Cameron´s argument that the EU makes UK safer is demolished by Brussels attacks

A spot on comment on a sad day by the Telegraph´s Europe Editor Peter Foster:

Downing Street had hoped to make security a key plank of the campaign to remain in the EU, but on days like today, the very phrase “European security” sounds like a bad joke.
Mr Cameron wants to argue that we need to remain part of European agencies like Europol and Eurojust precisely to prevent terrorist atrocities in Britain, but in the rough and tumble of the campaign that counter-intuitive argument will be hard to make.
Inevitably, attacks such as this – striking at the very capital of the European project – risks deepening the urge among some British voters to retreat behind our borders, throwing up the “Brexit” sign as we go.
Mr Cameron and other leaders will argue that would be a short-sighted mistake – unravelling the same Europe now under terrorist assault – but every new attack renders the argument that the EU makes us safer a little harder to make.

Garry Kasparov: "Trying to ally w Putin to fight ISIS is like giving yourself cancer to fight a cold"

Garry Kasparov ‏@Kasparov63 6 hrs6 hours ago

Trying to ally w Putin to fight ISIS is like giving yourself cancer to fight a cold. He supports terror, Iran, Assad, & wants more refugees.

 

Garry Kasparov is of course right. Sadly, the weak US, UK and German "leaders" are again doing their utmost to please this dictator, who has blood in his hands.

Exiled Chechen opposition leader: Boston bombings "gift to the Kremlin and Putin"

The credulity of some U.S. political commentators and analysts is just mind-boggling. In the wake of the Boston bombings, some are already calling for a new thaw in the US relations with Putin's Russia:
'a number of commenters are already arguing that the Obama administration should repair relations with Russia. Writing in The National Interest, Jacob Heilbrunn argues that the bombing is a “vindication” of Putin: “One can only speculate what Russian president Vladimir Putin is thinking as he sees Chechen terrorists wreaking havoc in a major American city.”'
Read the entire article here
"U.S. and Russian counterterrorism agencies already have a history of cooperating in tracking common enemies. If a joint effort plays some role in shining light on the Boston bombers’ motives or wider networks (if there are wider networks), that would strengthen these ties considerably — and possibly enhance the safety of the coming Olympics.

President Barack Obama has been exploring avenues for another “reset” of Russian-American relations. At least when it comes to counterterrorist operations, Putin is too. Depending on how the next few hours or days go, Boston may serve as an opportunity for these two powers to start over." Read the entire article here

But some experts say the Boston tragedy may provide an opportunity for another thawing.

"Certainly, in the past these situations have helped promote reconciliation between the U.S. and Russia," said Jeffrey Mankoff, a Russia analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Potentially that could happen again." Read the entire article here

In the overheated atmosphere created by the bombings, it may be useful to read what the exiled Chechen opposition leader Akhmed Zakayev has to say on this matter: 

"Indeed, the Boston bombings were a “gift to the Kremlin and Putin,” he says with a sigh. After last week’s attacks, Zakayev expects events in Boston to be exploited by the Russian government. “They will say, ‘This is the Chechen.’” When the smoke clears, he says he expects Moscow to politicize the suspects’ ethnic background. “Three years ago Putin said that Western nations granting political asylum to Chechens will have problems with these Chechens.” -

It’s this type of comment that raises Zakayev’s suspicions. Throughout our conversation, he hinted at a darker conspiracy, the cui bono suggestion that if the Putin regime benefited politically from the attack, it could have been, in some way, been involved in facilitating it. “Behind this action, we have to consider the involvement of a state organization or another big organization.”

Seizing on media reports that accused bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev flew to Moscow in January 2012, returning to the United States six months later, Zakayev called this information “an absolutely new situation.” (It had yet to be revealed that the Russian government had previously warned Washington about Tsarnaev.) What about reports that, during this period, Tsarnaev received military training from Chechen Islamist groups? “Which Chechen military group trained this guy? Nobody trained this guy,” Zakayev says. “I could believe if they come to Moscow that they have some instruction from someone, from Russian special services.” He adds that he “absolutely does not follow any conspiracy theory. We should wait until the Boston police have a full report.”

The finger-pointing at Russia is unsurprising. When I met Zakayev in 2010, he made it clear that he believed Moscow was involved in almost all major terror attacks attributed to Chechen Islamists, in an attempt to inflame Russian public opinion. It is widely believed by Chechens—and Sen. John McCain, slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, former Economist Moscow correspondent Edward Lucas, and many others—that the notorious 1999 Moscow “apartment bombings,” which precipitated the Second Chechen War, were not the work of Chechen radicals, but of Russian intelligence. And it should be pointed out that Chechen exiles are conspiratorial because they been the target of quite a few conspiracies. Last year testimony at a deportation hearing in London revealed that British intelligence foiled a 2009 assassination plot against Zakayev, which MI5 believed was ordered by Kadyrov." Read the entire article here

Russia is using Bin Laden´s death as pretext for their brutal killings in the Caucasus

Anna Politovskaya was murdered because she spoke out about the brutal Russian killings in Chechnia

Russia is - as was to be expected - using the death of  Osama Bin Laden as a pretext for continuing its brutal and murderous campaign against North Caucasus insurgents:

In its statement Monday, the Foreign Ministry likened bin Laden to slain Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev and the U.S. anti-terrorism operations in Pakistan to Russian security services' own operations in the North Caucasus, where, it said, a hunt continues for al-Qaida emissaries.

However, as the Moscow Times points out:

Still, not a single Chechen has ever been arrested outside Russia for involvement in al-Qaida. The few Russian citizens arrested by coalition forces in Afghanistan and then jailed in the Guantanamo prison comprised natives of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Kabardino-Balkaria. All were later sent back to Russia, where they were released.

Andrei Soldatov, a security analyst with the Agentura think tank, said playing up al-Qaida's presence in the North Caucasus helps Russian authorities pretend that they are fighting a common enemy with the United States and other Western countries.
"This naturally allows them to undercut foreign criticism of the brutal anti-terrorism efforts in the North Caucasus," he said.

Enver Kisriyev, a Caucasus expert with the Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Science, concurred, saying, "Claiming to be fighting al-Qaida allows federal and local security officials to often operate outside the legal limits."

Bin Laden's death will have little effect on the activities of North Caucasus rebels because they do not share al-Qaida's global goal of fighting the United States, which it sees as the biggest enemy of Islam, Soldatov said.

PS
The Moscow Times also reports that president Obama had notified the Kremlin about Bin Laden´s death before he made a public announcement:

"We appreciate it that the Russian authorities were sufficiently informed before the official statement by U.S. President Barack Obama," the Foreign Ministry said Monday in a brief statement.

There does not seem to have been any reports about Obama informing his western allies in the same way. If he did not do it, one wonders what particular reason he had to inform the Kremlin?

Putin´s "shithouse" programme a total failure

Vladimir Kara-Murza writes about Putin´s failed anti-terrorist programme in the World Affairs Journal:

Another year, another terrorist attack in Russia. On January 24, a suspected suicide bomber detonated an explosive device in the arrivals zone at Domodedovo, Moscow’s busiest airport. Thirty-five people were killed and more than a hundred were injured. As Vladimir Putin prepares for this year’s parliamentary “elections” and a possible return to the Kremlin in 2012, his “pacification” of the North Caucasus has once again been proven a failure. Not that more proof was needed after last year’s attack on Lubyanka metro station – literally under the nose of the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service.
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A decade ago, the Kremlin rejected a political track in favor of the “shithouse” strategy. Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov, whom Mr. Putin himself called “the lawfully elected president, whether we like it or not,” was branded a “terrorist” and killed. Any reference to him or his associates still stirs the Kremlin’s wrath, as was shown last week by the Russian Foreign Ministry’s protest over an event in Washington featuring Ilyas Akhmadov, Mr. Maskhadov’s former foreign minister. What had been a classic separatist movement in Chechnya was hijacked by Islamist fundamentalists and spread out to neighboring Ingushetia and Dagestan. For this transformation, Mr. Putin’s heavy-handed and cynical approach to the Caucasus bears a direct responsibility.

Read the entire article here.

Putin´s anti-terrorism programme - a total failure

 “Over the last 11 years in Russia, the number of terrorist attacks has risen dramatically. From 2000 to 2009, they have increased more than sixfold and reached the astronomical figure of more than 750 incidents a year. This is obviously a total failure of the country’s anti-terrorism program.”
Boris Nemtsov

The terrorist bombing at the Moscow Domodedovo airport was the latest proof that Vladimir Putin´s anti-terrorist policies are a disaster. As the brave opposition politician Boris Nemtsov has pointed out , the number of terrorist acts has grown radically in spite of Putin´s get tough policy.

Newsweek offers an interesting analysis of Putin´s failure:

Vladimir Putin rose to power nearly a dozen years ago promising to defend Russia from secessionist Chechen terrorists. In September 1999, responding to a series of still unexplained apartment-house explosions that killed 293 people in Moscow and southern Russia, the Army rolled into the breakaway republic with overwhelming force. Thousands of people were killed, and thousands more were driven from their homes. But the terrorist threat has not disappeared, instead mutating from nationalist violence to insatiable vendettas, only worsened by a deepening descent into a holy war inspired by Al Qaeda. Government moves against suspected terrorists, sometimes justified and sometimes not, have only provoked lethal retaliation. There were 29 suicide attacks in Russia over the past 12 months; 108 Russians were killed by terrorists, compared with only nine Israelis in the same period.

Corruption that pervades Putin´s Russia is one major reason why terrorism thrives:

Even then, the terrorist threat might be relatively containable if not for Russia’s wider ills. “The reason Russia is losing the war on terror is corruption,” says Elena Panfilova, director of Transparency International in Moscow. “Security systems cannot work in a country rotten with corruption.” Police at Moscow’s airports notoriously spend much of their time shaking down dark-skinned travelers for bribes instead of doing their jobs. In 2004 two female suicide bombers were detained by police at Domodedovo airport—but were released after making a payoff. The women then boarded a plane without tickets by allegedly bribing an airline employee. Ninety passengers and crew members were killed when the plane exploded. “The president relies on the decisions of corrupt bureaucrats and law-enforcement agencies,” says the Parliament security committee’s Gudkov. “The result is that terrorism has spilled from the North Caucasus and spread all across Russia. Hundreds of people die, all across the country.”

Read the entire article here.