16 US troops commit suicide in Iraq

Sixteen US troops from the 57th Unit of the Airborne Division have committed suicide inside a military base in Iraq, security sources say. Iraqi security sources have revealed that 21 US troops had committed suicide inside a former Iraqi air force base 27 days ago, Fars News Agency reported on Monday.

According to the sources, the 21 troops were treated in a hospital but only five soldiers have survived and they are in a critical condition. Security officials said they used potent narcotics to kill themselves.

The troops’ motivations for suicide are not known but according to Iraqi sources the servicemen belonged to the 57th Unit of the US Airborne Division that was behind the massacre of several Iraqi families– mostly women and children– in northern Baghdad, said Ali al-Baghdadi an Iraqi security official.

The suicides took place in the soldiers’ dormitory after the dinner time.
“The bodies of the US troops became misshapen such a way that they looked like 5000-year mummies,” said a witness. According to Iraqi officials’ estimates, some 600 US troops, including senior officers, have committed suicide in Iraq since the invasion of the country in 2003. Half of the suicide attempts have been successful.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=68821&sectionid=351020201

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Who Lost Iraq?

A few weeks later, Bush speechwriter David Frum offered an even more exuberant version of the same vision to the New York Times Magazine: “An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.”

From the moment on May 1, 2003, when the President declared “major combat operations… ended” on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, such exuberant administration statements have repeatedly been deflated by events on the ground. Left unsaid through all the twists and turns in Iraq has been this: Whatever their disappointments, administration officials never actually gave up on their grandiose ambitions. Through thick and thin, Washington has sought to install a regime “aligned with US interests” — a government ready to cooperate in establishing the United States as the predominant power in the Middle East.

Recently, with significantly lower levels of violence in Iraq extending into a second year, Washington insiders have begun crediting themselves with — finally — a winning strategy (a claim neatly punctured by Juan Cole, among other Middle East experts). In this context, actual Bush policy aims have, once again, emerged more clearly, but so has the administration’s striking and continual failure to implement them — thanks to the Iraqis.

In the past few weeks, the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has made it all too clear that, in the long run, it has little inclination to remain “aligned with US interests” in the region. In fact, we may be witnessing a classic “tipping point,” a moment when Washington’s efforts to dominate the Middle East are definitively deep-sixed.

The client state that the Bush administration has spent so many years and hundreds of billions of dollars creating, nurturing, and defending has shown increasing disloyalty and lack of gratitude, as well as an ever stronger urge to go its own way. Under the pressure of Iraqi politics, Maliki has moved strongly in the direction of a nationalist position on two key issues: the continuing American occupation of the country and the future of Iraqi oil. In the process, he has sought to distance his government from the Bush administration and to establish congenial relationships, if not an outright alliance, with Washington’s international adversaries, including the Bush administration’s mortal enemy, Iran.

Withdrawal Becomes an Official Issue

Perhaps the most dramatic symbol of this new independence is the Iraqi government’s resistance to a Washington proposal for a “status of forces agreement” (SOFA) that would allow for a permanent and uninhibited US military presence in Iraq.

With the impending expiration of the UN resolutions that gave legal cover to the US military presence in Iraq, the SOFA negotiations are crucial. They began with a proposal that expressed the full extent of Washington’s ambitions to utilize Iraq as the base for making the US “more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.” The proposal first leaked to the press in June 2008 was essentially a major land grab, including provisions like the following that would not have seemed out of place in a nineteenth century colonial treaty:

• An indefinite number of US troops would remain in Iraq indefinitely, stationed on up to 58 bases in locations determined by the United States.

• These troops would be allowed to mount attacks on any target inside Iraq without the permission of, or even notification to, Iraqi authorities.

• US military and civilian authorities would be free to use Iraqi territory to mount attacks against any of Iraq’s neighbors without permission from the Iraqi government.

• The US would control Iraqi airspace up to 30,000 feet, freeing the US Air Force to strike as it wishes inside Iraq and creating the basis for the use of, or passage through, Iraq’s air space for planes bent on attacking other countries.

• The US military and its private contractors would be immune from Iraqi law, even for actions unrelated to their military duties.

• Iraq’s defense, interior, and national security ministries (and all of Iraq’s arms purchases) would be under US supervision for 10 years.

When leaked (clearly by Iraqis involved in the negotiations), this proposal generated opposition across the political spectrum from parliament to the streets. It was even denounced by the usually silent Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shia Ayatollah. Soon, Prime Minister Maliki made clear his own rejection of the proposal, setting in motion a chaotic negotiating process in which the Iraqis seem to have argued vehemently for a more modest, briefer US presence, as well as a definite deadline for full withdrawal — a proposal that was anathema to the Bush administration.

By early August, when the details of a new proposal endorsed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began to leak out, it was clear that US negotiators had given way, granting significant concessions to the Iraqi side. According to Iraqi insiders, the new draft agreement called for US troops to be completely withdrawn from Iraqi cities, where most of the fighting usually takes place, by the summer of 2009. All US troops — not just the “combat” troops usually mentioned when Democrats talk about withdrawal timelines in Iraq — would have to be gone by the end of 2011.

If the leaked draft were implemented, the US would leave behind those 58 bases, including the five massive “enduring” bases into which the Bush administration has poured billions of dollars. Moreover, the unhindered scope of action Washington had originally demanded for its forces would be dramatically limited: The US would not have the right to attack other countries from Iraqi soil, its ability to conduct operations within Iraq would be circumscribed, and immunity from prosecution would be restricted to US military personnel (and then only when they were participating in approved military actions).

Symptomatic of the loosening US grip on its Iraqi client government were the reactions of the two sides to the leaked provisions of the new version of the agreement. Secretary of State Rice declared it “acceptable” and explained uneasily that the timeline proposed was not the sort of fixed withdrawal date that the Bush administration had long adamantly rejected, but an “aspirational” “time horizon” that would depend on “conditions” in Iraq.

Maliki, in all likelihood responding to the fervor of public protests to Rice’s comments, immediately declared the agreement unacceptable unless the deadline for withdrawal was time-based and unconditional. In a well publicized speech to a gathering of tribal sheiks, he said that any agreement must be based on the principle that “no foreign soldier remains in Iraq after a specific deadline, not an open time frame.” In further clarifying his remarks, a key aide told the Associated Press that “the last American soldiers must leave Iraq by the end of 2011, regardless of conditions at the time.”

The latest reports suggest that a further round of secret negotiations had restored some US demands, including full immunity for American soldiers (but not mercenary fighters), and application of the withdrawal deadline to combat troops only. Such concessions by Maliki, however, appeared certain to trigger another round of protest and resistance in the streets and in the Iraqi Parliament.

Whatever their outcome, the still-unfinished negotiations point to something quite new in the relationship between the two governments. Until recently, the Iraqi leadership faithfully sought to enact whatever policies the Bush administration favored (though its capacity to implement them was always in question). With the proposed SOFA, this posture disappeared, replaced by a clear antagonism to Washington’s desires. With its formidable weapons (including 146,000 soldiers on the ground), Washington is bound to win at least some of these confrontations, but what we may be seeing is the end of the dream of a regime “closely aligned” with US policies.

The Re-emergence of Oil Nationalism

Nothing better highlights this transformation than oil policy. From the beginning of its occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration sought to quadruple Iraqi oil production by delivering control of the industry to the major international oil companies. Once given free rein to act on their own discretion, Washington policymakers believed that the oil majors would invest vast sums in modernizing existing fields, activate undeveloped reserves using the most advanced technology available, and discover major new fields utilizing state-of-the-art exploration and extraction methods.

Up until 2007, the Iraqi government was an active ally in this enterprise, even though the vast majority of Iraqis — including the powerful oil workers union, the religious leadership, and a majority of Parliament — vehemently opposed these plans, demanding instead that control of the industry remain in government hands. In 2004, the US-appointed Iraqi government enthusiastically endorsed an International Monetary Fund agreement that mandated the development of major Iraqi oil reserves by international oil companies. When those companies found the legal basis for such investment too fragile to risk vast sums of capital, the Iraqi government (surrounded by American advisors) immediately began work on an oil law that would presumably provide a more secure foundation for their investment. In the meantime, informal advice was accepted from the oil majors, whose technicians were placed in charge of various engineering operations within the country.

In 2007, when the oil law was finally delivered to the Iraqi Parliament, it met with unremitting opposition. The always strong oil unions immediately began a ferocious resistance campaign that stalled the law.

None of these developments altered the Bush administration’s determination to push the law through. They did not, however, anticipate that the Maliki administration itself would become a further source of opposition. As Charles Ries told journalists on leaving his position as US Economic Ambassador to Iraq in August 2008 after a year of failure, “When I got here… I was quite optimistic it was only a month or two before the petroleum bill would be passed, but the more I understood what the real issues were… it was clear this was going to be a major political challenge.”

While Ries was on the job, even the leadership of the Ministry of Oil, until then a pro-American bastion, went into opposition. One symptom of this was its failure to complete five no-bid contracts (that did not include either investment or extraction rights) with oil consortia led by the usual suspects — Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron — designed to increase Iraqi production by 500,000 barrels per day. Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahrastani told the Wall Street Journal that a key reason for the faltering negotiations was the desire of the oil companies for “preferential treatment for future oil-exploration deals.” This comment, like the faltering negotiations, hinted at the abandonment of the Bush administration’s long-desired version of Iraqi oil policy.

The new attitude was underscored when the Oil Ministry revived a Saddam-era agreement with the China National Petroleum Corporation, which was now granted a $3 billion contract to develop the Ahdab oil field. Given the growing US-China rivalry over the control of foreign oil sources, the symbolism of this act couldn’t have been clearer — especially since the earlier contract had been unceremoniously canceled by the United States at the beginning of the occupation in 2003. No less important, this was a “service contract” whose terms did not follow US guidelines calling for the reduction or elimination of Iraqi government control of the oil industry.

Soon after announcing this new agreement, Oil Minister Shahrastani offered what might be seen as a declaration of oil policy independence. “Global oil supplies,” he declared, “meet and may slightly exceed current world demand.” The world, that is, had plenty of oil, and so there was, he insisted, no global need to rush pell-mell into oil development agreements that might not, in the long run, be of use to Iraq.

This represented an attack on the fundamental premise of US oil policy — that, as Vice President Cheney told an oil industry gathering back in 1999, “By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.”

Significantly, back in 2001 — and before 9/11 — the Cheney Energy Task Force, working with the National Security Council, would make this commitment the centerpiece of administration Middle Eastern policy, defining the world situation as one in which the supply of oil must be drastically increased to meet the demand for an “additional fifty million barrels a day.”

Oil-producing countries of the Middle East never embraced Cheney’s analysis and consistently resisted US efforts to encourage, induce, or coerce dramatic increases in oil production. Instead, they viewed the “shortage” of oil as a natural result of market forces, beneficial to their own economies.

With the success of the US invasion, the Iraqi government threatened to become a maverick among the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), endorsing US supported plans that, theoretically, would have quadrupled Iraqi production within 10 years. So Shahrastani’s comments were a signal that Iraq was rejoining OPEC’s ranks and potentially opening a new era in post-invasion Iraqi politics in which the government he represented would no longer be a reliable ally of the United States.

A Nail in the Coffin of American Defeat?

Implicit in these actions is a new attitude toward, and assessment of, the US presence in Iraq. Prime Minister Maliki and his cohorts appear to have adopted the viewpoint of journalist Nir Rosen that “the Americans are just one more militia,” just the most powerful of the rogue forces that they have to manage and eventually eliminate.

As the Iraqi government accumulates an expanding lake of petrodollars and finds ways to shake them loose from the clutches of US banks and US government administrators, its leaders will have the resources to pursue policies that reflect their own goals. The decline in violence, taken in the US as a sign of American “success,” has actually accelerated this process. It has made the Maliki regime feel ever less dependent for its survival on the American presence, while strengthening internal and regional forces resistant or antagonistic to Washington’s Middle East ambitions.

The respected Iraqi newspaper Azzaman pointed to one of these forces in a recent editorial: “Iran has emerged as the country’s top trading partner. Its firms are present in the Kurdish north and southern Iraq carrying out projects worth billions of dollars. Iranian goods are the most conspicuous merchandise in Iraqi shops. Iraq, though occupied and administered by America, has grown to be so dependent on Iran that some analysts see it as a satellite state of Tehran.”

To support this contention, Azzaman asserted: “The Ministry of Oil and other key portfolios such the Ministry of Interior and Finance are in the hands of pro-Iran Shiite factions.” Citing Oil Ministry sources, it suggested that recent changes in oil policy actually reflected Iranian pressure to “exclude US oil majors from contracts to develop the country’s massive oil fields.”

Azzaman may be overemphasizing Iranian influence, since there are myriad internal Iraqi influences that continue to press against Washington’s desire for a client regime. Parliament, the Sunni and Shia religious leaderships, powerful unions, and the Sunni and Shia insurgencies have all registered broad opposition to continued US presence and influence.

As all this occurs, US leverage over the Iraqi government, though still formidable, is in decline. The Bush administration — or its soon-to-be elected successor — may face a difficult dilemma: whether to accept some version of the withdrawal demands of the Iraqi government or re-escalate the war in yet one more attempt to create a government that is “aligned with US interests.” The recent declaration by the Pentagon that only the most modest of troop reductions is militarily feasible in the foreseeable future may be a symptom of this dilemma. Without a full complement of US troops, after all, it will be increasingly difficult to convince the Maliki regime to re-embrace policies favored by Washington.

The question remains: Can anything reverse the centripetal forces pulling Iraq from Washington’s orbit? Will the President’s “surge” strategy prove to have been the nail in the coffin of its hopes for US dominance in the Middle East?

If this turns out to be the case, then watch out domestically. The inevitable controversy over “who lost Iraq” — an echo of those earlier controversies over “who lost China” and “who lost Vietnam” — is bound to be on the way.

Michael Schwartz’s new book, War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket, 2008), will be released later this month. It explains just how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the US to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling sectarian civil war inside that country. A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Schwartz has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His work on Iraq has appeared in numerous outlets, including TomDispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and Contexts. His email address is ms42@optonline.net.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/opinion/?id=27790

Sarkozy threatened to leave stormy Russian talks

FOCUS News Agency

Tbilisi. French President Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to walk out of stormy talks with Russian officials before securing a deal with President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday on withdrawing troops from Georgia, a French official said, Reuters reported.
The four-hour talks at a castle near Moscow yielded an agreement by Russia to completely withdraw its forces from Georgia’s heartland in a month but it did not commit to scale back its military presence in two Georgian separatist regions.
Sarkozy, whose country holds the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union, hailed the deal as a victory for European diplomacy and said that if the agreement is implemented, much death and suffering will have been avoided.
But his and Medvedev’s smiles at a joint news conference hid a more fraught atmosphere in their closed-door meeting, which was also attended by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
“There were very tense moments,” a senior official in Sarkozy’s office told reporters after the deal was announced.
The agreement was a follow-up to a six-point peace plan Sarkozy brokered between Moscow and Tbilisi a month ago, but which the West says Russia had only implemented about half of.
The original deal said both sides should withdraw to the positions they held before a brief war last month in which Russia’s forces overran Georgia’s smaller army after Tbilisi tried to retake control of the rebel region of South Ossetia.
Moscow said a provision in the deal allowing it to conduct ‘additional security measures’ permitted the stationing of troops in a buffer zone around the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia — an interpretation Tbilisi, and the West, deny.
At one point in Monday’s talks, while Medvedev was not in the room, Russian officials tried to remove a reference to the August 7 pre-conflict positions, the French official said.
“At that moment, Sarkozy got up and said ‘We’re going. This is not negotiable,” he said while traveling to Tbilisi after the Moscow leg of Sarkozy’s trip.
The Russian officials, who included Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, had Medvedev called back into the room, and the row soon faded, the senior official said.
“When Medvedev came back, he said ‘Let’s calm down’. He didn’t even suspend the session and he didn’t even call (Russian Prime Minister Vladimir) Putin,” he added.
At their last talks a month earlier, which also dragged on for hours, a deal was clinched after former president Putin joined the talks, prompting speculation that he still wields great influence after anointing Medvedev as his successor.
The second agreement reached on Monday retained a reference to the August 7 deployment.
Sarkozy also warned Medvedev against the dangers of Russia’s decision last month to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, a move matched only by Nicaragua and condemned by Western powers.
“Sarkozy told Medvedev: ‘Beware of the principle of self-determination. If the Russians demand it for Abkhazia and Ossetia, the Chechens could also demand it,’” the source said
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has fought two wars against separatist rebels in Chechnya, a North Caucasus territory not far from South Ossetia.

http://www.focus-fen.net/?id=n152141

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Russia will keep its troops long time

Russia will keep its troops inside “two Georgian separatist regions”* for a long time and their presence is not affected by an agreement to pull out troops, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday.

Russia’s intervention last month, in which its forces crushed an attempt by Georgia to retake the separatist South Ossetia region, drew widespread international condemnation and prompted concern over the security of energy supplies.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy won a commitment from Moscow on Monday to withdraw its forces from undisputed Georgian territory within a month, to be replaced by an international force including a 200-strong European Union contingent.

But there was no explicit mention in Monday’s deal of the Russian forces inside South Ossetia and the second breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia, despite previous Western demands that all troops return to their pre-conflict positions.

“Russian forces are on the territory of South Ossetia and Abkhazia at the request of the presidents and parliaments of those republics and on the instructions of the Russian president,” Lavrov told a news conference.

“In the next few days an agreement should be signed which will give a legal basis to the presence of Russian forces. They will be there for a long time, at least for the foreseeable period. That is necessary to not allow a repeat of Georgian aggression,” Lavrov said.

DIPLOMATIC TIES

Russia angered the West last month by recognising Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which threw off Tbilisi’s rule in separatist wars in the 1990s, as independent states. Nicaragua is the only other state to have recognised their independence Later on Monday, Lavrov was to meet the two separatist foreign ministers to formally establish diplomatic relations — a step that is likely to further irritate Western governments who demand Georgia’s territorial integrity be respected.

Both the European Union and the United States have warned Russia its actions in Georgia could lead to serious consequences, but the scope for punitive measures is limited.

Europe depends on Russia for more than a quarter of its gas supplies while Washington needs Russia’s cooperation in efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Russia said it was morally obliged to send in its military last month to prevent what it called a genocide in the separatist regions by an aggressive Georgian government egged on by its ally, the United States.

Lavrov said the agreement, which came after four hours of tense talks at a castle outside Moscow on Monday, was a vindication for Russia because it included an EU guarantee that Georgia would not use force again against the separatists.

“The responsibility for any attempts of aggression by Georgia will rest with the international presence,” he said.

ENERGY JITTERS

The fighting in Georgia worried energy markets because it was waged near the route of an oil pipeline that can pump up to one million barrels of crude per day from the Caspian Sea. The pipeline is favoured by the West because it bypasses Russia.

A French official said Monday’s talks were so stormy that Sarkozy, whose country holds the EU’s rotating presidency, threatened to walk out when Russian negotiators tried to remove a reference to pre-conflict positions.

“At that moment, Sarkozy got up and said ‘We’re going. This is not negotiable,” the official said. The row blew over when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who was out of the room at the time, returned and appealed for calm, the official said.

A Kremlin source though said the general atmosphere of the talks was positive. “I would not say there was anything specifically tense about them,” he said.

The final agreement included a commitment to hold international talks on the Georgian crisis in Geneva on October 15.

In an early sign of how thorny those talks are likely to be, Lavrov said Russia would insist that South Ossetia and Abkhazia have a “full place at the table for those discussions” — a demand unlikely to be accepted by Georgia or Western states.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKL935886020080909?pageNumber=3&virtualBrandChannel=0

* There are no “rebel regions”, there are the Independent Republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia

LaRouche : la « nationalisation » de Fannie et Freddie

est un acte de haute trahison

A doomed presidency

With the army poised for a coup and the Taliban winning hearts, Zardari doesn’t stand a chance

Forget labels. In reality, two giant parties struggle perennially for power in Pakistan. One is the politicians’ party, whose candidate, Asif Ali Zardari, has just been elected president. The other is the army party, which prefers bazookas to ballot boxes. Democracy in this pivotal country is a frail blossom. And Zardari is as frail as they come.

The crude apology for a party system in Pakistan is 60 years old and shows scant sign of changing. First, the politicians have an election and govern for a while. When they falter, the generals take over. Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia ul-Haq, Pervez Musharraf – they come and go, punctuated briefly by elected prime ministers (mostly called Bhutto). It’s a malign sort of game, growing perilously close to an endgame now. Indeed, President Zardari’s inevitably brief tenure may well be the end of it all as a third party – young, idealistic, fervent and brave – begins to tip the board over. You may not have heard the Taliban so described before, but that doesn’t mean that brute force isn’t with them.

In the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s murder by hands unknown last December, the Pakistan People’s party had a triumphant election. It possessed just enough numbers in the national and provincial parliaments to deliver the presidency, but you’d be hard pressed to invent a more hopeless, doomed prospectus.

This president isn’t a politician. He’s a businessmen who’s been haplessly entangled in too much monkey business over the years. Nine years in prison for corruption on trumped-up charges? Perhaps they have never been fully, fairly investigated, but to too many Pakistanis he is Mr Ten Per Cent. He vows to fight against the Taliban and defend US interests, even when they include US special forces staging bloody raids inside Pakistan’s borders. He promises to put right a broken, increasingly beleaguered economy, and to spend another $15bn of American aid wisely and well. But what comes next will be failure, unpopularity and a new tide of sleaze allegations.

A year or two down the line, the men in braid will sense a familiar opportunity and mount another coup. Washington, glad to have the military back at the top, will find another $15bn. The army will buy more guns, and feed more of its private bank accounts. The looting of Pakistan’s hope and Pakistan’s future will proceed on schedule.

The twin supposed champions of democracy – Zardari and Nawaz Sharif – couldn’t have made a lousier fist of the past eight months: any sense of national interest was lost immediately in an orgy of squabbling. The governing party couldn’t have chosen a worse candidate for commander in chief (retaining most of Musharraf’s powers). And Nato’s American leadership, insisting increasingly shrilly that feebleness in Islamabad will give Waziristan’s cross-border invaders free rein in Afghanistan, couldn’t be hastening the demise of democracy more idiotically.

Zardari announced his arrival – to the Washington Post – as a warrior from Sind bent on destroying the “Lahore-Islamabad oligarchy”. The oligarchs scheduled for destruction are Sharif and a military top brass trapped between a new leadership they despise and a religious insurrection that is beginning to dismember the nation.

Yet the Taliban, whom the generals must defeat to get America’s billions, are much more than a gang of terrorist thugs. They are also a madcap reform movement of young men disgusted by corruption and the godless wheeler-dealers they think have drained the purity out of Jinnah’s “pure state”, and the success they’re experiencing in the borderlands and beyond shows that many ordinary Pakistanis agree with them. It’s a battle for hearts and minds and, on his record, Asif Ali Zardari is the predestined loser of last resort.

guardian.co.uk/

Review of Russian newspapers

This is the review of Russian newspapers issued on Monday September 8.

ROSSIYSKAYA GAZETA writes the war in South Osetia has changed a lot in Russia’s political life, including the topics discussed at the State Council. Instead of the future of Russian sports after the Peking Olympiad, over the past weekend the Council members had to deal with the aftermath of the war. The article says Russian regions are ready to help rebuild Tskhinval. Their leaders named particular districts and buildings in the capital of South Osetia that each region is going to help.

IZVESTIA writes that by supporting Saakashvili the U.S. is losing Europe. The paper reminds readers that in its August 22 issue it published an opinion piece suggesting that by starting the war in South Osetia Saakashvili ruined U.S. plans of a missile attack on Iran. The paper says, this suggestion should not be seen as the only version of the events, but it may be making more sense than others, first of all because such plans are still under consideration in the U.S. The paper says, the three destinations of the latest journey undertaken by U.S. Vice-President Richard Cheney are highly revealing in this sense: Tbilisi, Baku, Kiev. The paper continues its informed speculation by saying: if Georgia is meant to be the main base for U.S. actions against Iran, then Ukraine will have to play the role of a support base, and there only President Yuschenko is capable of signing up to such a plan. The paper concludes that any unusual activities by NATO warships in the Black Sea, especially around the Bosporus, would trigger close attention by the Russian Black Sea Fleet. It will all end in a situation, says the paper, where economic interests of European countries would suffer most and Europe would hardly be grateful to the U.S. for that.

VREMYA NOVOSTEI says that at the State Council meeting President Dmitry Medvedev called the conflict in South Ossetia “a real war”, and that the aftermath of that war leaves not much of the current system of international security.
   
The same newspaper describes Friday’s summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization in Moscow as a meeting “where the CSTO recognized Russia’s actions in the Caucasus as right and fair but failed to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia”. The paper explains that this stance of “silent support” is more appropriate for the moment, to avoid any escalation of existing tensions. However, continues the article, the summit decided to increase and improve military cooperation between member states, and, notwithstanding the nation which chairs the Organization, to arrange all Heads of State summits in Moscow.

KOMMERSANT says, Moscow is ready for Nicholas Sarkozy . The President of France is bringing a detailed European offer for the further implementation of the Medvedev-Sarkozy Plan for South Osetia. Last weeks unofficial meeting of EU’s Foreign ministers concluded that Russia is not following the Plan strictly enough. The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, is quoted by the paper as saying, one day before the visit, that Moscow is ready for dialogue, even if it concerns an international police force proposed by the EU, but only if the OSCE adopts a decision on that police force as well.

KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA reports from a fact-finding trip to Tskhinval by 60 journalists from different countries: Western reporters kept asking South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity the same question over and over again – evidently they could not get enough of the answer: “Yes, the first step for us is the recognition of our independence, the second step – our incorporation into Russia proper. And we will deploy Russian military bases here. We will.” Another Western correspondent is reported to have been asking locals, little children as well as grown-ups: are these ruins from the August bombing and shelling, or are they from previous wars? The question astonished scores of people over the course of the day. Those who are just returning to Tskhinval to rebuild their homes were quite surprised at the suggestion that they were showing foreigners fake ruins, says the paper.

NEZAVISIMAYA GAZETA writes about the planned exercise of the Russian Pacific Fleet in the Caribbean: the exercise was planned a year ago, but at the moment it will look like retaliation for the current presence of U.S. navy ships’ in the Black Sea. The paper says, “our two countries are rapidly slip-sliding into another cold war while our leaders announce loudly how unwilling we all are to start the cold war anew.

russiatoday.com

11-Septembre : des journalistes parisiens désemparés par les propos d’un artiste incontrôlable

 

http://www.voltairenet.org

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French comedian, friend of president, Sarkozy,

do not believe the 911 official story

Big scandal in the newsroom in Paris: One more french comedian has publicly challenge official story of the September 11 attack,! Worse, it is not this time an afro-french claiming its negritude, or an actress allergic to the language of wood politician, but a personal friend of President of the Republic Nicolas Sarkozy.

The humorist Jean-Marie Bigard  Guests on Europe 1 radio-station, September 5, 2008,  Bigard was asked by the moderator Laurent Ruquier for a comment about John McCain on bin Laden. He took the ball to leap to say that he did not believe the fable government and invites listeners who have not yet seen or read about 911 false flag, to do it.

Europe 1, owned by Lagardere, the big french arms dealer, was quickly called to order by NATO. Without delay, the direction of the station has issued a  distance oneself from the comedian remarks.
 

Dib