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When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine on February 24th, it caused a lot of problems for voices on the right and the left. Putin has a lot of fans in both corners, and these fans had spent years portraying him as a tactical genius, bamboozling us all with his four-dimensional chess moves. Right up until February 23rd, these Putin stans had been assuring us that Putin would never do something as dumb as launch a full-scale invasion of a sovereign democracy. Ever since then, the right have been able to change gears on Putin fairly seamlessly. This is WAR, and...

The Senate Judiciary Committee released a declassified transcript of FBI source Stefan Halper’s conversation in September 2016 with George Papadopoulos. The transcript shows that Halper name-checked several former Russian intelligence officials who he has met throughout his storied career. The former Cambridge professor plied Papadopoulos with questions about the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia and WikiLeaks. It wasn’t long into his conversation with George Papadopoulos at a prestigious social club in London weeks before the 2016 election that FBI confidential informant Stefan Halper mentioned his links to several retired Russian spies. “I have a lot of friends in Russia,”...

Nigergate: The shadow of the French inspector After yesterday’s posting, a close look at Ambassador Wilson, today’s the turn of Mr Jacques Baute. The following article raises some incredible questions and reveals some amazing facts. Mr Baute, a Frenchman, seemed to know all about the the Niger forgeries and kept very quiet about them. The result: the Bush administration was ridiculed. The day after Baute’s organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, declared the documents to be forgeries the French Government made a startling announcement..... The Bush administration was decieved by it’s presumed allies and the blame was placed on the...

An email made public through the organization WikiLeaks suggests that a company controlled in part by the family of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons mastermind donated to the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative before a different company controlled by the same family was awarded a 35-year no-bid lease to Port Canaveral’s cargo container terminal.

The Syrian army has uncovered a clandestine plant in Eastern Ghouta that was used by the terrorists to produce military-grade agents, with equipment of Saudi origin and materials presumably made in Western countries having been found at the building, local media reported on Tuesday. The plant is located in al-Shefounieh town in the area of Duma. Among other toxic chemicals, chlorine was found at the site, the SANA news agency reported, adding that the papers of the Jaysh al-Islam militant group were also discovered. A Syrian field commander said that high-tech equipment was found at the plant, which indicates that...

<p>The former number two official in Saddam Hussein's Iraqi air force claims the former Iraqi dictator moved weapons of mass destruction from Iraq to Syria in the months preceding the current Iraq war.</p>

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion. Arrest of Kenyan Exposes Massive Global Arms Trade The East African Africa News February 25, 2002 Monday Kenya L AST WEEKEND'S arrest of Kenyan-born Sanjivan Ruprah, who is alleged to be a part of a major arms smuggling operation to Africa, has brought into the open the extent of the multi-million dollar illegal business. The whereabouts of Bout remain unknown. Some media reports say he is in Moscow, while others say he is in the Congo or the United Arab Emirates. An international ...

.. inadequacies and deficiencies of the existing international monetary and financial system.. In 1998 Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, a strategist and master spy, conceived of an economic alliance between Russia, India and China. The purpose of this combination was to counter the international influence of the United States. By now it should be apparent that Russia and China intend to launch an attack against the U.S. dollar. Do we yet realize that such an attack is possible? And have we reckoned the political consequences?

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who has often described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest tragedy” of the 20th century, has now said that the “reunification” of Georgia has “already been decided,” a suggestion some of his listeners believe was a call for restoring Moscow’s control over Georgia and even the former USSR as a whole. In an intriguing commentary published in yesterday’s “Gazeta,” Bozhena Rynska describes both the celebration of the 80th birthday of longtime Soviet and Russian official Yevgeny Primakov and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s two very different toasts on that occasion (www.gazeta.ru/column/rynska/3287611.shtml). The celebration took...

Yevgeny Primakov, who led Russia's government as it emerged from its previous financial crisis 10 years ago, said a "state dictatorship" was required to ensure tens of billions of dollars flowed through banks to their intended recipients in industry. "Our biggest concern is that the thrombosis of credit lines and the rise in banks' rates is leading to falling production," said Primakov, chairman of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Trade, which unites and represents various Russian businesses. In an address to President Dmitry Medvedev at a Kremlin meeting attended by the heads of regional chambers, he said the rescue...

As Russian tanks rumble through Georgia, and Western pundits talk of the "new Cold War," one trope keeps reappearing in their discourse. Russia's newly aggressive stance, we are told, is partly our fault: After the fall of Communism, the West went out of its way to humiliate and trample Russia instead of treating it as a partner--and now, an oil-powered Russia is striking back. "Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed," Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and former Barack Obama adviser, wrote in Time. "A bipolar universe gave...

In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yuri Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. In the quote above, Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, head of the DIE, the KGB’s little sister in communist Romania, reveals a conversation he had with chairman Andropov, the Soviet leader. “We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world,” Andropov told Pacepa, “and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel...

NOVO-OGARYOVO (Moscow Region), July 13 (RIA Novosti) - A group of Russian and U.S. dignitaries gathered Friday at the presidential residence near Moscow behind closed doors in a bid to repair shattered ties. The panel called "Russia-USA: A Look Into the Future," led by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, declined to comment on the first Moscow session, but said it was a successful beginning to a series of high-level meetings. "We discussed many issues. Our goal was not to get media coverage, score public relations points, or press home any...

Former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov expressed conviction that peace in the middle East cannot be established without Syria, calling for ending the occupation of the Syrian Golan to achieves this peace. In a lecture he delivered Sunday evening at al-Assad Public Library in Damascus on the occasion of the publication of his new book "The Middle East: The Known and Hidden", Mr. Primakov said it is necessary that peace should be comprehensive and Israel has to accept to return the occupied Syrian Golan. However, he asserted, Israel was not ready for such peace. Mr. Primakov added that Russia had...

Kazan(Russia), Aug 31: Officials and religious figures from Russia and more than a dozen Islamic countries kicked off a conference here that organizers said was aimed at deepening their dialogue and defending a "multipolar" world in the face of US power. "Values cannot be imposed by force," Mintimer Shaimiyev, President of Russia`s mainly Muslim republic of Tatarstan where the three-day conference was being held, said in an opening address to delegates. "The example of Iraq has shown that democracy can only be the result of internal development. Liberal values can`t be exported like cars. A multipolar world without a system...

The next feud between America's freedom and democracy hawks and old United Nations diplomats will likely develop this week with the release of a much-anticipated report. Ordered by Secretary-General Annan, it was prepared by a panel of 16 former world movers and shakers now in their 70s, who will undoubtedly be hailed at Turtle Bay as wise men, and derided elsewhere as has-beens. Men who held previous posts like Russian foreign minister and Saddam champion Yevgeny Primakov, British U.N. envoy David Hannay, or current Arab League chief Amr Moussa, are not going to excite anyone looking for fresh insights into...

Hamas' visit to Moscow at the weekend couldn't have been more successful. The terror group that now controls the Palestinian Authority managed to gain international legitimacy from one of the world's leading powers and held off all efforts to persuade it to drop its core beliefs and recognize the Jewish state. That is assuming there were any such efforts. Reuters reports that on Friday: "Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a Hamas delegation it must recognise Israel's right to exist and abide by interim peace deals." But according to Mohammed Nazzal, a senior member of Hamas' delegation who spoke to...

Prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Primakov was President Mikhail Gorbachev's special representative to Saddam. Gorbachev was out, Yeltsin was in and Primakov continued to prosper. He became Yeltsin's head of the KGB successor, the FSB, and remained there, a true hard-liner, until 1996 when he was made foreign minister. Two years later he was named prime minister, a job that, to the surprise of many, he kept for a whole year. Then, not retirement but the presidency of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry -- and the full trust of Vladimir Putin -- came Primakov's way. This...

A top Pentagon official who was responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein's weapons programs before and after the 2003 liberation of Iraq, has provided the first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein "cleaned up" his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles to prevent the United States from discovering them. "The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org).

The relations between Russia and the Shiite's religious leadership in Lebanon started to develop in the beginning of the seventies. The spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shia community, Imam Moussa Al-Sadr, visited Moscow in 1972 and asked Soviet authorities to issue humanitarian aid to his people. At the same time cooperation between the Marxist factions of the PLO that were active in Lebanon and Soviet military intelligence – GRU, intensified greatly. Several soviet officers (speaking fluent Arabic) even visited Palestinian terrorist training camps in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon between 1972-1975. Using their connections in PLO they managed to establish...