2007 NACLA Report on the Americas: "Since [1983], the NED and other democracy-promoting governmental and nongovernmental institutions have intervened successfully on behalf of 'democracy'—actually a very particular form of low-intensity democracy chained to pro-market economics—in countries from Nicaragua to the Philippines, Ukraine to Haiti, overturning unfriendly 'authoritarian' governments (many of which the United States had previously supported) and replacing them with handpicked pro-market allies."[2]

NED works principally through four core institutes: the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDIIA or NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), and the Center for International Private Enterprise—representing, respectively, the country's two major political parties, organized labor, and the business community.

When facing the growling, violent bedlam that is Donald Trump's presidential campaign, I am given to contemplate the concept of the Perpetual Motion Machine. According to Wikipedia, "A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work indefinitely without an energy source. This kind of machine is impossible, as it would violate the first or second law of thermodynamics."

"Thus," the explanation continues, "machines which extract energy from finite sources will not operate indefinitely, because they are driven by the energy stored in the source, which will eventually be exhausted. A common example is devices powered by ocean currents, whose energy is ultimately derived from the Sun, which itself will eventually burn out. Machines powered by more obscure sources have been proposed, but are subject to the same inescapable laws, and will eventually wind down."

I'm not so sure about that.

Physics and engineering have been around since long before the Egyptians built the pyramids, but all the rules and logic and constants of those crafts never had to account for a dangerous authoritarian entertainer who tells his supporters to beat people up while on national television and still gets a bump in the polls. Donald Trump is Benito Mussolini with a bad combover. He is the frictionless machine. He may wind up on a gibbet someday, but if he carries the contests on Tuesday, he's going to be the Republican nominee for president.