Category Archives: News

Pierre Omidyar’s quarter billion dollar journalism project seems to have stopped publishing

Paul Carr asks: Genuine question: what the hell is happening at Pierre Omidyar and Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept?

I say “genuine question” because, as other writers have discovered, it’s impossible to ask questions about Greenwald without being accused by his army of fans of being an NSA shill or worse. Any suggestion that all might not be well in Glennville, or Pierretown, or whatever cute geographic nickname you prefer, is met with howls of “LEAVE GLENN ALONE!”

Which is perhaps why other media commentators have been reluctant to point out that the Intercept, the flagship site of Omidyar’s new $250m journalism empire, hasn’t posted a new story in almost ten days. This while its biggest target — the NSA — stands accused of exploiting perhaps the biggest Internet security flaw ever discovered. [Continue reading…]

Update: The Pando post appears to have kicked The Intercept off standby mode — at least until its editor, John Cook, heads off to seder at 3pm before which he sends his “Passover Greetings” (I’m not really sure what his point is about religious observance.)

Cook explains that the recent lack of activity was “on purpose,” so presumably the lack of communication about this lack of activity was also on purpose.

He says, “you shouldn’t expect to be hearing from us on much aside from the very specific work of the [NSA] documents, which is itself time-consuming and exacting, for some small, indeterminate, but discrete period of time as we get the site set up to operate for the long term.”

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NSA pretends it can increase national security while diminishing internet security

The New York Times reports: Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.

But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.

The White House has never publicly detailed Mr. Obama’s decision, which he made in January as he began a three-month review of recommendations by a presidential advisory committee on what to do in response to recent disclosures about the National Security Agency.

But elements of the decision became evident on Friday, when the White House denied that it had any prior knowledge of the Heartbleed bug, a newly known hole in Internet security that sent Americans scrambling last week to change their online passwords. The White House statement said that when such flaws are discovered, there is now a “bias” in the government to share that knowledge with computer and software manufacturers so a remedy can be created and distributed to industry and consumers. [Continue reading…]

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Latakia: In Assad’s coastal heartland, Syria’s war creeps closer

Reuters reports: For three years, residents of Syria’s Mediterranean provinces have watched from their coastal sanctuary as civil war raging further inland tore the country apart, killing tens of thousands of people and devastating historic cities.

But a three-week-old offensive by rebel fighters in the north of Latakia province, a bastion of President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority, has brought the battle ever closer and shattered that sense of relative security.

Rebels are now fighting in the hills overlooking the sea, bringing the country’s main port of Latakia within their range – rocket-fire killed eight people in one barrage on the city a month ago – and Syria’s coast feels under real threat.

“They can erase us, even those of us who support them,” said a young Alawite woman as she drank coffee with her fiance in a Latakia cafe, 50 km (30 miles) south of where have rebels seized their first toehold on Syria’s coast, by the Turkish border.

While many Alawites, roughly 10 percent of Syria’s 23 million people, have actively supported Assad, others sympathized with the popular revolt against him in 2011 but now fear reprisals from his mainly Sunni Muslim enemies.

Memories of a rebel offensive in August, when scores of Alawite villagers near Latakia were killed by radical Sunni Islamists and foreign jihadists, heighten tensions in the bustling streets of the city of 400,000. [Continue reading…]

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Libya remains in the grip of rivalrous rebel factions

The Los Angeles Times reports: Dragging deeply on a cigarette and swirling his espresso dregs, the curly-haired young militiaman offered up a vivid account of the battles he and fellow rebels waged to bring down dictator Moammar Kadafi — days of blazing bombardment, thirsty desert nights.

Then he voiced his dismay at the chokehold those same armed groups now maintain on Libya.

“We fought so hard to make a new country,” said the 28-year-old of Libyan extraction who left Britain to join the revolution that swept this North African nation in 2011. “Now it’s all about money. Money and guns.”

The rebel groups that worked together to oust Kadafi have fragmented into rivalrous factions whose outsized collective power has sapped Libya’s oil wealth, turned a nascent government structure to tatters and ushered in a grim cycle of assassinations, abductions and firefights in the streets. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine tension turns deadly in ‘worst case scenario’

Bloomberg reports: Ukrainian security forces battled pro-Russian gunmen in the eastern town of Slovyansk, with both sides suffering casualties, in what European Union member Poland called “the worst-case scenario” for the country.

A day after Ukrainian officials accused Russia of “external aggression,” camouflaged gunmen fired on units deployed by the government in Kiev in an anti-terror operation near Slovyansk, about 240 kilometers (150 miles) from the Russian frontier, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said today on Facebook. One serviceman was killed and five were wounded, with an unknown number of dead on the separatist side, he said.

It followed the takeover of a regional police station in Donetsk yesterday and gun battles in which police stopped separatists from seizing buildings in other towns. The events echoed those that preceded Russia’s annexation of Crimea, rattling Ukraine’s industrial heartland and raising concern that Russia may carve off more of Ukraine with what NATO has estimated are 40,000 combat-ready troops massed on the border.

“Over the past few hours we’ve witnessed the worst-case scenario playing out in Ukraine,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has advocated a strong response to Russia, said in an interview with Radio Zet in Warsaw.

The anti-terror operation began after acting President Oleksandr Turchynov called an emergency meeting of the country’s National Defense and Security Council last night.

“Please let all civilians know to vacate the center of town, to not leave their apartments and to stay away from windows,” Avakov posted on his Facebook account. “Separatists have opened fire on approaching special-forces units.”

One person was killed an nine were wounded, news service Interfax reported, without giving details on which side the casualties came from. Russian state-run Rossiya 24 TV said Ukrainian “self-defense” forces led by an Afghan War veteran had spread across Slovyansk and troops allied to the government in Kiev arrived in armored personnel carriers and by helicopter.

Intelligence reports from the U.S. and its allies indicate that some of the pro-Russian demonstrators infiltrated cities in eastern and southern Ukraine during the past month or even earlier as part of a Russian plan to divide Ukraine into federated regions, some of which may hold referendums to rejoin Russia, as Crimea did, two U.S. officials said.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the reports, which they stressed aren’t conclusive, the officials said that the assessment continues to be that Russian President Vladimir Putin prefers using a campaign of provocation, propaganda, bribery and subversion — rather than an outright invasion by Russian troops — to take over some of parts of eastern and southern Ukraine. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said the appearance of heavily armed men in unmarked uniforms drew alarming parallels to the takeover of Crimea by Russian troops last month ahead of a referendum for the region to secede from Ukraine and Russia’s annexing the territory.

“The reappearance of men with specialized Russian weapons and identical uniforms without insignia, as previously worn by Russian troops during Russia’s illegal and illegitimate seizure of Crimea, is a grave development,” he said. “I call on Russia to de-escalate the crisis and pull back its large number of troops, including special forces, from the area around Ukraine’s border.”

On Saturday, the White House said it warned Russian President Vladimir Putin against using the clashes in Ukraine’s east as a pretext for seizing more territory. Moscow says it reserves the right to send troops into eastern Ukraine to protect ethnic Russians there from an alleged threat of violence against them from nationalists in the Ukrainian government, although Russia has presented little concrete evidence such a threat exists. [Continue reading…]

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Few in Ukraine — including in the East — support separatism or joining Russia, poll shows

Paul Goble writes: Vladimir Putin insists that his moves in Ukraine are motivated by a desire to protect ethnic Russians, Russian speakers and, Moscow’s latest category, “pro-Russian people” who do not want to live under Kyiv, a view that has been uncritically accepted by large numbers of Russians in the Russian Federation and by many in the West.

But a new poll shows that few of the people on whose behalf Putin claims to be acting are interested in separatism from Ukraine or in having their regions become part of the Russian Federation. Instead, even in the eastern portions of Ukraine where Russian speakers form a large share of the population, overwhelming majorities want to remain in Ukraine.

According to the results of a poll by the Democratic Initiative of Ukraine released today and discussed by Andrey Illarionov in an Ekho Moskvy blog post, 89 percent of the residents of Ukraine consider that country their Motherland. [Continue reading…]

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New evidence that the NSA poses a major threat to global security

When it comes to intelligence officials, past or present, it seems much safer to assume that they are not acting in national interests than to assume otherwise. It doesn’t matter which nation or which agency, the business of intelligence is deception.

There is an inherent conflict between the declared need of such agencies to operate in secrecy and the need to provide those operations with the oversight they require in order to prevent the abuse of power.

After the latest revelations about the CIA’s torture programs and NSA operations which undermine the security of the internet, are we not already far past the point where it must be faced that the U.S. intelligence community has systemic flaws? These should not just be patched over. It’s time to ask fundamental questions about the function of the intelligence agencies.

Bloomberg reports: The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.

The NSA’s decision to keep the bug secret in pursuit of national security interests threatens to renew the rancorous debate over the role of the government’s top computer experts.

Heartbleed appears to be one of the biggest glitches in the Internet’s history, a flaw in the basic security of as many as two-thirds of the world’s websites. Its discovery and the creation of a fix by researchers five days ago prompted consumers to change their passwords, the Canadian government to suspend electronic tax filing and computer companies including Cisco Systems Inc. to Juniper Networks Inc. to provide patches for their systems.

Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers.

“It flies in the face of the agency’s comments that defense comes first,” said Jason Healey, director of the cyber statecraft initiative at the Atlantic Council and a former Air Force cyber officer. “They are going to be completely shredded by the computer security community for this.” [Continue reading…]

Update — DNI states: NSA was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL, the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability, until it was made public in a private sector cybersecurity report. Reports that say otherwise are wrong.

The problem for the DNI, NSA, CIA, and the rest of the intelligence community, is that they can’t restore trust simply by issuing statements or through cosmetic reform. It’s no good saying, we wouldn’t do something like that, when we already know they already have.

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Narendra Modi: A threat to the world’s largest democracy?

The Guardian reports: More than a dozen of India’s most respected artists and academics – including the novelist Salman Rushdie and the sculptor Anish Kapoor – have written to the Guardian to express their “acute worry” at the prospect of Narendra Modi, the controversial Hindu nationalist politician, becoming the country’s prime minister.

Modi, the candidate of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is currently leading all opinion surveys and many analysts believe he is assured of victory when results of the six-week phased poll are announced next month.

Tens of millions of Indians voted on Thursday in Delhi, the capital, and in volatile areas in the centre and east of the country where Maoist insurgents are active. Turnout has so far been high in one of the most bitterly fought elections for many decades. The Congress party, in power since 2004, currently appears headed for a historic defeat.

The letter to the Guardian, also signed by British lawyers, activists and three members of parliament, says that Modi becoming prime minister would “bode ill for India’s future as a country that cherishes the ideals of inclusion and protection for all its peoples and communities”. [Continue reading…]

Jason Burke writes: India has long been prone to periodic bouts of communal violence, and political opponents, cynically or otherwise, repeatedly cite the 2002 rioting [in Gujarat] to highlight the threat of sectarian conflict if Modi wins the coming elections. Though Modi has not been convicted, they point out, associates have been sent to prison for their role in the violence. There are also many ordinary Indians, and not just India’s Muslim minority, who are deeply committed to a tolerant, pluralist, progressive vision of India and who believe Modi would divide and damage their country.

Others see things differently. For tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people across India, what happened in 2002, or at least what they believe happened, does not so much raise doubts about Modi’s claim to lead the country, but reinforce it.

In a school run by the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] close to the Meerut rally site, on the eve of the meeting, members of the organisation gathered for a conference on encouraging traditional sports. Their worldview is nationalist and conservative. Incidents such as the 2012 gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman on a bus in Delhi are a result of “moral decadence” and western culture, they say, while the boundaries of “Bharat”, the Sanskrit-origin word they use to describe their country, should encompass Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tibet, Bangladesh and Burma. One veteran claims India faces three problems: “corruption, inflation and Muslims”. Modi has an answer to all three, he insists. Rajendra Agrawal, the BJP member of parliament representing Meerut’s 1.4 million voters, stresses that Hinduism’s message is one of peace and tolerance but “one day … Islamic aggression will have to be dealt with”.

A key question is how far Modi has moved from the hardline vision of the organisation he joined at the age of 10. In recent years, there have been tensions between the politician and the RSS. The candidate’s pragmatic, business-friendly, globalised outlook is at odds with the traditional self-reliance of the nationalist movement. The RSS did not take it well, either, when Modi suggested that India needed to build toilets before temples.

Christophe Jaffrelot, a political scientist who specialises in extremism in south Asia, says Modi has effectively “emancipated himself” from the RSS high command, who traditionally outrank even senior BJP figures. Yet, he adds, Modi may well “do anyway what the RSS has wanted to do for decades because he is perfectly in tune with their ideology.” [Continue reading…]

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Britain increasingly invokes power to disown its citizens

The New York Times reports: The letter informing Mohamed Sakr that he had been stripped of his British citizenship arrived at his family’s house in London in September 2010. Mr. Sakr, born and raised here by British-Egyptian parents, was in Somalia at the time and was suspected by Western intelligence agencies of being a senior figure in the Shabab, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda.

Seventeen months later, an American drone streaked out of the sky in the Lower Shabelle region of Somalia and killed Mr. Sakr. An intelligence official quoted in news reports called him a “very senior Egyptian,” though he never held an Egyptian passport. A childhood friend of Mr. Sakr, Bilal al-Berjawi, a Lebanese-Briton also stripped of his citizenship by the British government, was killed in a drone strike a month earlier, after having escaped an attack in June 2011.

Senior American and British officials said there was no link between the British government’s decision to strip the men of their citizenship and the subsequent drone strikes against them, though they said the same intelligence may have led to both actions.

But the sequence of events effectively allowed the British authorities to sidestep questions about due process under British law, mirroring the debate in the United States over the rights of American citizens who are deemed terrorist threats. The United States and Britain have a long history of intelligence sharing and cooperation in fighting terrorist threats. [Continue reading…]

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Rebels view token aid from U.S. as strategy to prolong war in Syria

The New York Times reports: When rebels want to return to Syria to fight, Jordan’s intelligence services give them specific times to cross its border. When the rebels need weapons, they make their request at an “operations room” in Amman staffed by agents from Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

During more than three years of civil war in Syria, this desert nation has come to the world’s attention largely because it has struggled to shelter hundreds of thousands of refugees. But, quietly, Jordan has also provided a staging ground for rebels and their foreign backers on Syria’s southern front. In the joint Arab-American operations room in Amman, the capital, for example, rebels say they have collected salaries as an incentive not to join better-funded extremist groups.

But this covert aid has been so limited, reflecting the Obama administration’s reluctance to get drawn into another Middle Eastern conflict, that rebels say they have come to doubt that the United States still shares their goal of toppling President Bashar al-Assad.

In fact, many rebels say they believe that the Obama administration is giving just enough to keep the rebel cause alive, but not enough to actually help it win, as part of a dark strategy aimed at prolonging the war. They say that in some cases their backers even push them to avoid attacking strategic targets, part of what they see as that effort to keep the conflict burning.

“The aid that comes in now is only enough to keep us alive, and it covers only the lowest level of needs,” said Brig. Gen. Asaad al-Zoabi, a Syrian fighter pilot who defected and now works in the operations room.

“They call it aid, but I don’t consider it aid,” he said. “I consider it buying time and giving people the illusion that there is aid when really there is not.” [Continue reading…]

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CIA’s use of harsh interrogation went beyond legal authority, Senate report says

McClatchy reports: A still-secret Senate Intelligence Committee report calls into question the legal foundation of the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists, a finding that challenges the key defense on which the agency and the Bush administration relied in arguing that the methods didn’t constitute torture.

The report also found that the spy agency failed to keep an accurate account of the number of individuals it held, and that it issued erroneous claims about how many it detained and subjected to the controversial interrogation methods. The CIA has said that about 30 detainees underwent the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

The CIA’s claim “is BS,” said a former U.S. official familiar with evidence underpinning the report, who asked not to be identified because the matter is still classified. “They are trying to minimize the damage. They are trying to say it was a very targeted program, but that’s not the case.” [Continue reading…]

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Climate change-fueled droughts are about to make Syria even more hellish

Brian Merchant writes: In a 2011 study, scientists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined that climate change was at least partly responsible for the more frequent droughts withering the Mediterranean region. Both veteran foreign policy analysts and climate experts have blamed a particularly debilitating spate of those droughts for setting the stage for the violent conflict that would unfold in Syria. Climate change, it can be said, warmed Syria up for war.

“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, said in October of the same year that unrest broke out in the Middle East. Now, the drought is on the verge of returning en force, and it could exacerbate the already considerable suffering of the refugees, victims, and citizens caught in the crossfire of the interminable conflict.

“A drought could put the lives of millions more people at risk,” Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), said at a Tuesday briefing on a new report that outlines the incoming threat. [Continue reading…]

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Who is Narendra Modi and why is the world afraid of him leading India?

Max Fisher writes: Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat, looks likely to become India’s next prime minister — and the international community is terrified. Though Modi is running as an economic fixer, or “India’s CEO,” The Economist went so far as to issue an anti-endorsement, urging Indians to vote for anyone but Modi.

So who is Narendra Modi? And why is the world so worried?

Modi is a leader in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s second-largest political party, as well as the party’s candidate to become prime minister should BJP sweep the current elections. The BJP is running against the incumbent party, the Indian National Congress Party (or Congress for short), which has been in power for most of the country’s history. It looks likely that the BJP will come out on top in the election, making Modi prime minister.

Modi is known for his trim beard, stern demeanor, and imposing rhetorical style. He is currently the top political official for Gujarat, a northwestern state with about 60 million people, and has been since 2001. He is also a member of the right-wing Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (or RSS). He has been a member of the RSS for nearly four decades — an important detail for reasons explained below.

Modi is campaigning on two major platforms. The first is economic management: he positions himself as India’s CEO. While India’s economy has slowed over the last four years, Gujarat’s economy has done well enough for many Indians to see Modi as a leader able to cut through India’s notorious bureaucracy and corruption, and return the country to double-digit growth. The second platform, which is less openly stated but just as important, is right-wing Hindu nationalism — a major concern for India’s Muslims, not to mention outside observers who see it as a recipe for disaster.

He has a notorious record for ginning up religious tension in a country where this can be — and often is — deadly. And his ascent coincides with a rising trend of Indian right-wing Hindu nationalism that has stirred up major concern among many foreign observers. That concern is so pronounced, The Economist ran a cover story explicitly urging Indian readers to vote against Modi. “By refusing to put Muslim fears to rest, Mr. Modi feeds them. By clinging to the anti-Muslim vote, he nurtures it,” the article warned. The anti-endorsement was, like just about everything Modi, extremely controversial in India. [Continue reading…]

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Carbon dioxide levels climb into uncharted territory for humans

Mashable reports: The amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has exceeded 402 parts per million (ppm) during the past two days of observations, which is higher than at any time in at least the past 800,000 years, according to readings from monitoring equipment on a mountaintop in Hawaii. Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is the most important long-lived greenhouse gas responsible for manmade global warming, and it is building up in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.

Once emitted, a single molecule of carbon dioxide can remain aloft for hundreds of years, which means that the effects of today’s industrial activities will be felt for the next several centuries, if not thousands of years. [Continue reading…]

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Heartbleed bug puts the chaotic nature of the Internet under the magnifying glass

The Washington Post reports: A major flaw revealed this week in widely used encryption software has highlighted one of the enduring — and terrifying — realities of the Internet: It is inherently chaotic, built by multitudes and continuously tweaked, with nobody in charge of it all.

The Heartbleed bug, which security experts first publicly revealed on Monday, was a product of the online world’s makeshift nature. While users see the logos of big, multibillion-dollar companies when they shop, bank and communicate over the Internet, nearly all of those companies rely on free software — often built and maintained by volunteers — to help make those services secure.

Heartbleed, security experts say, was lodged in a section of code that had been approved two years ago by a developer that helps maintain OpenSSL, a piece of free software created in the mid-1990s and still used by companies and government agencies almost everywhere.

While the extent of the damage caused by the bug may never be known, the possibilities for data theft are enormous. At the very least, many companies and government agencies will have to replace their encryption keys, and millions of users will have to create new passwords on sites where they are accustomed to seeing the small lock icon that symbolizes online encryption.

“This was old code. Everyone depends on it. And I think that just everyone assumed that somebody else was dealing with it,” said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The group that was actually dealing with it consisted of fewer than a dozen encryption enthusiasts sprawled across four continents. Many have never met each other in person. Their headquarters — to the extent one exists at all — is a sprawling home office outside Frederick, Md., on the shoulders of Sugarloaf Mountain, where a single employee lives and works amid racks of servers and an industrial-grade Internet connection. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. troops may be sent to Eastern Europe

The Associated Press reports: NATO’s top military commander in Europe, drafting countermoves to the Russian military threat against Ukraine, said Wednesday they could include deployment of American troops to alliance member states in Eastern Europe now feeling at risk.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove told The Associated Press he wouldn’t “write off involvement by any nation, to include the United States.”

Foreign ministers of the 28-nation alliance have given Breedlove until Tuesday to propose steps to reassure NATO members nearest Russia that other alliance countries have their back.

“Essentially what we are looking at is a package of land, air and maritime measures that would build assurance for our easternmost allies,” Breedlove told the AP. “I’m tasked to deliver this by next week. I fully intend to deliver it early.”

Asked again if American soldiers might be sent to NATO’s front-line states closest to Russia, the four-star U.S. general said, “I would not write off contributions from any nation.” [Continue reading…]

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Eastern Ukraine: ‘Local’ protesters storm theater thinking it was Kharkiv City Hall

The Moscow Times reports: Pro-Russian demonstrators in eastern Ukraine mistook a theater for the city hall and stormed the wrong building, a local journalist said, citing the case as evidence that the protesters were not local.

Protesters who took over Kharkiv City Hall over the weekend first broke into the town’s opera and ballet theater, but left upon finding a concert hall inside, journalist Vyacheslav Mavrichev said on his Facebook page.

Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has accused the Kremlin of orchestrating “separatist unrest” in Kharkiv and eastern cities Donetsk and Lugansk, while officials say that many pro-Russia protesters in east Ukraine may in fact be Russian.

The New York Times reports: As the government in Kiev moved to reassert control over pro-Russian protesters across eastern Ukraine, the United States and NATO issued stern warnings to Moscow about further intervention in the country’s affairs amid continuing fears of an eventual Russian incursion.

Secretary of State John Kerry accused the Kremlin of fomenting the unrest, calling the protests the work of saboteurs whose machinations were as “ham-handed as they are transparent.” Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he added: “No one should be fooled — and believe me, no one is fooled — by what could potentially be a contrived pretext for military intervention just as we saw in Crimea. It is clear that Russian special forces and agents have been the catalysts behind the chaos of the last 24 hours.” [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine’s Muslims don’t want to be part of Russia

Paul Goble writes: Muslims are quite comfortable living in Ukraine and have no interest in having the regions where they live be annexed to the Russian Federation where relations between Muslims and others are known to be far worse, according to a Daghestani native who has been living 35 years in Luhansk.

Seyfulla Rashidov, head of the Muslim community there and a professor at the Eastern Ukrainian University, told Vadma Byurchiyev of Kavpolit.com that he and his fellow Muslims are happy to be part of Ukraine and won’t support Moscow’s efforts to annex portions of their country.

Saying he would favor a tougher and more professional response by Ukrainian officials to pro-Russian demonstrators, Rashidov noted that he “had not seen a single acquaintance in the crowd of [pro-Moscow] demonstrators. I am certain that they came from other cities. I have no evidence that they are citizens of another state, but they clearly are not Luhansk people.” [Continue reading…]

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