Moscu bajo ataque

[verdinegro]

Rusia estrena un novedoso método de extracción de datos... Voy a tener que pegarme un correntazo en las bolas para recordar una clave de una cuenta de Gmail. Estos sujetos merecen un tratamiento medieval.

[Buzz]

Nadie en Occidente se atreve a afirmar lo que estás sugiriendo. Tu rusofobia te tiene mal.

Vladimir Putin & 1999 Russian Apartment-House Bombings -- Was Putin Responsible?
https://www.hudson.org/national-securit ... esponsible

Vladimir Putin came to power as the result of an act of terror committed against his own people. The evidence is overwhelming that the apartment-house bombings in 1999 in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk, which provided a pretext for the second Chechen war and catapulted Putin into the presidency, were carried out by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Yet, to this day, an indifferent world has made little attempt to grasp the significance of what was the greatest political provocation since the burning of the Reichstag.

Russian human-rights defenders Sergei Yushenkov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, and Alexander Litvinenko also worked to shed light on the apartment bombings. But all of them were murdered between 2003 and 2006. By 2007, when I testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about the bombings, I was the only person publicly accusing the regime of responsibility who had not been killed.

The bombings terrorized Russia. The Russian authorities blamed Chechen rebels and thereby galvanized popular support for a new war in Chechnya. President Boris Yeltsin and his entourage were thoroughly hated for their role in the pillaging of the country. Putin, the head of the FSB, had just been named Yeltsin’s prime minister and achieved overnight popularity by vowing revenge against those who had murdered innocent civilians. He assumed direction of the war and, on the strength of initial successes, was elected president easily.

Almost from the start, however, there were doubts about the provenance of the bombings, which could not have been better calculated to rescue the fortunes of Yeltsin and his entourage. Suspicions deepened when a fifth bomb was discovered in the basement of a building in Ryazan, a city southeast of Moscow, and those who had placed it turned out to be not Chechen terrorists but agents of the FSB. After these agents were arrested by local police, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, said that the bomb had been a fake and that it had been planted in Ryazan as part of a training exercise. The bomb, however, tested positive for hexogen, the explosive used in the four successful apartment bombings. An investigation of the Ryazan incident was published in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and the public’s misgivings grew so widespread that the FSB agreed to a televised meeting between its top officials and residents of the affected building. The FSB in this way tried to demonstrate its openness, but the meeting was a disaster: It left the overwhelming impression that the incident in Ryazan was a failed political provocation.

Three days after the broadcast, Putin was elected. Attention to the Ryazan incident faded, and it began to appear that the bombings would become just the latest in the long list of Russia’s unsolved crimes.

In April 2000, a week after Putin’s election, I decided to go to Ryazan. The residents of 14–16 Novoselov Street, where the bomb had been planted, were suffering from heart problems and depression, and their children were afraid to go to sleep at night. Those I met were completely convinced that the incident had not been a training exercise. “Who can imagine such a thing?” asked Vladimir Vasiliev, whose initial reports of suspicious activity had led to the arrest of the FSB agents. “But the claim that it was a test makes no sense. Does it make sense to test people for vigilance at a time when the whole country is in a state of panic?”

Two motions in the Duma to investigate the Ryazan incident failed in the face of monolithic opposition from the pro-Putin Unity party. In February 2002, a third motion to investigate failed and a group of Duma deputies and human-rights activists organized a “public commission” to seek answers independently. Its chairman was Sergei Kovalyev, a Duma deputy and former Soviet dissident. Sergei Yushenkov, another Duma deputy, was the vice chairman. The commission had no official standing, but the Duma deputies could pose questions to the government in their individual capacity.

By 2002, the commission members were facing a rising tide of indifference. The second Chechen war was being prosecuted successfully and an economic boom was gaining momentum. Putin’s popularity rose to an all-time high.

Shortly after the commission began its work, however, an incident occurred that reminded Russians of just how mysterious the apartment bombings were. In March, the newspaper Noviye Izvestiya announced the result of its investigation into the fact that Gennady Seleznev, the speaker of the Duma and a close associate of Putin, had announced the bombing in Volgodonsk on September 13 — three days before it occurred. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the Liberal Democratic party, told journalists that same day what Seleznev had said, but they could not confirm it, so it was not reported. On September 16, however, the building in Volgodonsk really was blown up, and on September 17 Zhirinovsky demanded an explanation of how Seleznev had known about the bombing in advance.

“Do you see what is happening in this country?” he said, shouting and gesticulating from the podium in the Duma. “You say an apartment building was blown up on Monday and it explodes on Thursday. This can be evaluated as a provocation.” Seleznev avoided responding, and Zhirinovsky had his microphone turned off when he persisted in demanding an explanation.

A new source of accusations against Putin and the FSB emerged in London. Berezovsky, who had been instrumental in facilitating Putin’s rise to power but then had gone into exile after being deprived of his influence, held a press conference on March 5, 2002, in which he accused the FSB of carrying out the bombings with Putin’s complicity in order to justify a second Chechen war.

The apartment bombings took place while Putin was prime minister and the head of the FSB was Nikolai Patrushev, his longtime protégé. But the planning for such a complex operation would have had to begin much earlier, before Putin became prime minister, at a time when Berezovsky was one of the most powerful members of the leadership. Berezovsky played a critical role in Putin’s ascent, making the case to members of the Yeltsin entourage that Putin should become prime minister. Berezovsky’s attitude toward Putin changed only when Putin acted to remove him from power. Berezovsky began to hint and then, in December 2001, to state openly that the apartment bombings had been carried out by the FSB, with the complicity of Putin.

Putin could hardly respond to Berezovsky’s accusations by saying that the real initiator had been Berezovsky and that he himself had been just a passive participant. Putin was later to accuse Berezovsky of responsibility for every major political murder and terrorist act that took place in Russia, but, in regard to the apartment bombings, he had to remain silent. In the words of the Russian publicist Andrei Piontkovsky: “The more hopeless became [Berezovsky’s] chances of returning to the political arena in Russia, the louder became his accusations. . . . It seems that he opened a completely new form of political business: Blackmail the authorities with the exposure of one’s own crimes.”

The independent commission began its work in February 2002 and achieved one important success. Yushenkov and Duma deputy Yuli Rybakov flew to London to attend the March 5 press conference organized by Berezovsky. Yushenkov met fugitive former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who introduced Yushenkov to Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB agent and orthodox Communist who had been fired by the FSB after investigating the links between FSB officers and Chechen organized crime. After this meeting, Trepashkin began cooperating with the public commission.

In April 2002, Yushenkov traveled to the U.S., where he met Aliona and Tanya Morozov, whose mother had been killed in the 1999 explosion in Moscow’s Guryanova Street. The Morozov sisters were officially crime victims, which meant they could present evidence in court proceedings. Tanya Morozova agreed to give Trepashkin her power of attorney, allowing him to submit evidence on her behalf.

The person who rented the basement on Guryanova Street where the bomb had been placed had been using the passport of Mukhid Laipanov, a resident of the Karachaevo-Cherkesiya republic in the North Caucasus. The real Laipanov, however, had been killed in an auto accident in February 1999, seven months before the bombing took place. The police said that his passport had been used by Achemez Gochiyaev, an ethnic Karachai and the director of a Moscow construction firm.

In the immediate aftermath of the Guryanova Street bombing, the police interviewed Mark Blumenfeld, the building superintendent. His description of the person who had rented the basement apartment was used to create a police sketch of a suspect. The sketch, however, was then quickly replaced with one of Gochiyaev, who looked completely different. When Gochiyaev learned that he was being accused of blowing up a building, he went into hiding.

At the end of March 2002, Yuri Felshtinsky, a historian and an associate of Litvinenko, received a call from someone who said he was acting on behalf of Gochiyaev. At the end of April, an intermediary turned over a handwritten statement from Gochiyaev in which he said that he had been set up and had fled only because he knew that the FSB was getting ready to kill him. Trepashkin found Gochiyaev’s testimony convincing and decided to concentrate on locating the sketch of the original suspect.

On the night of April 17, 2003, I was working in my Moscow apartment when I received a call telling me that Sergei Yushenkov had been shot dead in front of the entrance to his apartment building. My book Darkness at Dawn, in which I argued that the FSB was responsible for the apartment bombings, was due out in the U.S. in May, and now Sergei, who held the same view, had been murdered.

Sergei was an active member of the public commission and had been full of enthusiasm when a few months earlier he had told me of plans to expose the real story of the bombings. I got up and went to the window and looked at the surrounding buildings, the street lamps, and the all-but-empty street. What horror is going on in this country? I wondered. For the first time in the 27 years I had been writing about Russia, I felt afraid even to leave my apartment.

Yuri Shchekochikhin, another member of the public commission, died three months later. He was the victim of a mysterious illness that caused his skin to peel off and his internal organs to collapse. The Russian authorities refused to allow an autopsy, but his relatives managed to send tissue samples to London; based on these samples, he was tentatively found to have died from thallium poisoning. Thallium is the substance also believed to have been used in the poisoning of Roman Tsepov, Putin’s former bodyguard, in September 2004.

Shchekochikhin had been a friend of mine since the 1980s. Shortly before his death, he presented me with a copy of his latest book, Slaves of the KGB: 20th Century, the Religion of Betrayal, about persons forced to work under the Soviet regime as informers. Yuri inscribed it: “We are still alive in 2003!”

With the deaths of Yushenkov and Shchekochikhin, Trepashkin was the only person left actively investigating the apartment bombings. As the lawyer for Tanya Morozova, he was entitled to review the FSB file, and he began to search for the original sketch of the suspect. He went through the file carefully but could not find any picture, suggesting it had been removed from the file.

Acting on a hunch, Trepashkin began going through old newspaper archives in the hope that the original sketch had been published somewhere before the FSB had pulled it from circulation. After an exhaustive search, he finally found it. To his surprise, it was a sketch of someone he knew: Vladimir Romanovich, an FSB agent who in the mid 1990s had been responsible for investigating Chechen criminal organizations.

Trepashkin next began to search for Blumenfeld, who was identified in the file as the person who had provided the description. He found Blumenfeld, who agreed to talk to him. Blumenfeld said that on the morning of the bombing he had described to the police the man who had rented the basement space, and that two days later he had been taken to Lefortovo prison, where FSB officers pressured him to change his story and “recognize” a photo of a different man, Gochiyaev.

Trepashkin now was in a position to discredit the official explanation of the bombings, which Viktor Zakharov, the head of the Moscow FSB, had given in September 2000. Zakharov had said: “We know the entire chain. . . . The direct organizer of the terrorist acts was . . . Gochiyaev, known in Chechnya under the nickname ‘The Fox.’ He also led the perpetrators of the terrorist acts. All of them are adherents of the radical current of Wahhabism.” A trial was being prepared for Yusuf Krymshamkhalov and Adam Dekkushev, two members of what the authorities were calling the “band of Gochiyaev” who allegedly transported explosives to Volgodonsk.

Trepashkin was preparing to present the evidence based on the rediscovered original sketch and Blumenfeld’s claims in court, but first he connected Blumenfeld with Igor Korolkov, a reporter for Moskovskiye Novosti. Blumenfeld confirmed to Korolkov that “the man publicly presented by the investigation as Gochiyaev was not in fact Gochiyaev.”

“In Lefortovo prison,” Blumenfeld also said, “they showed me a photograph of Gochiyaev and said I had rented the basement to him. I said I never saw this man. It was insistently recommended to me that I identify Gochiyaev. I understood everything and ceased arguing.”

On the day after his meeting with Korolkov, Trepashkin was arrested and his apartment was searched. He was then accused of improper use of classified material and was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment in a labor camp in the Urals. As a result, his important testimony was never presented as evidence in court.

With the arrest of Trepashkin, the investigation of the apartment bombings faltered. Those in Russia who wanted to raise the issue lacked investigative tools such as subpoena power and were well aware that too active an interest could cost them their lives. The rest of the world was complacent, unwilling to consider the implications of a terrorist’s being in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

In May 2003, Darkness at Dawn was published. A month later, I presented the book in Washington at the Hudson Institute, where I am a senior fellow. A German film crew arrived with Aliona Morozova. I explained why I believed that the apartment bombings were a provocation. My remarks provided the central narrative of a film titled “Disbelief,” which premiered in 2004 at the Sundance Film Festival. A Russian-language version of Disbelief was put on YouTube and circulated widely in Russia.

But, unfortunately, real action required civic leaders — and persons capable of helping to make the bombings a serious political issue were disappearing one by one. Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s leading investigative journalist, and Alexander Litvinenko continued to speak out on the case. Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block on October 7, 2006; Litvinenko died on November 23 from radioactive polonium-210 that had been put in his tea in a London sushi restaurant.

The circumstantial evidence that the bombings were carried out by the FSB is overwhelming. The only reason there is no direct evidence is that the Putin regime has concealed it. In the case of the Ryazan incident, the authorities have sequestered the persons who put the bomb in the basement, the records of the exercise, and the dummy bomb itself. They putatively did this to protect state secrets, but, according to Russian law, among the things that cannot be considered state secrets are facts about “catastrophes threatening the security and health of the citizens” and “violations of the law by state organs and officials.”

The greatest barrier to accepting the evidence that points to the FSB as the perpetrator of the bombings is sheer reluctance to believe that such a thing could be possible. By any standard, murdering hundreds of innocent and randomly chosen fellow citizens in order to hold on to power is an example of cynicism that cannot be comprehended in a normal human context. But it is fully consistent with the Communist inheritance of Russia and with the kind of country that Russia has become.

Russia never really forgot the apartment bombings. During the anti-Putin protests in 2011 and 2012, demonstrators carried signs referring to the attacks. It is common in Russia for people to avoid certain issues because otherwise “it will be impossible to live.” Unfortunately, an issue doesn’t disappear simply because it is ignored. Of all the dangers that hang over Russia, none is more menacing than the failure to demand answers to the 17-year-old mystery of how Putin came to power.

[Buzz]

‘The Bloody Czar’: Did a False-Flag Operation Fuel Putin’s Rise?
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/t ... tins-rise/

The evidence is overwhelming that the apartment-house bombings in 1999 in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk, which provided a pretext for the second Chechen war and catapulted Putin into the presidency, were carried out by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Yet, to this day, an indifferent world has made little attempt to grasp the significance of what was the greatest political provocation since the burning of the Reichstag.

The apartment bombings — which were quickly blamed on Islamist Chechen rebels — killed hundreds of Russian civilians. Putin, newly named as the political successor to then-president Boris Yeltsin, vowed revenge and was shot into power. He then proceeded to prosecute the war in the breakaway province of Chechnya and crushed the rebels. Combined with a general economic boom, Putin become the undisputed and, for a time, extremely popular, ruler of Russia.

Suspicions deepened when a fifth bomb was discovered in the basement of a building in Ryazan, a city southeast of Moscow, and those who had placed it turned out to be not Chechen terrorists but agents of the FSB. After these agents were arrested by local police, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, said that the bomb had been a fake and that it had been planted in Ryazan as part of a training exercise. The bomb, however, tested positive for hexogen, the explosive used in the four successful apartment bombings. An investigation of the Ryazan incident was published in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and the public’s misgivings grew so widespread that the FSB agreed to a televised meeting between its top officials and residents of the affected building. The FSB in this way tried to demonstrate its openness, but the meeting was a disaster: It left the overwhelming impression that the incident in Ryazan was a failed political provocation.

[Buzz]

The authors allege that the Russian apartment bombings and other September 1999 terrorist acts were committed by the Federal Security Service. Litvinenko and Felshtinsky write the bombings were a false flag operation intended to justify second Chechen War and bring Vladimir Putin to power.

[Buzz]

Apartment Bombings
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ngs/40931/

"Litvinenko claimed that the Russian government itself blew up apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere in 1999, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, in order to blame it on the Chechens and provoke the second Chechen war. Pretty damning stuff."

[Buzz]

[verdinegro]

Nadie en Occidente le cree a ese tal Litvinenko. Mereció la muerte que tuvo y ahora está en el infierno junto a Mahoma.

Sigue creyendo en teorías de conspiración que nadie cree. Eres un rusófobo enfermo.

[Buzz]

Nadie en Occidente le cree a ese tal Litvinenko. Mereció la muerte que tuvo y ahora está en el infierno junto a Mahoma.

Sigue creyendo en teorías de conspiración que nadie cree.

En el fuero interno nadie le cree, pero había que asesinarlo.En un hecho que el gobierno ruso es un gobierno de hampones y asesinos, capaces d etodo para justificar sus propósitos.

La evidencia presentada por Litvinenko es sólida y constatable. La del fuero interno es solo "real" para ti. Procede ahora con los guantes de seda y lo que usualmente haces con estos.

Por cierto, si en verdad creyeras en el infierno, no hicieras lo que haces, pues tendrías que reconocer que ya posees la residencia permanente y solo un imbécil o un poseso estaría tranquilo con esta noción

[Buzz]

The Question Russians Are Afraid To Ask
https://la-palabra.com/archives/article/y_tume_amas/

Ten years ago, a series of bombings across Russia killed more than 300 people. The authorities blamed Chechen rebels, but critics say the security services staged the blasts as part of a plan to bring Putin to power. A decade later, some of those critics are dead and the bombings remain unsolved.

Most of the residents of an apartment block in southeast Moscow were asleep when an explosion on the ground floor tore through the front of their building shortly after midnight, 10 years ago today. The blast killed 94 people and injured almost 250. Five days earlier, a bomb killed 64 people at an apartment building in the southern city of Buinaksk. In the coming weeks, two more apartment blasts would kill more than 130 in Moscow and another southern city, Volgodonsk. More than 300 people would die in the four bombings.

The blasts sent a wave of fear washing over a country crippled by a savage political struggle to succeed ailing President Boris Yeltsin. The authorities blamed the explosions on Chechen rebels. Seething with anger, newly appointed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin - Yeltsin's choice to replace him - vowed to kill Chechen militants wherever they were hiding.

"If they're in the airport, we'll kill them there. And excuse me, but if we find them in the toilet, we'll exterminate them in their outhouses," Putin said.

It was the public's first taste of Putin's now infamous prison-​inflected slang, and it met with huge approval in a society weary from a decade of economic collapse. Putin soon launched a second war in Chechnya. His ratings soared.

Political analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky says the apartment bombings enabled a virtually unknown bureaucrat to sweep into the presidency months later.

"They changed the situation by favoring a prime minister nobody knew, with a dubious, dark biography," Pribylovsky says. "Two things brought about Putin's victory: the bombings and the phrase about wiping out terrorists in the outhouse."

Today, after eight years as president, Putin is prime minister again, and still firmly in charge of a country he remade into an authoritarian state. Six Muslims from southern Russia have been sentenced in connection to the 1999 bombings, but the case remains unsolved. A small handful of critics say that's because the explosions were staged by the Federal Security Service, or FSB.

That line of reasoning has proved highly dangerous. Two of its leading proponents have been killed. Another was sent to a Siberian prison on what he says were false charges to stop him from investigating the bombings.

Mikhail Trepashkin, a lawyer who represented two sisters whose mother died in one of the Moscow explosions, says police stopped his car shortly before their case was due in court. "They searched my car twice and found nothing. As they were closing the door, they threw in a bag containing a pistol," Trepashkin says. "I said it wasn't mine, but there was nothing I could do. I was held for a total of four years, one month, and eight days in harsh conditions, including torture and insults."

Trepashkin, a gregarious former FSB officer who says the prison conditions have affected his health, says he was promised the charges would be dropped if he stopped investigating the bombings.

He says he was also asked to be part of a death squad tracking another official doubter, former KGB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko. Litvinenko was fatally poisoned three years ago by a radioactive substance in London, where he lived in exile. His supporters say he was killed because he blamed the FSB for the apartment bombings.

Historian Yury Felshtinsky, who co-​wrote a book with Litvinenko called "Blowing Up Russia," told Russian Service that no single fact has emerged to disprove their account. "Even the FSB, in its own version of the events - over which the second Chechen war was launched - hasn't actually accused a single Chechen," Felshtinsky says.

Felshtinsky says Putin, who headed the FSB until August 1999, must have known about the bomb plot. Critics say the debris from the bombings was cleared away too quickly to allow proper investigations, usually in a matter of days. They also say it's significant no Chechen rebels ever claimed credit for the bombings.

But it was a mysterious episode shortly after the Moscow bombings that some believe provided the best glimpse into what the FSB was doing. It began late on a September night, when residents of an apartment block in the city of Ryazan in central Russia noticed a suspicious-​looking car parked near a basement door. They informed the police, who discovered large bags of white powder connected to a detonator. The timer was set to go off early the next morning. The police said tests showed the powder was hexogen, a World War II-​era explosive used in the Moscow explosions. The local authorities announced they'd narrowly averted another blast.But as the police were about to make arrests two days later, FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev appeared on national television to announce the sacks in fact contained only sugar. He said they were used as part of a public safety drill. The FSB quickly cleared the basement of all remaining evidence.

Trepashkin and others believe the official confusion over the incident showed the FSB did organize the operation -- not as a counterterrorism exercise, but to blow up the building.

When the authorities refused to investigate the bombings, a small group of liberal legislators formed their own independent committee. Its vice-​chairman, Sergei Yushenkov, was gunned down outside his Moscow apartment in 2003. Before his death, the prominent Kremlin critic told the committee's findings pointed toward the security services.

[verdinegro]

La evidencia presentada por Litvinenko es sólida y constatable.

Es la palabra de un webón pagado y envenenado por el MI6.

La historia ha reivindicado a Vladimir Putin. Es una infamia y una burla hacia las víctimas culpar a Rusia por lo que hacen los terroristas separatistas islámicos. Rusia nunca necesitó copiar los métodos de la CIA y el MI6 para lidiar brutalmente con el separatismo.

[gille]

Yo creo que ese atentado lo hizo el tren de Aragua porque según esa banda tiene operaciones en todas partes del mundo

[Buzz]

La historia ha reivindicado a Vladimir Putin. Es una infamia y una burla hacia las víctimas culpar a Rusia por lo que hacen los terroristas separatistas islámicos. Rusia nunca necesitó copiar los métodos de la CIA y el MI6 para lidiar brutalmente con el separatismo.

Esta visto que los errores de Rusia se esparcieron por el mundo. ¿Quien fue el primer pais de occidente que empleo servicios de inteligencia para complotar, subvertir, perseguir, espiar y torturar?

El famoso NKVD --también conocido como Cheka-- quien fue precursor de la KGB y del FSB del enano.

Organismos de terror doméstico e internacional. Realmente un faro, pero únicamente iluminador de terrorismo endógeno.

The Mystery of Russia's 1999 Apartment Bombings Lingers
https://www.hudson.org/national-securit ... lear-it-up

Many years have gone by, but no Chechen has ever been convicted of participating in the apartment bombings, whereas the evidence of FSB involvement is overwhelming. It is time for the CIA to help resolve this issue.

[verdinegro]

La historia ha reivindicado a Vladimir Putin. Es una infamia y una burla hacia las víctimas culpar a Rusia por lo que hacen los terroristas separatistas islámicos. Rusia nunca necesitó copiar los métodos de la CIA y el MI6 para lidiar brutalmente con el separatismo.

Esta visto que los errores de Rusia se esparcieron por el mundo. ¿Quien fue el primer pais de occidente que empleo servicios de inteligencia para complotar, subvertir, perseguir, espiar y torturar?

El famoso NKVD --también conocido como Cheka-- quien fue precursor de la KGB y del FSB del enano.

Organismos de terror doméstico e internacional.

El NKVD fue creado por judíos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD



Early NKVD leaders, Genrikh Yagoda, then (1924) 1st deputy head of SOU OGPU Vyacheslav Menzhinsky then head of SOU OGPU and deputy head OGPU, and Felix Dzerzhinsky chief of OGPU, 1924

De un diario israelí:

Stalin's Jews
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,734 ... 99,00.html

We mustn't forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish

Here's a particularly forlorn historical date: Almost 90 years ago, between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.

Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB.

We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags.

Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists, "opposition members" who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself.

In his new, highly praised book "The War of the World, "Historian Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as did the Soviet revolution. In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel Aviv University's Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was unique in that it was directed internally.

Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a kosher certificate.

All these things are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet Union's archives have not yet been fully opened to the public. But who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service. The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question of "How could it have happened to us?" As opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle the score with their Stalinist past.

And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf."

Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife. In his Book "Stalin: Court of the Red Star", Jewish historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women.

Stalin's close associates and loyalists included member of the Central Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes him as the "first Stalinist" and adds that those starving to death in Ukraine, an unparalleled tragedy in the history of human kind aside from the Nazi horrors and Mao's terror in China, did not move Kaganovich.

Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We'll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the organization's chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist.

In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a "carnival of mass murder," "fantasy of purges", and "essianism of evil." Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.

The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and "Soviet people." Therefore, we find it easy to ignore their origin and "play dumb": What do we have to do with them? But let's not forget them. My own view is different. I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things.

Even if we deny it, we cannot escape the Jewishness of "our hangmen," who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment. After all, others will always remind us of their origin.

[Buzz]

None Dare Call It a Conspiracy
Who was behind the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that accelerated Vladimir Putin's rise to power?
https://www.gq.com/story/moscow-bombing ... -and-putin

Immediately after the bombings, a broad spectrum of Russian society publicly cast doubt on the government's version of events. Those voices have now gone silent one by one.

In 2003, John McCain declared in Congress that "there remain credible allegations that Russia's FSB [Federal Security Service] had a hand in carrying out these attacks."

There the matter may well have ended, except that same night two of the suspects in Ryazan were apprehended. To the local authorities' astonishment, both produced FSB identification cards.

Whereas, for example, the Americans had spent six months sifting through the remnants of the World Trade Center after September 11, regarding it as an active crime scene, Russian authorities had razed 19 Guryanova street just days after the blast and hauled everything away to a municipal dump.

[verdinegro]

None Dare Call It a Conspiracy

¿Será que porque no es más que una teoría de conspiración que no ha calado?

[Buzz]

None Dare Call It a Conspiracy

¿Será que porque no es más que una teoría de conspiración que no ha calado?

Sencillo guantes de seda, por que quien menciona esto en Rusia, termina tomando polonio, el té favorito del miserable a quien tanto admiras.

[Damiron]

Rusia estrena un novedoso método de extracción de datos... Voy a tener que pegarme un correntazo en las bolas para recordar una clave de una cuenta de Gmail. Estos sujetos merecen un tratamiento medieval.

Y tienes???

[verdinegro]

None Dare Call It a Conspiracy

¿Será que porque no es más que una teoría de conspiración que no ha calado?

Sencillo guantes de seda, por que quien menciona esto en Rusia, termina tomando polonio, el té favorito del miserable a quien tanto admiras.

Claro, porque Rusia es la única fuente de polonio en el mundo.

[verdinegro]

How Ukraine became the unlikely home for Isis leaders escaping the caliphate
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 11676.html

As far as extreme terror went, Al Bara Shishani had a reputation.

Understood to have held the post of Isis’ deputy minister of war, head of a unit responsible for “special operations” and surveillance, the Georgian-born commander reportedly had a hand in it all: executions of “non-believers”; public beheadings; terror operations abroad.

He also had a reputation for being dead – that is, until last Friday.

Al Bara Shishani’s dramatic reappearance in the dock of a court room in central Kiev was shocking not only for the fact of how alive he was.

As details emerged about his miraculous resurrection – how he dodged what had been reported as a fatal air strike in Syria, then used a fake passport to travel to Turkey and Ukraine, where he would live untroubled for two years – a number of questions came begging about Kiev’s capacity and willingness to deal with terrorists taking shelter within.

According to the SBU, Ukraine’s admittedly unreliable security agency, Al Bara Shishani even continued to coordinate Isis terror operations from Kiev.

Born Cezar Tokhosashvili, Al Bara Shishani is one of several Isis commanders to hail from the Pankisi gorge region in northern Georgia.

The history of the mountainous territory has close ties to Chechnya, located across the border with Russia, 40 miles to the north. Most of Pankisi’s 10,000 residents belong to a few ethnic Chechen clans; several hundred refugees moved here following the conflicts there. “Shishani” is the Arabic rendering of “Chechen”.

More recently, the gorge has been associated with the fighting in Iraq and Syria. According to various estimates, between 50 and 200 of its young men left to fight between 2012-15. Most joined units fighting Bashar al-Assad in the Free Syrian Army. Some ended up with Isis.

Multiple links to Syria meant everybody in the gorge knew everything about Al Bara Shishani’s terror career, says Sulkhan Bordzikashvili, a local journalist in Pankisi.

They followed him as he decamped to Latakia, western Syria, in 2012; then in 2015, when he joined Isis. Some approved. Others did not.

It was also an open secret that another local boy, the one-legged and one-armed Akhmed Chatayev – aka “Akhmed the One-armed” – played a key role in converting Al Bara Shishani to Isis.

Chatayev was later accused of coordinating suicide bombers in the June 2016 attack on Istanbul’s airport. His involvement was never confirmed conclusively, however, and in 2017, he blew himself up during a police raid in the Georgian capital Tbilisi.

According to Bordzikashvili, the gorge was collectively shocked to discover Al Bara Shishani was not equally dead.

“Maybe his close friends knew he was in Ukraine, but my understanding is the family did not,” the journalist told The Independent. “These types of people are hiding from everyone and it is now very difficult to return home without ending up in jail.”

It is certainly true that militants used to enjoy a much easier passage home.

In 2013, for example, Chatayev was able to return to Pankisi despite being subject to an Interpol wanted notice.

And Ukraine, once again, is key to understanding how he did it.

The future Isis commander surfaced there three years earlier when he was arrested and put before a judge in the bucolic town of Uzhgorod, western Ukraine. Katerina Sergatskova, a Kiev-based journalist who investigated his case, says it is unclear what exactly he was doing in the Carpathian mountains – most of his comrades from that time are now dead, so it’s hard to get any answers.

The person responsible for the case was Yuriy Lutsenko, Kiev’s then minister of the interior. He would later become famous as the “self-serving and corrupt” prosecutor at the centre of the House impeachment scandal into Donald Trump’s dealings with current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

According to Lutsenko, Chatayev was detained via Interpol at Moscow’s request. In his account, police also found bomb instructions and photographs of dead bodies on his mobile phone. Despite that, Chatayev was never extradited to Russia. A bribe is one alleged reason why he was instead allowed to travel home to Georgia.

Lutsenko did not respond to a request for comment.

Ukrainian authorities have long fostered holes in their legal and law enforcement systems. The usual beneficiary is organised crime, which sustains itself on the flow of fake IDs and contraband, says Philip Ingram, a former British intelligence officer. But the lax regime has also created an obvious vulnerability to international terrorism.

“It is a vulnerability that Kiev does not seem entirely interested in addressing,” Ingram said.

The US has been particularly frustrated at Kiev’s inability to stop the fake passport trade. In remarks made during the Trump impeachment inquiry, State Department official George Kent revealed how a major conflict erupted between the US embassy and Ukrainian authorities in 2017. Mr Kent had been deputy ambassador at the time.

Once again, Lutsenko, by that point already chief prosecutor, was the man in the centre of the storm. Kent accused Lutsenko of unmasking an undercover anti-corruption bureau agent who had infiltrated the fake passport business. He had done so, Kent alleged, to avenge the US embassy for supporting the anti-corruption agencies that worked against his own corrupt interests.

Obtaining fake passports was at one point an extremely easy and cheap affair. That changed with the introduction of biometric passports in 2015, which has narrowed the number of illegal schemes. But several companies still continue to operate out of the darknet – with clean passports costing around $5,000.

The Independent has learnt of at least one example of a former militant obtaining a biometric passport this way.

This is obvious significance for European security, given that Ukraine now enjoys visa-free travel with most EU countries. While fake passports can be identified easily enough, genuine passports for fake identities can’t. “If documents are being issued by a recognised passport authority that should be of concern,” said Ingram.

And none of this is lost on the thousands of post-Soviet Islamic militants looking for destinations to lie low, says Vera Mironova, a jihad expert and visiting fellow at Harvard University.

Ukraine offers several advantages over the competition too: the common Russian language, chaos of war, unprofessionalism of local security services, and the low risk of extradition to countries such as Russia.

Mironova estimates “hundreds” of former Isis fighters have decamped to Ukraine. But it is not the numbers that should be of primary concern, she said. The cluster of terrorists in Ukraine were by their nature a “self-selecting” elite: “This isn’t a random selection. The slower guys stop as soon as they get to Turkey. After all, it is a multiple-step operation to get to Ukraine. The ones who get there are the dangerous ones.”

Once militants get to Ukraine, they rarely encounter problems with authorities, said Mironova.

This appears to have been the case for at least some of the two years that Al Bara Shishani spent in and around Kiev. Ukrainian authorities have not disclosed when they found out about him. According to an SBU press release, the CIA and Georgian Interior Ministry joined the operation two months before his 15 November arrest. It is unclear why they chose not to arrest him earlier.

Sergatskova, who has almost single-handedly covered the subject in Ukrainian press over the past year, says authorities remain strangely relaxed about the issue.

“Whenever I wrote on the subject, government officials have accused me of inventing the problem,” she said. “But the arrest of one of Islamic State’s top commanders here in Kiev, right under our noses, would surely suggest many of the world’s most dangerous men do think of Ukraine as a safehouse. Corruption in all state bodies – the police, courts, prosecutors – opens doors to abuse.”

When contacted by The Independent, the SBU rejected claims that Ukraine was in any way hospitable to international terrorism.

“That would be a fundamentally incorrect judgment to make,” spokesperson Elena Gitlyanska said. “Today we are talking about a few individual cases, people who are trying to hide from the authorities. But we find all of them and deport them.”

Both Sergatskova and Mironova agreed that the militants they had interviewed posed no significant terror threat to Ukraine, at least in the short term. It was not in their interest to create problems at home, they argued.

That may change if Kiev decided to follow up with more arrests.

“I know many who are living normal lives, like driving Ubers,” said Mironova.

“They aren’t going to s**t in their own home. But if they are cornered, if they become terrified that they will be arrested, then we have a big problem on our hands.”

[Buzz]