You are thinking like Putin. Put now has a mandate from the world due to the heinous nature of the act to ‘go get em’. Here is his reason to move troops into Georgia. This actually could be legitimate unlike Bush’s invasion of Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11. #msg-3943729
On the morning of 12 September 2001, without any evidence of who the hijackers were, Rumsfeld demanded that the US attack Iraq. This should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," co-authored by Bush’s thinker Perle.
On July 8, 1996, Richard Perle, now the Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory group that reports to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, presented a written document to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, spelling out a new Israeli foreign policy, calling for a repudiation of the Oslo Accords and the underlying concept of "land for peace"; for the permanent annexation of the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip; and for the elimination of the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad, as a first step towards overthrowing or destabilizing the governments of Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. The document was prepared for the Jerusalem and Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), a think tank financed by Richard Mellon-Scaife. The report, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," was co-authored by Perle; Douglas Feith, currently the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy; David Wurmser, currently special assistant to State Department chief arms control negotiator John Bolton; and Meyrav Wurmser, now director of Mideast Policy at the Hudson Institute.
Tbilisi denies presence of Chechen rebel bases in Pankisi Gorge
03.09.2004 07:32:00 GMT
Tbilisi. (Interfax-AVN) - Georgian Foreign Minister Salome Zurabishvili has denied statements that Chechen rebels bases are present in the Pankisi Gorge.
"Russia officially recognizes in the international arena that there are neither Chechen rebel bases, nor terrorists in the Pankisi Gorge. Therefore, all accusations against Georgia are unfounded," Zurabishvili said at a press briefing in Tbilisi on Thursday, commenting on statements by Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Russian Academy of Geo-Political Sciences.
Ivashov said at a news conference on Thursday that, in fact, Georgia is a rear base for carrying out terrorist attacks against Russia. He also said that "rebel bases are located not only in the Pankisi Gorge, but in other parts of Georgia as well, including at medical centers." Corresponding financial centers for terrorism are also located in Georgia, Ivashov said.
Zurabishvili said that "Russia itself has said that the monitoring of the northern sectors of the Georgian-Russian border, conducted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, should be terminated, since there is no more threats in that region."
Georgia thinks, said Zurabishvili, that the monitoring mission should be continued on the Chechen, Ingush and Dagestani stretches of the Georgian-Russian border, "so no one in the world will have any queries about what is happening on this border."
Georgia is asking to extend the monitoring mission to the North Ossetian stretch of the border, Zurabishvili said.
Let me clarify the pictures of the deformed babies were from 1998 onwards.
The real tragedy of soldiers policing a colonial occupation is also suppressed. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. The same number, according to a veterans’ study, killed themselves on their return home. Dr. Doug Rokke, director of the US army depleted uranium project following the 1991 Gulf invasion, estimates that more than 10,000 American troops have since died as a result, many from contamination illness. When I asked him how many Iraqis had died, he raised his eyes and shook his head. "Solid uranium was used on shells," he said. "Tens of thousands of Iraqis – men, women and children – were contaminated. Right through the 1990s, at international symposiums, I watched Iraqi officials approach their counterparts from the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defense and ask, plead, for help with decontamination. The Iraqis didn’t use uranium; it was not their weapon. I watched them put their case, describing the deaths and horrific deformities, and I watched them rebuffed. It was pathetic." During last year’s invasion, both American and British forces again used uranium-tipped shells, leaving whole areas so "hot" with radiation that only military survey teams in full protective clothing can approach them. No warning or medical help is given to Iraqi civilians; thousands of children play in these zones. The "coalition" has refused to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to send experts to assess what Rokke describes as "a catastrophe." - John Pilger 04/16/04
SO now Putin has all he needs to justify a larger military build up in Georgia putting him that much closer to Baku. I cant help but wonder if they did not botch the job on purpose to make sure there was plenty of support for big military action. The hostage taking in Moscow was dealt with much more efficiently. This was all just a little bit to easy for Putin somehow. How well do you think the Chechyn rebels can hold up to the Russian forces? I do not know that much about the conflict with Russia over the longer time frames but I am under the impression that the main reason that Putin has not made a bigger effort to take the region back under control is he did not have the support for large casualties. Most Russians know what losing the oil to the U.S. will do to their economy and they are willing to have an all out war with the U.S. I wonder if Putin has been waiting till now to close in on Grozny and kill two birds with one sstone. No matter who wins the election next year is going to be worse than this one. JMO
By MIKE ECKEL, Associated Press Writer
BESLAN, Russia - A shaken President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) made a rare and candid admission of Russian weakness Saturday in the face of an "all-out war" by terrorists after more than 340 people — nearly half of them children — were killed in a hostage-taking at a southern school.
Putin went on national television to tell Russians that they must mobilize against terrorism and promised wide-ranging reforms to toughen security forces and purge corruption.
"We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten," he said.
Shocked relatives wandered among row after row of bodies lined up in black plastic or clear body bags on the pavement at a morgue in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, where the dead from the school standoff in Baslan were taken. In some open bags lay the contorted, thin bodies of children, some monstrously charred.
In Baslan, other relatives scoured lists of names to see if their loved ones had survived the chaos of the day before, when the standoff turned into violence, with militants setting off explosives in the school and commandos moving in to seize the building.
Workers cleaned up the gymnasium where the more than 1,000 hostages were held during the 62-hour ordeal. The gym of School No. 1 was reduced to a shell — the roof destroyed, the windows shattered — during Friday's fighting.
Regional Emergency Situations Minister Boris Dzgoyev said 323 people, including 156 children, were killed. More than 542 people including 336 children were hospitalized, medical officials said.
Dzgoyev also said 35 attackers — heavily-armed and explosive-laden men and women who were reportedly demanding independence for Chechnya (news - web sites) — were killed in 10 hours of battles that shook the area around the school with gunfire and explosions after 1 p.m. Friday. Earlier, a senior prosecutor had said there were only 26 militants and all were killed. The discrepancy could not immediately be explained.
Putin made a quick visit to the town before dawn Friday, meeting local officials and touring a hospital to speak with wounded. He stopped to stroke the head of one injured child.
But some in the region were unimpressed, as grief turned to anger, both at the militants and at the government response.
"Putin arrived and left in the middle of the night while everyone is sleeping, probably because he was afraid to talk with the people, to look them in the eyes," said Zalina Gutiyeva, 37, a pediatrician in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, a Russian Orthodox region set amid the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus.
It was still unclear how exactly the standoff fell apart into violence on Friday. Officials say security forces had not intended to storm the building but were forced to when hostage-takers set off explosives — some however questioned that version.
The militants seized the school on the first day of classes on Wednesday, herding hundreds of children, parents who had been dropping their kids off, and other adults into the gymnasium, which the militants promptly wired with explosives — including bombs hanging from the basketball hoops. The packed gym became sweltering, and the hostage-takers refused to allow in food or water.
One survivor, Sima Albegova, told the Kommersant newspaper she asked the militants, why the captives were taken. "Because you vote for your Putin," one of the militants told her, she said.
Another freed hostages said a militant told her, "The federal forces killed our children and you didn't help us. If Putin doesn't withdraw forces from Chechnya and doesn't free our arrested brothers, we'll blow everything up," according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.
Russian officials said the bloodshed began when explosions were apparently set off by the militants — possibly by accident — as emergency workers entered the school courtyard to collect the bodies of hostages killed in the initial raid Wednesday.
Diana Gadzhinova, a 14-year-old hostage, was quoted as telling Izvestia that the militants had ordered the hostages to lie face down in the gymnasium as workers approached to collect the bodies.
"They told us that there were going to be talks," she said. Others also told stories of how the explosions sent the militants guarding them running in what appeared to be confusion and surprise to see what had happened.
Hostages fled during the explosions, and the militants opened fire on them. Security forces opened fire in return, and commandos moved in, officials said.
The explosions tore through the roof of the gymnasium, sending wreckage down on hostages, killing many. Many survivors emerged naked covered in ashes and soot, their feet bloody from jumping barefoot out of broken windows to escape.
During his visit to Beslan, Putin stressed that security officials had not planned to storm the school — trying to fend off any potential criticism that the government side had provoked the bloodshed. He ordered the region's borders closed while officials searched for everyone connected with the attack.
"What happened was a terrorist act that was inhuman and unprecedented in its cruelty," Putin said in his televised speech later. "It is a challenge not to the president, the parliament and the government but a challenge to all of Russia, to all of our people. It is an attack on our nation."
Putin took a defiant tone, acknowledging Russia's weaknesses, but blaming it on the fall of the Soviet Union, foreign foes seeking to tear apart Russia and on corrupt officials. He said Russians could no longer live "carefree" and must all confront terrorism.
He called for Russians to mobilize against what he said was the "common danger" of terrorism. Measures would be taken, Putin promised, to overhaul the law enforcement organs, which he acknowledged had been infected by corruption, and tighten borders.
"We are obliged to create a much more effective security system and to demand action from our law enforcement organs that would be adequate to the level and scale of the new threats," he said.
The school attack was the latest violence thought connected to Chechen separatists who have been battling Russian rule for more than a decade. IT came after a suicide bomb attack outside a Moscow subway station Tuesday that killed eight people, and last week's near-simultaneous crashes of two Russian jetliners after what officials believe were explosions on board.
An unidentified intelligence official was quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying the school assault was financed by Abu Omar As-Seyf, an Arab who allegedly represents al-Qaida in Chechnya, and masterminded by Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev.
With some families gathering for wakes for the dead, some were vowing vengeance in North Ossetia, a Russian Orthodox Christian region in the mainly Muslim North Caucasus.
"Fathers will bury their children, and after 40 days (the Orthodox mourning period) ... they will take up weapons and seek revenge," said Alan Kargiyev, a 20-year-old university student in Vladikavkaz.
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