Category Archives: News

This is how Russia bombed the UN aid convoy near Aleppo

The Daily Beast reports: The international reaction to Monday night’s devastating attack on an aid convoy in the Syrian town of Urem al-Kubra has been swift and furious. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in an unusually forthright speech at the General Assembly, described the attack as “savage and apparently deliberate.” He concluded by saying the fate of Syria could not depend on the “future of one man,” namely Bashar al-Assad.

According to a statement released Wednesday by the Free Syrian Army, 31 people in total died—19 civilians and 12 aid workers. The director of the local branch of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC), Omar Barakat, was among those killed. At least 18 trucks carrying humanitarian aid were destroyed, along with a SARC warehouse and a health clinic.

While aid agencies are naturally hesitant to ascribe direct blame, suspicion fell at once upon the Assad regime and Russia, which are the only air powers operating in this area of Syria.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has gone to great lengths to deflect blame, even claiming that video of the aftermath of the attack shows no sign of damage from an air strike, and suggesting the convoy was attacked by Syrian rebel fighters on the ground. To lend weight to the latter scenario, the MOD released drone footage of a pickup truck towing what it said was a mortar, moving past the convoy in rebel-held territory.

The Russians also have claimed the trucks might have been destroyed by spontaneous combustion.

However, there is a mounting body of evidence that makes it clear the Syrian regime and, in particular, the Russian military, hold responsibility for the atrocity. [Continue reading…]

Bellingcat provides more analysis on the attack.

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Abandoning discretion, Iranians proclaim their role in Syrian war

Reuters reports: Abandoning a long-standing reticence, Iranians are increasingly candid about their involvement in Syria’s war, and informal recruiters are now openly calling for volunteers to defend the Islamic Republic and fellow Shi’ites against Sunni militants.

With public opinion swinging behind the cause, numbers of would-be fighters have soared far beyond what Tehran is prepared to deploy in Syria, according to former fighters who spoke to Reuters, and commanders quoted by Iranian media.

Iran has been sending fighters to Syria since the early stages of the five-year war to support its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, in the struggle against Sunni rebels backed by Gulf Arab states and Western powers.

Once Tehran described these forces as military “advisers” but with around 400 killed on the battlefield, this discretion has slipped and several thousand are now believed to be fighting Islamic State and other groups trying to topple Assad.

Many Iranians initially opposed involvement in the war, harboring little sympathy for Assad. But now they are warming to the mission, believing that Islamic State is a threat to the existence of their country best fought outside Iran’s borders. [Continue reading…]

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A Trump campaign chair in Ohio says there was ‘no racism’ before Obama

 

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s campaign chair in a prominent Ohio county has claimed there was “no racism” during the 1960s and said black people who have not succeeded over the past half-century only have themselves to blame.

Kathy Miller, who is white and chair of the Republican nominee’s campaign in Mahoning County, made the remarks during a taped interview with the Guardian’s Anywhere but Washington series of election videos.

“If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you,” she said. [Continue reading…]

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Birtherism has always been a race-baiting fabrication — it still is

Amy Davidson writes: On Sunday, Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying things that weren’t true about Donald Trump’s birtherist lies. “After the President presented his birth certificate, Donald has said, ‘You know, he was born in the United States and that’s the end of the issue.’ It was a contentious issue,” Christie said. Jake Tapper, the host, corrected him. “As a point of fact, Donald Trump did not accept when Barack Obama released his birth certificate in 2011. He kept up this whole birther thing until Friday.” Tapper was right to call Christie on that falsehood; some of Trump’s lowest insinuations about the President’s citizenship have occurred not only in the past few years but in recent months. Efforts to deal with that fallacy, however, have somehow, in the past few days, allowed another Trump lie to solidify: the idea that the President somehow didn’t release his birth certificate until 2011. In fact, Obama released his birth certificate in June, 2008. His campaign posted it online. Reporters were allowed to hold it and examine its embossed state seal and signature stamp. It showed that he had been born in Honolulu, on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m. Hawaiian officials attested to its accuracy. That there were any questions after that point is, in itself, a scandal. Indeed, that there were any questions before that point is outrageous. Candidates who say that they were born in the United States are generally not faced with nervous glances and requests to prove it. But Obama was, and, in 2008, he did prove it.

And yet, two and a half years after Obama released his birth certificate, Donald Trump began pushing the case that the birth certificate was not a birth certificate. In part, this was because instead of saying “birth certificate” on top, it said “certification of live birth” and it was a printout of a computer record, rather than something bearing the scrawl of an obstetrician. That is what Hawaiian birth certificates look like; this was, unambiguously, a Hawaiian state birth certificate. If Obama’s document didn’t offer actual proof of his birth, then pretty much anyone born in Hawaii who had used a birth certificate to obtain a driver’s license or passport had done so under false pretenses. But in Donald Trump’s world, anything that doesn’t look the way you would expect it to in a cartoon is open to doubt. He managed to animate conspiracy theories about the “real” birth certificate — the documentation, pasted into a bound volume in the Hawaiian state archives, that is the basis for the state certificate and that, under state law, is not released — and about how either it didn’t exist or else revealed some secret about Obama. “Maybe it says he is a Muslim,” Trump said on Fox News, in March, 2011, as if the doctor who delivered the infant future President might have detected some religious leanings in his first baby noises.

It is worth noting that for there to have been any sort of discrepancy between the certification and the certificate, multiple Hawaiian officials would have to have been involved in a fraud. (So would the editors of the two Hawaiian newspapers in which Obama’s birth was announced, in 1961, a move that would have required not only conspiring journalists but ones equipped with psychic powers or a time machine — and probably both.) Then again, polls in 2011 showed that a certain number of birthers accepted that Obama was born in Hawaii; they just didn’t believe that Hawaii was part of the United States. And who can believe what foreign bureaucrats certify? [Continue reading…]

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Signs of panic and rebellion in the heart of ISIS’s self-proclaimed caliphate

The Washington Post reports: The graffiti that appeared on a wall near the mosque in Mosul where the Islamic State leader declared his caliphate two years ago was a small but symbolic act of rebellion.

The spray-painted letter “m” — for the Arabic word “mukawama,” meaning resistance — was part of a campaign by Kitaeb al-Mosul, an underground opposition group in the northern Iraqi city that released a video detailing their efforts this month.

The Islamic State reacted with swift brutality, executing three young men it accused of being involved. The militants released their own video showing the men kneeling in orange jumpsuits before being shot in the head. The letter “m” was sprayed on the wall behind them, a reference to their alleged crime. A spray can lay on the ground beside them, surrounded by blood.

In recent months, the Islamic State has carried out more arrests and executions such as these in a sign of desperation as it faces the prospect of losing Mosul, according to reports from inside the city. [Continue reading…]

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Russia blamed for hacking attack on German MPs

The Telegraph reports: Germany is investigating a series of sophisticated computer hacking attacks on MPs and political parties amid fears Russia may be trying to influence the outcome of next year’s elections.

The offices of several MPs inside Germany’s parliament were targeted in the attacks, as well as regional offices of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and rival parties.

The German government agency in charge of cyber security believes the attacks originated from Russia and may be linked to the hacking of private emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign team in the US earlier this year. [Continue reading…]

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Statistics point to massive fraud in Russia’s Duma vote

RFE/RL reports: When liberal rights activist Ella Pamfilova was named to head Russia’s election commission in March, she promised to clean house and oversee transparent, democratic elections.

“We will change a lot, and radically, in the way the Central Election Commission operates. A lot and radically — this is something I can promise you,” she said at the time.

However, a statistical analysis of the official preliminary results of the country’s September 18 State Duma elections points to a familiar story: massive fraud in favor of the ruling United Russia party comparable to what independent analysts found in 2007 and 2011.

“The results of the current Duma elections were falsified on the same level as the Duma and presidential elections of 2011, 2008, and 2007, the most falsified elections in post-Soviet history, as far as we can tell,” physicist and data analyst Sergei Shpilkin told RFE/RL’s Russian Service. “By my estimate, the scope of the falsification in favor of United Russia in these elections amounted to approximately 12 million votes.” [Continue reading…]

For those who might find a statistical analysis unpersuasive, perhaps the most compelling evidence of fraud can be seen in numerous CCTV videos that have been posted on YouTube showing election officials stuffing ballot boxes. And for those who are skeptical about the provenance of these videos, Russian state-funded RT has posted a compilation:

 

Might this be bad for the image of the beneficiary of the fraud, Vladimir Putin? Evidently not, since the most common response from RT’s devoted followers, as seen in the comments below this video, is to celebrate the channel’s transparency! Meanwhile, as for prominent news reporting on election fraud, thus far, not surprisingly, RT has none.

Once again we see at play the perverse skepticism of this era defined by selective attention, outrage, and doubt: a willingness to believe some things in the absence of actual evidence while disbelieving other things that can easily be proved. Among those afflicted with this disease, reason and facts have no traction.

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U.S. officials say Russia probably attacked UN humanitarian convoy

The New York Times reports: Russia was probably responsible for the deadly bombing of a United Nations humanitarian aid convoy in Syria, American officials said Tuesday, further shredding what remained of a severely weakened agreement between the United States and Russia aimed at halting the war.

Aghast at the attack on Monday night, United Nations officials on Tuesday suspended all aid convoys in Syria, describing the bombing as a possible war crime and a cowardly act.

The suspension was announced as the United Nations was convening its annual General Assembly meetings in New York, where the five-year-old Syria war has become the organization’s most anguishing challenge.

“Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower,” Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in his opening remarks to the gathering, his last as leader of the United Nations after 10 years. Mr. Ban called the attack on the convoy “sickening, savage and apparently deliberate.”

Publicly, the Obama administration said it held Russia responsible, in its role as a sponsor of the partial cease-fire agreement that it reached last week with United States. But the Americans still held out the possibility of salvaging the agreement. Benjamin Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, said Russia should have ensured a halt to air operations in an area where “humanitarian assistance is flowing.”

Privately, American officials said their intelligence information suggested Russian aircraft had actually carried out the attack. [Continue reading…]

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Hellish Greek refugee camp becomes an inferno

The Daily Beast reports: The Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos is a living hell even during the best of times. Last April, on the eve of Pope Francis’s historic visit, refugees complained to The Daily Beast through the barbed-wire fence that they had no hot water, no toilets and no information about how long they would have to stay. Many aid agencies long ago abandoned the camp to protest the way the refugees were being treated, which only served to make the conditions worse.

On Monday night, around the time diplomats in New York were signing a multi-national declaration to make life better for the world’s 21 million refugees, Moria’s hell became a literal inferno.

More than 4,000 refugees had to flee a fire that swept through the camp and raged late into the night, destroying more than a third of the shelters. The fire allegedly was set during a protest to mark a six-month anniversary of their detention in a camp that was built to house perhaps half the number of people there. Nine migrants and refugees were arrested on suspicion of starting the blaze.

Everything changed drastically on Lesbos and many other Greek islands last March when the European Union signed a deal with Turkey to trade illegal migrants or refugees for vetted ones. Since then, almost no one’s applications has been processed and the only people who have left the island are those deported back to Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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Trump praises autocratic Egyptian leader

Politico reports: There’s at least one Muslim country that Donald Trump has “great respect” for.

The Republican presidential nominee Monday showered Egypt’s increasingly autocratic ruler, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, with kind words during a special meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Trump, who has called for a ban on immigration from countries “compromised by terrorism,” which presumably would include Egypt, promised to invite Sisi to visit the White House if he’s elected president. Trump also suggested he’d like to visit Egypt.

In a strikingly praise-filled summary of the meeting released by his campaign, the Republican was said to express to Sisi “his strong support for Egypt’s war on terrorism, and how under a Trump administration, the United States of America will be a loyal friend, not simply an ally, that Egypt can count on in the days and years ahead.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle legal problems

The Washington Post reports: Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.

In one case, from 2007, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the size of a flagpole.

In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump’s club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people’s money, according to tax records. [Continue reading…]

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Media’s increasing willingness to call out Trump’s lies

Quartz reports: The Huffington Post branded him a serial liar months ago. Now, the most traditional American media outlets have also abandoned journalistic diplomatese in their coverage of Republican candidate Donald Trump, and are reaching for new ways to flag the word “lie.”

In at least five articles in the New York Times on Sept. 17, including the lead story in the print edition, the words “lie,” “false,” “falsely claimed” and “untrue” appeared in headlines, lead paragraphs, and top sections of the paper’s Trump coverage. The day before, CNN’s Jake Tapper called Trump “the most prominent pusher of the birther lie,” the Associated Press reported that Trump “peddled another lie,” and a Washington Post headline declared, “It’s time for TV news to stop playing the stooge for Donald Trump.”

It’s a marked change in language, even for outlets that have aggressively reported on Trump’s appeals to violence and bigotry. And it’s especially startling coming from the ultra-traditional Times, which even in the new digital age remains a north star for much mainstream media coverage.

“I think our investigative work — see [the Sept. 17] story on Trump’s tax breaks — has always been hard hitting,” says Dean Baquet, the New York Times’ executive editor. “But we have decided to be more direct in calling things out when a candidate actually lies.” [Continue reading…]

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Aid convoy hit in Syria as cease-fire ends

The New York Times reports: A humanitarian aid convoy was attacked in Syria on Monday after the Syrian military declared that a seven-day partial cease-fire was over and immediately began intensive bombardments in rebel-held areas of Aleppo, the divided city that has come to symbolize the ravages of the war.

The convoy attack, military declaration and bombings were the strongest signs yet of the gradual unraveling of a broader agreement between Russia and the United States aimed at restarting peace talks to end the conflict in Syria, which has killed an estimated 500,000 people and displaced millions.

Minutes after the Syrian military declared the cease-fire over around sunset, aerial attacks began pummeling insurgent-occupied neighborhoods of Aleppo, residents reported. The few remaining hospitals were back to overflowing, and rescuers struggled to find people in the dark, with the electricity out. By midnight, 34 people were reported killed.

United Nations officials were dumbfounded by the attack on the convoy of 31 trucks, which was escorted by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and was carrying food, medicine and supplies bound for rebel-held areas of western Aleppo Province. The convoy was among the first to try to deliver humanitarian aid to these areas, a relief plan permitted under the cease-fire agreement. [Continue reading…]

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Erdogan plans Syrian ‘safe zone’ as military campaign widens

Bloomberg reports: Turkey announced plans to create a safe zone in Syria the size of the Grand Canyon, a campaign that could be one of the biggest foreign military interventions in its modern history.

The Turkish military, which entered Syria last month to push Islamic State and Kurdish separatists from the border area, will expand its offensive to clear a 5,000-square-kilometer (1,931-square-mile) sanctuary, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday. The operation is liable to escalate its conflict with both of those armed groups and is set to be Turkey’s largest incursion since it poured troops into northern Iraq in the 1990s to attack strongholds of its own autonomy-seeking militants.

Turkey’s goal “is likely to require the deployment of thousands of Turkish soldiers in Syria for years and increase risks of a possible military confrontation with Syrian forces,” Nihat Ali Ozcan, a strategist at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara, said by telephone on Monday. [Continue reading…]

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UN chief blasts leaders in General Assembly for ‘feeding the war machine’ in Syria

The Associated Press reports: Taking the world stage for the last time as secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon unleashed years of pent-up anger at leaders who keep “feeding the war machine” in Syria, violate human rights and prevent aid deliveries to starving people.

The U.N. chief told presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and ministers at the opening of General Assembly’s annual ministerial meeting on Tuesday that “powerful patrons” on both sides in the more than five-year Syrian conflict “have blood on their hands.”

“Present in this hall today are representatives of governments that have ignored, facilitated, funded, participated in or even planned and carried out atrocities inflicted by all sides of the Syria conflict against Syrian civilians,” he said.

“Many groups have killed innocent civilians — none more so than the government of Syria, which continues to barrel bomb neighborhoods and systematically torture thousands of detainees,” he added. [Continue reading…]

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Ahmad Khan Rahami’s father told police in 2014 his son was a terrorist, officials say

The New York Times reports: Two years before Ahmad Khan Rahami went on a bombing rampage in New York and New Jersey, his father told the police that the son was a terrorist, prompting a review by federal agents, according to two senior law enforcement officials.

Separately on Tuesday, another official said that when Mr. Rahami was captured during a shootout with the police, he was carrying a notebook that contained writings sympathetic to jihadist causes.

In one section of the book, which was pierced by a bullethole and covered in blood, Mr. Rahami wrote of “killing the kuffar,” or unbeliever, according to the official, who agreed to speak about the investigation only on the condition of anonymity. [Continue reading…]

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The new terror: Even when it fails, it works

Christopher Dickey writes: Police have released the photo of a 28-year-old man originally from Afghanistan, Ahmad Khan Rahami, being sought for questioning in connection with the bombing in New York City on Saturday night. [The suspect has now been arrested.]

According to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, talking to CNN, Rahami should be regarded as “armed and dangerous.”

“Things are moving very quickly,” De Blasio said, but he would not confirm that Rahami was part of an operating cell or that it had connection with jihadists overseas, including al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State.
What to make of all this?

“Terrorists are now doing what we had long expected them to do and wondered why they didn’t do,” former acting CIA director John McLaughlin told an audience in New York last week. “They are going for soft targets.”

He was talking about attacks in Europe.

This week, he could say the same thing — exactly the same thing — about the United States.

It appears all but certain to counterterrorist officials in Europe and the United States that the long-anticipated jihadist strategy of random terror carried out with such devastating social and political consequences in France and Germany over the last year has now begun in America.

The implications in this deeply troubled election year, right as the United Nations General Assembly is convening in New York City, are enormous. [Continue reading…]

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Who are the Russian-backed hackers attacking the U.S. political system?

NBC News reports: Two teams of highly skilled hackers directed and protected by the Russian state are on the offensive.

Cybersecurity experts and intelligence officials tell NBC News the same hackers who broke into the Democratic Party’s computers, the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Administration System and who are implicated in the leaks of the personal emails of former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the health documents of Olympians are executing a Kremlin-backed campaign of cyber-espionage and sabotage.

Their target: Western democratic institutions and Russia’s political opponents.

“They are starting to figure out the way to apply the power they have in terms of technical capabilities into the geopolitical aspect,” Italian cyber security investigator Stefano Maccaglia told NBC News.

At a small square in Rome on a recent summer day, Maccaglia explained how he came to know most of these hackers in the early 2000s, when he was one himself. Having since crossed to the other side, Maccaglia’s job now is to investigate — sometimes for the Italian government — the Russian hackers’ cyber-attacks.

Maccaglia, who is now an advisory consultant for the network security company RSA, explained that the two teams of Russian hackers vary from trained researchers with a mathematical background to “the very funny person” skilled in computer programming languages and are turned into “gangs of cyber-mercenaries” who offer their “brilliance” to the highest bidder.

“They obviously have a very good life now,” Maccaglia said of the privileges they enjoy for their services.

Their relationship to the Russian state, he explained, is a win-win: The cyber gangsters are allowed to keep stealing — their traditional hacking work — as long as they do the bidding of Russian intelligence services.

In exchange, they receive state protection.

“They are above the law and are obviously protected,” Maccaglia said. “That’s why nobody can prosecute them. There is no way to reach them anymore.” [Continue reading…]

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