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Did Manning Help Avert War in Iran?
Consortiumnews.com
March 31, 2014
From the Archive: Many of the world’s crises, like those in Syria and Ukraine, can be better understood by factoring in Israel’s maneuvers to involve the U.S. in bombing Iran. Documents leaked by Pvt. Manning exposed how one such scheme might have played out, as Robert Parry wrote in 2013.
By Robert Parry (Originally published on Aug. 19, 2013)
From U.S. embassy cables leaked by Pvt. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, you can easily imagine how the propaganda game might have played out, how Americans could have been panicked into supporting another unnecessary war in the Middle East, this time against Iran. Except that Manning’s release of the documents spoiled the trick.
The gambit might have gone this way: One morning, a story would have led the front page of, say, the Washington Post citing how the widely respected International Atomic Energy Agency and its honest-broker Director-General Yukiya Amano had found startling “evidence” that Iran was nearing a nuclear bomb – despite a longstanding U.S. intelligence estimate to the contrary and despite Iranian denials.
U.S. Army Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.
Next, the neocon-dominated opinion pages would ridicule anyone who still doubted these “facts.” After all, these articles would say, “even” the IAEA, which had challenged President George W. Bush’s claims about Iraq in 2002, and “even” Amano, who had initially believed Iran’s denials, were now convinced.
Neo-con think tanks would rush to join the chorus of alarm, dispatching WMD “experts” to TV talk shows bracing the American people on the need for military action. From Fox News to CNN to MSNBC, there would be a drumbeat about Iran’s perfidy. Then, as hawkish Republicans and Democrats ratcheted up their rhetoric – and as Israeli leaders chortled “we told you so” – the war-with-Iran bandwagon might have begun rolling with such velocity that it would be unstoppable.
Perhaps, only years later – after grave human costs and severe economic repercussions – would the American people learn the truth: that the IAEA under Amano wasn’t the objective source that they had been led to believe, that Amano was something of a U.S.-Israeli puppet who had feigned a pro-Iranian position early on to burnish his credentials for pushing an anti-Iranian line subsequently; that after he was installed, he had even solicited U.S. officials for money and had held secret meetings with Israelis (to coordinate opposition to Iran’s nuclear program while maintaining a polite silence about Israel’s rogue nuclear arsenal).
However, because of the actions of Pvt. Manning, the rug was pulled out from under this possible ruse. The U.S. embassy cables revealing the truth about Amano were published by the U.K. Guardian in 2011 (although ignored by the New York Times, the Washington Post and other mainstream U.S. news outlets). The cables also drew attention from Web sites, such as Consortiumnews.com.
So, the gambit could not work. If it had been tried, enough people would have known the truth. They wouldn’t be fooled again – and they would have alerted their fellow citizens. Pvt. Manning had armed them with the facts.
And this scenario, while hypothetical, is not at all far-fetched. When the cables were leaked about a year after Amano’s appointment, his IAEA was busy feeding the hysteria over Iran’s nuclear program with reports trumpeted by think tanks, such as the Institute for Science and International Security, and by the Washington Post and other U.S. news media.
Revealing Cables
According to those leaked U.S. embassy cables from Vienna, Austria, the site of IAEA’s headquarters, American diplomats in 2009 were cheering the prospect that Amano would advance U.S. interests in ways that outgoing IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei wouldn’t; Amano credited his election to U.S. government support; Amano signaled he would side with the United States in its confrontation with Iran; and he stuck his hand out for more U.S. money.
In a July 9, 2009, cable, American chargé Geoffrey Pyatt said Amano was thankful for U.S. support of his election. “Amano attributed his election to support from the U.S., Australia and France, and cited U.S. intervention with Argentina as particularly decisive,” the cable said.
The appreciative Amano informed Pyatt that as IAEA director general, he would take a different “approach on Iran from that of ElBaradei” and he “saw his primary role as implementing safeguards and UNSC [United Nations Security Council]/Board resolutions,” i.e. U.S.-driven sanctions and demands against Iran.
Amano also discussed how to restructure the senior ranks of the IAEA, including elimination of one top official and the retention of another. “We wholly agree with Amano’s assessment of these two advisors and see these decisions as positive first signs,” Pyatt commented.
In return, Pyatt made clear that Amano could expect strong U.S. financial support, stating that “the United States would do everything possible to support his successful tenure as Director General and, to that end, anticipated that continued U.S. voluntary contributions to the IAEA would be forthcoming. … Amano offered that a ‘reasonable increase’ in the regular budget would be helpful.”
Pyatt learned, too, that Amano had consulted with Israeli Ambassador Israel Michaeli “immediately after his appointment” and that Michaeli “was fully confident of the priority Amano accords verification issues.” Michaeli added that he discounted some of Amano’s public remarks about there being “no evidence of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons capability” as just words that Amano felt he had to say “to persuade those who did not support him about his ‘impartiality.’”
In private, Amano agreed to “consultations” with the head of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, Pyatt reported. (It is ironic indeed that Amano would have secret contacts with Israeli officials about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, which has yet to yield a single bomb, when Israel possesses a large and undeclared nuclear arsenal.)
In another leaked cable dated Oct. 16, 2009, the U.S. mission in Vienna said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded ambassador [Glyn Davies] on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.
“More candidly, Amano noted the importance of maintaining a certain ‘constructive ambiguity’ about his plans, at least until he took over for DG ElBaradei in December” 2009.
In other words, Amano was a bureaucrat eager to bend in directions favored by the United States and Israel regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Amano’s behavior surely contrasted with how the more independent-minded ElBaradei resisted some of Bush’s key claims about Iraq’s supposed nuclear weapons program, correctly denouncing some documents as forgeries.
[Pyatt, who was the chief contact with Amano, is now U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and was a key figure, working with neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, in orchestrating the violent coup that overthrew the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February and touched off a confrontation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama, a clash that disrupted their cooperation in trying arrange a peaceful resolution to the Iran-nuclear issue. For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]
Salvaging Some Hype
Though Manning’s release of the embassy cables apparently scotched any large-scale deployment of the Amano ploy, some elements of the gambit did go forward nonetheless, albeit with less oomph than they might have had.
In February 2013, the front page of the Washington Post offered a taste of what the propaganda campaign might have looked like when investigative reporter Joby Warrick hyped an account about Iran’s nuclear program pushed by David Albright, director of the Institute for Science and International Security who had lent support to Bush’s invasion of Iraq a decade ago.
The Albright/Warrick alarm cited Iran’s alleged effort to place an Internet order for 100,000 ring-shaped magnets that would work in some of the country’s older centrifuges.
“Iran recently sought to acquire tens of thousands of highly specialized magnets used in centrifuge machines, according to experts and diplomats, a sign that the country may be planning a major expansion of its nuclear program that could shorten the path to an atomic weapons capability,” Warrick wrote in his lede paragraph.
You had to read to the end of the long story to hear a less strident voice, saying that Iran had previously informed IAEA inspectors that it planned to build more of its old and clunkier centrifuges, which use this sort of magnet, and that the enrichment was for civilian energy, not a nuclear bomb.
“Olli Heinonen, who led IAEA nuclear inspections inside Iran before his retirement in 2010, said the type of magnet sought by Iran was highly specific to the IR-1 centrifuge and could not, for example, be used in the advanced IR-2M centrifuges that Iran has recently tested,” according to the final paragraphs of Warrick’s article.
“‘The numbers in the order make sense, because Iran originally told us it wanted to build more than 50,000 of the IR-1s,’ Heinonen said. ‘The failure rate on these machines is 10 percent a year, so you need a surplus.’”
At the bottom of Warrick’s story, you’d also learn that “Iran has avoided what many experts consider Israel’s new ‘red line’: a stockpile of medium-enriched uranium greater than 530 pounds, roughly the amount needed to build a weapon if further purified.”
So there was nothing urgent or particularly provocative about this alleged purchase, though the structure and placement of the Post story suggested otherwise. Many readers likely were expected to simply jump to the conclusion that Iran was on the verge of building an atomic bomb and that it was time for President Barack Obama to join Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in another Middle East war.
The pressure from the Post and other neocon-leaning news outlets on the Obama administration to fall in line with Netanyahu’s belligerence toward Iran has been building for years, often with Warrick channeling anti-Iranian propaganda from Albright and his ISIS, which, in turn, seems to be a pipeline for hardliners at the IAEA.
A decade ago, Albright and the ISIS were key figures in stoking the hysteria for invading Iraq around the false allegations of its WMD program. In recent years, Albright and his institute have adopted a similar role regarding Iran and its purported pursuit of a nuclear weapon, even though U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran terminated that weapons project in 2003.
Nevertheless, Albright has transformed his organization into a sparkplug for a new confrontation with Iran. Though Albright insists that he is an objective professional, ISIS has published hundreds of articles about Iran, which has not produced a single nuclear bomb, while barely mentioning Israel’s rogue nuclear arsenal.
An examination of the ISIS Web site reveals only a few technical articles relating to Israel’s nukes while ISIS has expanded its coverage of Iran’s nuclear program so much that it’s been moved onto a separate Web site. The articles not only hype developments in Iran but also attack U.S. media critics who question the fear-mongering about Iran.
More than a year ago when a non-mainstream journalist confronted Albright about the disparity between ISIS’s concentration on Iran and de minimis coverage of Israel, he angrily responded that he was working on a report about Israel’s nuclear program. But there is still no substantive assessment of Israel’s large nuclear arsenal on the ISIS Web site, which goes back to 1993.
Despite this evidence of bias, the Post and other mainstream U.S. news outlets typically present Albright as a neutral analyst. They also ignore his checkered past, for instance, his prominent role in promoting President Bush’s pre-invasion case that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.
Stoking a War
At the end of summer 2002, as Bush was beginning his advertising roll-out for the Iraq invasion and dispatching his top aides to the Sunday talk shows to warn about “smoking guns” and “mushroom clouds,” Albright co-authored a Sept. 10, 2002, article – entitled “Is the Activity at Al Qaim Related to Nuclear Efforts?” – which declared:
“High-resolution commercial satellite imagery shows an apparently operational facility at the site of Iraq’s al Qaim phosphate plant and uranium extraction facility … This site was where Iraq extracted uranium for its nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. … This image raises questions about whether Iraq has rebuilt a uranium extraction facility at the site, possibly even underground. … The uranium could be used in a clandestine nuclear weapons effort.”
Albright’s alarming allegations fit neatly with Bush’s propaganda barrage, although as the months wore on – with Bush’s warnings about aluminum tubes and yellowcake from Africa growing more outlandish – Albright did display more skepticism about the existence of a revived Iraqi nuclear program.
Still, he remained a “go-to” expert on other Iraqi purported WMD, such as chemical and biological weapons. In a typical quote on Oct. 5, 2002, Albright told CNN: “In terms of the chemical and biological weapons, Iraq has those now.”
After Bush launched the Iraq invasion in March 2003 and Iraq’s secret WMD caches didn’t materialize, Albright admitted that he had been conned, explaining to the Los Angeles Times: “If there are no weapons of mass destruction, I’ll be mad as hell. I certainly accepted the administration claims on chemical and biological weapons. I figured they were telling the truth. If there is no [unconventional weapons program], I will feel taken, because they asserted these things with such assurance.” [See FAIR’s “The Great WMD Hunt,”]
Given the horrendous costs in blood and treasure resulting from the Iraq fiasco, an objective journalist might feel compelled to mention Albright’s track record of bias and error. But the Post’s Warrick didn’t, even though Albright and his ISIS were at the core of the February story, receiving credit for obtaining copies of the magnet purchase order.
So, while we’ll never know if the Amano ploy would have been tried – since Manning’s disclosures made it unfeasible – it surely would not have been unprecedented. The American people experienced similar deceptions during the run-up to war with Iraq when the Bush-43 administration assembled every scrap of suspicion about Iraq’s alleged WMD and fashioned a bogus case for war.
Eventually, Manning was pulled into that war as a young intelligence analyst. He confronted so much evidence of brutality and dishonesty that he felt compelled to do something about it. What he did in leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks and, thus, to other news outlets was to supply “ground truth” about war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
His disclosure of diplomatic cables also gave the American people and the world a glimpse behind the curtain of secrecy that often conceals the dirty dealings of statecraft. Perhaps most significantly, those revelations helped sparked the Arab Spring, giving people of the Middle East a chance to finally take some political control over their own lives.
And, by letting Americans in on the truth about Amano’s IAEA, Bradley Manning may have helped prevent a war with Iran.
[Pvt. Manning is now serving a 35-year prison sentence for unauthorized release of classified material.]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Read more: http://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/31/did-manning-help-avert-war-in-iran-3/
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Don't fall for Putin's lie
Too many in the west fall for the lie that Russia has a historic right to dictate events in neighbouring nations such as Ukraine
Ian Birrell
The Guardian, Tuesday 1 April 2014 05.00 AEST
Jump to comments (186)
Putin behaves like a 19th-century imperial overlord, and wants to restore the Russian hegemony destroyed by the collapse of the Soviet Union.' Photograph: Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images
Vladimir Putin has won plaudits at home and brushed aside censure abroad with his brazen theft of Crimea. His few supporters at the UN last week tellingly included some of the planet's most unsavoury regimes, such as North Korea, Syria, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Their leaders no doubt appreciated the skilful blend of force, speed and propaganda with which he seized the region from Ukraine.
But it is extraordinary that the Russian president has bedazzled so many in the west – and not just his new admirer Nigel Farage. Putin is the autocratic leader of a regime reviled for domestic repression and systemic human rights abuses. He is a man accused of overseeing atrocities in his quest to restore the Russian hegemony destroyed by the collapse of the Soviet Union – something he outlined quite openly in his first speech to the Duma.
Yet many people fell for his farcical referendum, held at gunpoint and boycotted by big chunks of Crimea's population. They ignored polling showing that only a minority supported joining Russia – as well as the paltry 4% support won by the party that advocates Russian unity and now runs the region.
Even before I left last week after a month there, some Russian speakers were regretting their support as economic and social realities have hit home; other Crimeans have simply fled.
Now Putin, with his tanks and troops lined up on the border, has gone further. His foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, insists that Ukraine is effectively dismembered. The country cannot function as a unified state, he says, and must become a loose federation with autonomous powers given to regions bordering Russia. He adds that Ukraine is not permitted to join Nato – which is, remember, a self-defence alliance.
Pause for a second. Imagine the furore if France, for example, demanded the break-up of Switzerland to protect French speakers, with the creation of a crippled client state on its borders. Yet Putin behaves like a 19th-century imperial overlord, still playing the great game as his country resorts to blackmail, while too many observers fall for the lie that Russia has a unique historic right to dictate events in neighbouring nations.
The Soviet Union crumbled because it was an economic, moral and political disaster; many citizens could not wait to throw off the chains of communism imposed from Moscow. Now Putin seeks to extend the Russian empire once again – and with it the reach of his brutal and venal rule. And he does so because he feels threatened by the potential outbreak of liberal democracy in Kiev following the overthrow of his patsy president, fearing that ripples may spread elsewhere around his backyard.
So Putin's propaganda machine promulgates the idea that Ukraine has been taken over in a coup by a bunch of Nazis. But, as Yale historian Timothy Snyder points out, the restoration of democracy could not be further from fascism. Polling for May's presidential election indicates that the highest-placed far-right candidate is on course to get a lower share of the vote than the BNP won in the last British general election.
Western criticism has been weakened by misguided interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq – and, indeed, by a short-sighted failure to stop flows of illegal cash so corrosive to countries such as Russia and Ukraine. But this should not prevent firm support for the fledgling democracy in Kiev, with financial help, military training and tougher sanctions on Putin, his banks and his circle if they remain belligerent.
Instead, there seems to be too much tacit acceptance of the annexation of Crimea, which will have been noted in the Kremlin, and too little thought given to Ukrainian self-determination.
Putin's refusal to play by conventional global rules should shake any complacency, as it raises profound questions. One leading Eurosceptic told me he now thought the continent needed a combined army, while a harsh critic of the Iraq conflict praised President Obama's tough stance. But above all there must be clarity over who is the bad guy in this new cold war drama as he seeks to extend his Russian empire.
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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/31/putin-lie-west-russia-ukraine
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Malaysia changes version of last words from missing flight's cockpit
KUALA LUMPUR, April 1 Mon Mar 31, 2014 1:17pm EDT
(Reuters) - The last words spoken by one of the pilots of the missing Malaysian Airlines airliner to the control tower were "Good night Malaysian three seven zero", Malaysia's civil aviation authority said, changing the previous account of the last message as a more casual "All right, good night."
The correction of the official account of the last words was made as Malaysian authorities face heavy criticism for their handling of the disappearance, particularly from families of the Chinese passengers on board Flight MH370 who have accused Malaysia of mismanaging the search and holding back information.
"We would like to confirm that the last conversation in the transcript between the air traffic controller and the cockpit is at 0119 (Malaysian Time) and is "Good night Malaysian three seven zero," the Department of Civil Aviation said in a statement on Monday.
Malaysia's ambassador to China told Chinese families in Beijing as early as March 12, four days after the flight went missing, that the last words had been "All right, good night."
"Good night Malaysian three seven zero" would be a more formal, standard sign-off from the cockpit of the Boeing 777, which was just leaving Malaysia-controlled air space on its route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Minutes later its communications were cut off and it turned back across Malaysia and headed toward the Indian Ocean. More than three weeks later, a huge international search effort is going on in the southern Indian Ocean off western Australia, but has so far failed to turn up any wreckage.
The statement from the civil aviation authority came after acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein was questioned at a news conference on Monday over the last words from the cockpit and fended off demands to release the official transcript.
The statement said authorities were still conducting "forensic investigation" to determine whether the last words from the cockpit were by the pilot or the co-pilot. Previously, Malaysia Airlines has said that the words were believed to have come from the co-pilot.
The civil aviation department said the investigating team had been instructed to release the full transcript at the next briefing with the next of kin.
Malaysia says the plane, which disappeared less than an hour into its flight, was likely to have been diverted deliberately far off course. Investigators have determined no apparent motive or other red flags among the 227 passengers or the 12 crew. About two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese nationals.
(Reporting By Stuart Grudgings; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
Bright orange objects ruled out as hunt continues for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370
Jennifer Rajca, Paul Toohey in Perth and Cindy Wockner in Kuala Lumpur
News Corp Australia
1 hour ago
March 31, 2014 8:05PM
Tony Abbott visits MH370 search headquarters in Perth, saying Australia will keep looking for the missing plane, for the sake of the families
ORANGE objects spotted by a plane searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet have turned out to be nothing more than fishing equipment, as prime minister Tony Abbott declared there’s no time limit on the search for MH370.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said the objects had been analysed and spokesman Jesse Platts said “they have nothing to do with the missing flight.’’
An Australian P-3 Orion search plane spotted at least four orange objects in waters west of Perth on Sunday and were described by Orion pilot Russell Adams as the most promising lead in the search so far.
But despite yet another false alarm, Mr Abbott said the search will not be scaled down.
“I’m certainly not putting a time limit on it ... We can keep searching for quite some time to come,’’ Abbott told reporters today at RAAF Pearce, the Perth military base coordinating the operation.
“We owe it to the families, we owe it to everyone that travels by air, we owe it to the anxious governments of the countries who had people on that aircraft. We owe it to the wider world which has been transfixed by this mystery for three weeks now.’’
The Australian vessel with the job MH370 conducted sea trials of hi-tech detection equipment today before its 1850km journey to a tract of the southern Indian Ocean west of Perth.
The trials included a US Navy black box detector, an unmanned underwater vehicle and other acoustic detection equipment.
While the support vessel Ocean Shield is expected to take up to four days to reach the huge, 319,000 square kilometre search zone, another navy ship, the frigate HMAS Toowoomba, at top speed reached the area by mid-morning today after two days at sea.
Malaysian Guided Missile Frigate KD Lekiu arrived at HMAS Stirling this evening to receive briefings on the MH370 search operations west of Perth.
READ MORE: CHINA CONSIDERS NEW SATELLITES
A P3 Orion helping in the search. Source: AP
It’s a race against time, given the box’s low-frequency acoustic beacon has a limited battery life. That has extended from an estimated 30 days to roughly 45 days, according to Captain Mark Matthews, a US Navy equipment specialist.
“These are rated to last 30 days, but that is a minimum. In my experience, they do last a little bit longer than that,’’ Capt Matthews said yesterday.
But the operation remained an extraordinarily difficult exercise, Mr Abbott said.
“We are searching a vast area of ocean and working with quite limited information,’’ he said after touring the Pearce base, where search planes from seven nations are being deployed, involving 550 personnel.
Defence Minister David Johnston said about 1000 sailors were looking for debris at sea - but the task was still onerous.
While each country involved was currently bearing its own costs, Australia was paying for running the co-ordination centre, which will have about 20 staff and be led by retired air chief marshall Angus Houston from Perth CBD headquarters.
Mr Abbott also said his Malaysian counterpart was not too hasty in announcing last week - before any debris had been recovered or confirmed as being from MH370 - that the plane was lost in the southern Indian Ocean and all on board were assumed dead.
“That’s the absolute overwhelming weight of evidence and I think that Prime Minister Najib Razak was perfectly entitled to come to that conclusion,’’ he said.
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
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US, Russia to begin Ukraine talks as tensions decrease at border, analyst says
Published March 30, 2014
FoxNews.com
A leading Ukrainian military analyst says there are now about 50,000 Russian troops within several hours of the two nations' border, but there has been a "general decrease in tensions" since Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Obama on Friday.
Of the 50,000 troops, about 10,000 are located directly at the border, but Dmitry Tymchuk told Fox News on Sunday he has seen some "pull-back and regrouping" of these soldiers, lessening the immediate chances of a full-scale Russian invasion.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry was scheduled to open talks on Sunday with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in Paris as part of the latest attempt by Washington to defuse an ongoing conflict with Moscow over future of Ukraine.
Kerry arrived in Paris from a refueling stop in Shannon, Ireland. He had been on his way to Washington from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia when he decided to travel to Paris for the talks.
Putin proposed the meeting between the top diplomats in the surprise phone call with Obama, which occurred while the latter was traveling in Saudi Arabia.
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that U.S. officials have been divided over whether Putin's call was indicative of a genuine desire to ease tensions between East and West or a pretext for further military action in Eastern Europe.
White House officials described the call as "frank and direct" and said Obama had urged Putin to offer a written response to a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine crisis that the U.S. has presented. Obama also urged Moscow to scale back its troop build-up on the border with Ukraine, which has prompted concerns in Kiev and Washington about a possible Russian invasion in eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin, on the other hand, said Putin had drawn Obama's attention to a "rampage of extremists" in Ukraine and suggested "possible steps by the international community to help stabilize the situation" in Ukraine.
Kerry has repeatedly met with Lavrov over the past month in attempts to halt Russia's annexation of Crimea. However, those talks have proven fruitless, and U.S. officials tell the Journal that Putin is likely to demand that the U.S. accept Russia's annexation of the Black Sea peninsula earlier this month as the minimum necessary for any cooperation between the two nations.
In previous meetings, Mr. Kerry has outlined to Mr. Lavrov a common approach to resolving the Ukraine crisis, U.S. officials told the Journal. This included joint initiatives to stabilize Kiev's economy, promote the decentralization of the country's political system and demobilize pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian paramilitaries that have blossomed across the country in recent months. However, those proposed initiatives have been contingent on the unlikely event of Russia pulling back from Crimea.
Mr. Lavrov on Saturday said in an interview with Russian state television the Kremlin has no intention to send more troops into other areas of Ukraine, despite the deployment of tens of thousands of Russian troops on its eastern border.
The Soviet-trained diplomat, echoing previous Russian justifications for its actions, said Russia has an obligation to protect ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine. And he said Kiev must embrace fundamental political changes, including transitioning to a federated state, with greater power for the country's various regions.
Fox News' Greg Palkot and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
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conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
31032014
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Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
Journalists freed after being held hostage in Syria for 6 months
By Associated Press
March 30, 2014 | 2:31pm
New York Post
Freed El Mundo Middle East correspondent Javier Espinosa laughs as his son runs towards him after his arrival at Torrejon de Ardoz airbase near Madrid March 30, 2014. Photo: Reuters
MADRID — Two Spanish journalists freed after being held hostage for more than six months in Syria by a rogue al-Qaida group returned home Sunday to an emotional welcome from friends and colleagues.
Correspondent Javier Espinosa and photographer Ricardo Garcia Vilanova arrived in Madrid aboard a Spanish government executive jet, less than 24 hours after calling by telephone from Turkey to say they were out of captivity and safe.
Syria ranks as the most dangerous country in the world for reporters. Media rights groups say nearly 30 journalists have been killed there since the conflict began in March 2011, while dozens more have been kidnapped by both rebels and pro-government forces.
Most of the kidnappings in the past year have taken place in rebel-held territories, particularly in chaotic northern and eastern Syria, where the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has a presence. With the two Spanish journalists now free, there are at least nine more foreign correspondents still missing in Syria as well as 10 Syrian reporters.
It was militants from the Islamic State that abducted Espinosa and Garcia Vilanoa at a checkpoint in the town of Tal Abyad in the eastern province of Raqqa on Sept. 16 as the reporters were trying to leave the country.
Spanish reporters Javier Espinosa, right, and Ricardo Garcia Vilanova.
At a hastily-convened news conference Sunday at El Mundo newspaper’s Madrid headquarters, Espinosa and Garcia Vilanova received a standing ovation. They thanked those present for their support, but said they could not provide details of their captivity or how they won their freedom, saying the matter was “out of our hands.”
A spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry said the government uses “maximum discretion” when dealing with kidnapped journalists, and would not comment on whether a ransom was negotiated. She spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
For friends and family, word of the journalists’ freedom was reason to rejoice after months of stress. Monica Garcia Prieto, Espinosa’s partner, put it simply in a succinct Tweet: “Pure happiness.”
Journalists are not the only ones who have been targeted for kidnapping. Activists, who do much of the on-the-ground reporting in Syria, are also at risk. Reporters Without Borders says around 20 activists are held by the Islamic State, while an unknown number are held by the government.
The Hanein Network, a militant website that carries al-Qaida statements, issued a plea to the Islamic State in December to release Espinosa and Garcia Vilanova, describing them as “men who risked their lives to report the truth.”
Its home page shows the Spaniards in a soft-focus background. A masked militant of the Islamic State stands in the foreground, holding two cats, in an apparent sentimental appeal for clemency.
Another Spanish reporter who was seized by the Islamic State in September, Marc Marginedas, was released earlier this month.
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