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Egyptian police followed norms but islamists are violent, activist (calling the Muslim Brothers ‘terrorists)

August 18, 2013 By administrator

Brutal revence by terrorists, says Ibn Khaldun director Dalia Ziada 16 August, 22:24

(ANSAmed) – ROME – Egyptian police complied with international regulations during the dispersal of the pro-Morsi sit-ins in Cairo, Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies (ICDS) executive director Dalia Ziada told ANSAmed in an email exchange. Ziada attributed the huge death toll and continuing violence to Islamists’ ”brutal revenge reaction”, calling the Muslim Brothers ‘terrorists’

The ICDS executive director called the evacuation of the two squares occupied by those calling for a reinstatement of ousted president Mohamed Morsi ”inevitable”, noting that her center had conducted a survey of Cairo and Giza inhabitants two weeks ago showing that some 63% supported the clearing out of the squares, and that for ”security reasons” the police could not allow the sit-ins to continue.

”We documented 44 torture crimes that the Muslim Brotherhood leaders ordered and their supporters executed” in a single month, she said. ”The victims who survived the systematic torture and were able to escape told us that they were tortured because they are supportive of the fall of Morsi.” Ziada went on to say that police had found weapons at the camps after they had been evacuated and had used loudspeakers to ”tell the people at the sit-in to leave and they kept doing so for at least one hour. Then, tens of the people at the strike (mostly women) left peacefully through an evacuation path and they were not touched or harmed in any way”. Only after these preliminaries did the security forces begin using tear gas and – after coming under fire from the protestors – did they use bulldozers.

The ICDS executive director attributed the high death toll to the ”brutal revenge reaction” by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egyptian authorities were forced to clear the squares occupied by those calling for the reinstatement of ousted president Morsi, ”especially after arsenals of weapons and mass graves containing the bodies of people dead for weeks and bearing signs of torture were found in the immense camps,” ANSAmed was told by Egyptian ambassador to Rome, Amr Helmy.

Images of mass graves and corpses found in the Cairo camps of Morsi supporters have gone viral online, as has evidence of torture attributed to the Muslim Brotherhood. A video showing the mass graves is found on the site of the television station El Balad (http://www.el-balad.com/585622#.Ug378-Dg42k). After 20 corpses were found in an advanced state of decomposition – thus dating back to before the clearing out of the square by security forces the day before yesterday, explained Dalia Ziada – the police ordered that the area in front of the Rabaa mosque be dug up, where they discovered mass graves containing dozens of corpses. On her Facebook page, the activist comments on a video of a charred corpse whose fingers had been cut off found in the same mosque (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaE7Wl5rsIM).
On the issue of former Egyptian interim Vice President for International Affairs Mohamed ElBaradei’s resignation Wednesday following the crackdown, Ziada remarked that it was unfortunate but not surprising, as since he had entered politics in 2010 he had done ”nothing better than tweeting”. ”Always when it comes to critical moments he runs away,” she said.

Ziada said that time would be needed before Egypt could regain stability, noting that Al-Azhar, the interim government and the military had ”called upon the Muslim Brotherhood several times” to sit down and try to reach a compromise, but that the group had refused to do anything but ”continue with violence”. (ANSAmed).

Aftershocks Of Iran’s 1953 Coup Still Felt Around The World, 60 Years Later

August 17, 2013 By administrator

By Frud Bezhan

Sixty years ago, on August 15, 1953, Iranian military officers backed by U.S. and British intelligence agencies initiated a coup d’etat whose aftershocks can still be felt around the globe.

The coup toppled Iran’s first democratically elected government and its popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and is widely credited with fueling the hostility against the West that culminated decades later with the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

But the events that played out over a five-day period from August 15-19 reverberated far beyond Iran’s borders. The coup altered the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East, became a blueprint for a succession of covert U.S. efforts to foster coups and destabilize governments in the ’50s, and provided the Soviet Union with ideological ammunition during the Cold War.

The theory, disputed by some, was that the CIA and Britain’s MI6 masterminded the coup to maintain control over Iranian oil and to prevent Tehran from falling under Soviet influence after World War II.

Mossadegh played a prominent role in Iran’s 1951 move to nationalize its oil industry, which had long been controlled by Britain. The decision led to a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil intended to rein in Mossadegh’s government, but when that failed a secret plan was devised to oust him.

The replacement of Mossadegh with a handpicked prime minister, General Fazlollah Zahedi, opened the way for Iran’s relatively weak shah to gain nearly absolute power within Iran’s constitutional monarchy.

With strong military and economic backing from Washington, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would take on the role of autocrat until the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

As for Mossadegh himself, he was arrested and convicted of treason, along with scores of government officials, after the coup. He served three years in jail before living under house arrest until his death in 1967.

Lingering Coup

Stephen Kinzer, the author of “All The Shah’s Men: An American Coup And The Roots of Middle East Terror,” sees the coup as a short-term victory for Washington. But in the long-term, he says, Washington’s intervention in Iran would prove detrimental to its standing in Iran.

“From the perspective of history, the coup was not successful for the United States,” Kinzer says. “The 1979 revolution was a long-term effect of the increasing repression from the shah, who came to power as a result of the coup. That Islamic Revolution brought to power a fanatically anti-American regime that has spent more than 30 years working to undermine American interests all over the world.”

Sixty years on, the coup continues to loom large in Iran’s national psyche and remains a thorn in the country’s relations with the West.

Mark Gasiorowski, author of “Mohammad Mosaddeq And The 1953 Coup In Iran,” says the removal of Mossadegh paved the way for two political trends — radical Islamists led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and radical leftists in the form of the militant Mujahedin-e Khalq — to gain ground in the decades after the coup.

“What the coup did was to take out the moderate, secular, element of Iranian politics and enabled radical Islamists and radical leftists to emerge as key opposition factions in place of it [in the 1960s and ’70s],” Gasiorowski says. “The coup had this big impact of essentially eliminating this pro-democracy faction and that had a very important impact on Iranian politics in the intervening years.”

Regional Repurcussions

Gasiorowksi, a professor of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans, says that to many in Iran the coup proved Washington’s duplicity. The United States, which portrayed itself as the guardian of freedom, was seen as resorting to nefarious means to get rid of a democratically elected government to suit its own strategic interests.

Gasiorowski says the ’53 coup had major regional repercussions as well. He says Iran became a key part of the U.S. strategy of containing the Soviet Union in the region, thereby further underpinning the Middle East as a key battleground of the Cold War.

“The coup really reinforced the Cold War polarization of the region,” he says. “Of course, that’s the reason the United States did it. They did because they were afraid of communist influence in Iran, and they wanted to make Iran, along with Turkey and Pakistan, into a battleship to oppose the Soviet Union.”

In response, the Soviet Union escalated its own activities in the region, providing aid and arms to governments in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and a host of other states in the Middle East and North Africa.

Kinzer, an award-winning journalist who teaches at Boston University, says the Iranian coup was a milestone for the upstart CIA, which was established in 1947. He says the 1953 coup, which was the agency’s first major successful overthrow of a foreign government, became a template for the future.

“Had the Iran operation not succeeded, the idea of covert operations that became such an integral part of American foreign policy during the 1950s and beyond might not have seemed so appealing,” he says.READ NEXT: Remembering When Right Was Right And Left Was Wrong
Following the 1953 coup in Iran, the CIA orchestrated the successful Guatemalan coup one year later, failed to oust Syria’s president in 1957; and suffered a black eye backing the unsuccessful military invasion of Cuba in 1961.

For decades, the United States denied playing any part in the Iranian coup. But that position ended in 2009 when President Barack Obama acknowledged Washington’s role.

In Britain, meanwhile, the government-funded BBC provided details in 2011 of how it broadcast anti-Mossadegh programs to undermine his government.

Secret files and memoirs of CIA operatives show that the CIA played a pivotal role in initiating and planning Operation Ajax, as the covert operation to oust Mossadegh was called.

Power Struggle between PM Erdogan’s [AKP] & Turkish Sunni Imam Fethullah Gulen [Gulen movement]

August 17, 2013 By administrator

By: Kadri Gursel for Al-Monitor Turkey Pulse Posted on August 16.

That there was a covert power struggle between the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party [AKP] and “The Service,” a sociopolitical Islamic movement under the spiritual leadership of Turkish Sunni man of religion Fethullah Gulen is known. This struggle broke out into the open on Aug. 13 with a communiqué issued by the Gulen movement.

What makes the struggle interesting for third parties is the prowess and potentials of The Service, popularly called Cemaat [faith community], in affecting the political course of the country.

The Service has a qualitative and quantitative concentration particularly in the administration, judicial, security and educational institutions of the state of the Republic of Turkey, in addition to effective media and widespread social and economic networks.

Until recently, The Service was operating within the framework of an actual coalition of power with the Islamist party. Their unity and sharing of power had common goals, such as ending the tutelage of the Kemalist military in national politics.

It is a reality that The Service has phenomenally amplified its power in Turkey and globally during the last 11 years of AKP rule.

The question now is what kind of positions The Service, freed from this asymmetrical coalition that appears to have been definitely disintegrated, will adopt against the AKP. Of course, the real question is how The Service will make use of the colossal power it has in the coming elections.

Will it again cooperate with the AKP on the basis of a new accord?

But seeing the accusations made by parties against each other, it is obvious that extraordinary efforts will have to be made to form a new partnership format.

The Journalists and Writers Foundation [GYV], the leading organ of The Service for public relations, issued a long, 11-article communiqué on Aug. 13 just to dispute the accusations and charges from AKP quarters.

What is more important in this statement were not the responses to accusations, but the grave nature of these accusations that The Service was sharing with the public for the first time.

Those who have been following the struggle between The Service and the government from media reports were already familiar with some of the accusations and charges. But the substance of some accusations hitherto unknown to the public and that the GYV was now responding to were more significant.

From AKP’s accusations it is understood that the ruling circles had begun to perceive The Service’s attitudes and actions against their party as “hostile.” For example, the Turkish public had never heard either from the AKP media or from AKP spokesmen the No. 1 accusation replied to in The Service communiqué.

That accusation was: “The Service Movement was behind the Gezi Park actions.” To see The Service behind a social explosion directly against Erdogan or to try to create such an impression indicates the level of threat AKP is perceiving from this community.

The second accusation also hadn’t been heard by the public before: “Gezi protesters were not detained, but released by prosecutors and judges close to The Service.”

The third was: “Police affiliated with The Service inflamed the protests by burning the tents of the protesters and by intervening violently.”

In accusations two and three above, there is an extremely damning and gruesome implication that The Service, by making use of the judiciary and police it controls, has been engineering a sinister political plot by escalating the Gezi crisis to undermine AKP rule.

We had earlier heard variations of the No. 4 accusation, “The Service does not oppose the coup in Egypt,” used by AKP spokesmen and its media to discredit and intimidate the opposition, but had not noticed it being used against The Service.

The No. 8 accusation cited in the GYV statement actually marks the point when this deep rift between the Service and the AKP happened: “The Service was to arrest the prime minister on Feb. 7.” Here the event in question is what will go down in Turkish political history as “the February 7, 2012, MIT [National Intelligence Organization] and Judiciary crisis.”

On February 7, 2012, a prosecutor of the “Specially Authorized Judiciary” summoned to its office Hakan Fidan, the undersecretary of the MIT — said to be Erdogan’s most trusted name in the state bureaucracy — and a few other high-level MIT officials on suspicion of colluding with the Kurdish PKK.

Today it is generally accepted that there was widespread Service penetration of specially authorized prosecutors and courts set up specifically to investigate and to try terror organizations. The very effective influence of judiciary members in these institutions is obvious.

Until recently, the same was said for the intelligence service of the national police. The reason for the “specially authorized judiciary” to take on the MIT was the national police intelligence service’s discovery and detention of many MIT personnel alleged to have actively participated in PKK terrorism.

Erdogan saw the anti-MIT operation of the judiciary as an attack against his government and took counteraction. All the names known to be close to The Service in the police intelligence units were removed. The specially authorized courts were disbanded after concluding the cases they were handling.

The AKP government is constantly keeping alive as a threat the issue of closing down hundreds of private tutoring classes controlled by The Service, attended by hundreds of thousands of students hoping to succeed in university entrance exams.

A series of cracks thus appeared on February 7 in the vase holding together The Service and AKP. This vase has now been pulverized.

We have heard the charge, “The Service will arrest Erdogan,” because it was said so in public by some pro-AKP people in the media. We knew it was a ludicrous, impossible charge.

Some of the other accusations The Journalists and Writers Foundation disputed include:

“5. The road to alternative political rule goes through Pennsylvania [the self-exiled Gulen’s state of residence]. Those who are seeking an alternative to the government, go and meet Gulen.” GYV said this just another effort to isolate the movement.

“6. The Service wants to impose its tutelage over the bureaucracy and to share the government.” GYV replied “It is natural that there should be volunteers from The Service in the bureaucracy who have used their legal and legitimate citizenship rights.”’ But it rejected as “baseless”’ the charge of sharing power.

“9. The Service will set up alliance with some parties and people in the coming elections.” The Service said this charge did not go beyond a rumor and said: “The Service Movement until today has not entered into alliance with any party and will not enter in alliances with any party and person after this point as well.”

“10. Another discredited accusation that we hope that the government doesn’t believe was ‘The Prime Minister’s office was bugged by The Service.'” This is about The Service listening in on the prime minister’s conversations. These accusations are categorically rejected and the judiciary is asked to investigate.

The 11th accusation is, “Why isn’t Fethullah Gulen returning to Turkey? He is under US influence because of his living there.” This accusation, labeled as “slander and libelous” by the Gulen Foundation, had widespread acceptance initially in Kemalist nationalist circles, defined as “neonationalists.” It is interesting to note that it found its way to AKP quarters.

On Aug. 15, when Erdogan was asked about this communiqué before he flew off to Turkmenistan, he replied: “I don’t want to be in the position of responding to it. I don’t think it is proper to discuss these issues in newspapers. I think it is wrong to use the media for such affairs.”

Kadri Gürsel is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor‘s Turkey Pulse and has written a column for the Turkish daily Milliyet since 2007. He focuses primarily on Turkish foreign policy, international affairs and Turkey’s Kurdish question, as well as Turkey’s evolving political Islam.

Assange: ‘I am a big admirer of Ron Paul’

August 17, 2013 By administrator

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange praised United States Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and his father, Dr. Ron Paul, during an interview Friday in which he said the family has been among the biggest supporters his whistleblowing group has in Congress.

Speaking from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Assange said during a live-streamed question-and-answer session that he is “a big admirer of Ron Paul and Rand Paul for their very principled positions in the US Congress on a number of issues.”

The Paul family, added Assange, have been “the strongest supporters of the fight against the US attack on WikiLeaks and on me.”

Sen. Paul, a devout libertarian and a rumored candidate among the Republican Party’s likely picks for presidential nominees for the 2016 election, has represented Kentucky in the Democrat-controlled Senate since early 2011. His father, a longtime congressman with strong libertarian leaning himself, served as a Republican member of the US House of Representatives on behalf of Texas until his retirement in January of this year.

“The Republican Party in so far as how it has coupled together with the war industry is not a conservative party at all and the Libertarian aspect of the Republican Party is presently the only useful political voice in the US Congress,” said Assange.

Speaking of the rift between the majority of Republican lawmakers and the libertarians more closely aligned in ethos of the Pauls, Assange said, “It will be the driver that shifts the United States around.”

“It’s not going to come from the Democrats, it’s not going to come from Ralph Nader, it’s not going to come from the co-opted parts of the Republican Party,” Assange said. “The only hope as far as electoral politics… presently, is the libertarian section of the Republican Party.”

Before Rep. Paul retired from Congress, he campaigned unsuccessfully in the 2012 US presidential contest. During that race to the White House, Rep. Paul spoke in support of WikiLeaks and their most well-known source, Army Private Bradley Manning, even though the soldier’s admitted actions had led other members of the GOP to call for the prosecution of both Assange and his source.

“I’d have him protected under the whistleblowers act,” Rep. Paul said at a campaign stop in San Antonio, Texas last April.

“I imagine people ought to think it through, but from what I can do see from my viewpoint, is that his motivation had nothing to do with helping the enemy,” he said. “You know that if anybody had ever suffered a consequence because of the release of those thousands and thousands of pages, we would have heard about it by now.”

Prosecutors in the court-martial of Private first class Manning said his leaks to Assange’s website violated the Espionage Act and also equated to aiding the enemy. Last month, Col. Denise Lind acquitted Manning of aiding the enemy, and is expected to sentence the soldier in the coming days for the 20 counts he was found guilty of.

And although Sen. Paul hasn’t been as outspoken about his support of Pfc. Manning or WikiLeaks as his father, he’s recently thrown his weight behind endorsing Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker who has also been charged with espionage for sharing secret documents with the media.

“Snowden told the truth in the name of privacy,” Sen. Paul said earlier this month.

Sen. Paul has also advocated strongly against the military industrial complex and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, in America’s wars overseas.

Pfc. Manning was convicted last month of leaking a trove of field reports from the Afghan and Iraq wars to WikiLeaks in which the truth behind the lengthy military operations were for the first time ever published with accuracy previously unseen. Meanwhile, Assange has been at the Ecuadorian Embassy for over a year awaiting safe passage to South America. He has been granted asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questions about rape allegations, where he fears he will then be shipped to the US to be tried for facilitating Manning’s leaks.

Armenia is losing its art treasures – criminologist

August 17, 2013 By administrator

Armenia is now being robbed of its precious treasures of art and culture, a criminologist has said, commenting on recent thefts of valuable books and canvasses.

“That’s a theft of a nationwide significance, with each side trying to find excuses of its own,” Sergey Galoyan told reporters on Saturday, promising to unveil individual names in the near future.

According to him, the recent theft of highly valuable books from two libraries of Armenia was a crime in the strictest sense of the word. “And who said what books had been taken? No one was informed of anything,” he said.

Galoyan further noted that valuable canvasses by Alexander Bazhbeuk-Melikyan, a Soviet Armenian artist and graphic designer , were also stolen recently. The criminologist promised to publicize more details in this connection too.

At least 90 killed in Egypt ‘Day of Rage’

August 17, 2013 By administrator

Confrontations between security forces and demonstrators claimed at least 90 lives in Egypt on Friday as tens of thousands took to the streets in defiance of a military-imposed state of emergency, The Irish Times reported.

Protesters gathered in Cairo and other cities after the Muslim Brotherhood called for a “Day of Rage” against the army’s ousting of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, and the deadly security operation to evict Morsi supporters from protest camps in the capital on Wednesday.

At least 638 people were killed countrywide that day, according to Egypt’s health ministry, but the toll is likely be higher. Most died as security forces used bulldozers and gunfire to break up the Cairo sit-ins, where protesters had camped out for six weeks demanding Mr Morsi’s reinstatement.

Reports from Egypt suggested that yesterday’s protests had widened beyond Muslim Brotherhood supporters angry over Mr Morsi’s overthrow, to include Egyptians outraged over the carnage in their capital. The spokesman of the National Salvation Front (NSF), a coalition of leftist and liberal groups which supported Mr Morsi’s removal in July after millions protested against his rule, resigned citing the NSF’s refusal to condemn what he described as a “massacre” by police. The NSF was formerly led by Mohamed ElBaradei who quit as interim vice-president this week.

The government defended its position, saying it gave demonstrators a chance to leave the protest camps. It accused Brotherhood leaders, many of whom, including Mr Morsi, have been in custody since his removal, of rejecting suggested initiatives to peacefully end the sit-ins

Turkey’s possible attempt to stir Azeri aggression unconstructive: official

August 17, 2013 By administrator

August 17, 2013 – 16:48 AMT

Artsakh President’s spokesman commented on the statement by Turkish President Abdullah Gul who voiced a wish to hold a Turkic Council summit in the Nagorno Karabakh.

“The move would be possible if Turkey recognized the NKR’s independence and requested the Republic’s authorities to organize the summit. But if Turkey means to stir Azeri aggression, expressing readiness to support Baku in a war against Karabakh, the step is clearly unconstructive,” David Babayan told PanARMENIAN.Net

“The final declaration of the summit was much more reserved in terms of Karabakh conflict and was mainly addressed to Turkey and Azerbaijan. This spells Turkic countries’ unwillingness to be involved in Karabakh conflict as well as make it a pan-Turkic issue, contrary to Baku’s intention,” the official stressed.

As the Turkish President earlier said at a Gabala-hosted Third Turkic Council Summit Meeting, a day will come when we’ll hold a similar event in Karabakh.”

Muslim Brotherhood leader’s son killed in Cairo violence

August 17, 2013 By administrator

August 17, 2013 – 15:32 AMT

A son of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie was killed in Cairo during Friday August 17 “Day of Rage” protests against the army-backed Egyptian government, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party said, according to Reuters.

Ammar Badie, 38, died of a bullet wound sustained while taking part in protests in Ramses Square, it said on its Facebook page.

The whereabouts of Mohamed Badie, who is the Islamist movement’s General Guide, are unknown. He has been charged with inciting violence and faces a trial that starts on August 25. His son’s death follows the killing of the daughter of Mohamed El-Beltagi, a senior Brotherhood politician, in protests this week.

Egyptian state TV also reported on Saturday that the son of Hassan Malek, another Brotherhood leader, had been arrested.

Police also detained Brotherhood politician Gamal Heshmat, according to a statement from the Anti Coup Alliance. Heshmat is a leading member of the Freedom and Justice Party.

source: PanARMENIAN.Net

Azeri Defense Ministry rep. says not authorized to swap captives

August 17, 2013 By administrator

August 17, 2013 – 15:07 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net – Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry has commented on the Armenian Defense Ministry’s readiness to exchange Azerbaijani captive Firuz Farajov for Armenian captive Hakob Injighulyan.

Azerbaijani Defense Ministry spokesman Eldar Sabiroghlu told APA that they were informed about the proposal, the news agency reported.

“Firuz Farajov has been held captive for more than a year and based on his interviews with Armenian media, he always wished to go to a third country.

Armenian Defense Ministry’s statement is related to the fact that the Armenian serviceman has been captured by Azerbaijan. I would not like to express a decisive position in this regard. These issues are in the competence of another relevant body,” he said.

Putin’s visit to Baku valuable gift to Azerbaijani Dictator Ilham Aliyev ahead of elections

August 17, 2013 By administrator

August 17, 2013 | 13:27

YEREVAN. – By paying a working visit to Baku, Russian President Vladimir Putin made the most valuable gift to Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev in the context of upcoming presidential vote.

Former Armenia’s Ombudmsan Larisa Alaverdyan believes unless Azerbaijan and Turkey act in the interests of Russia, official Moscow will raise issues of misconduct on the part of these countries. She stressed that at present deep Azerbaijani-Turkish policy is carried out.

“The shape of relationship with Russia depends on Turkey-Azerbaijan duo. Beside, there will be considerable external influence,” Alaverdyan said during the Saturday press conference.

Vladimir Putin paid a working visit to Azerbaijan on August 13. A number of bilateral agreements, including those on energy and transport, were signed.