TBR News July 8, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. July 6, 2016: “We are out of the country on business and will return July 9.”
The Müller Washington Journals 1948-1951
At the beginning of December, 1948, a German national arrived in Washington, D.C. to take up an important position with the newly-formed CIA. He was a specialist on almost every aspect of Soviet intelligence and had actively fought them, both in his native Bavaria where he was head of the political police in Munich and later in Berlin as head of Amt IV of the State Security Office, also known as the Gestapo.
His name was Heinrich Müller.
Even as a young man, Heini Müller had kept daily journals of his activities, journals that covered his military service as a pilot in the Imperial German air arm and an apprentice policeman in Munich. He continued these journals throughout the war and while employed by the top CIA leadership in Washington, continued his daily notations.
This work is a translation of his complete journals from December of 1948 through September of 1951.
When Heinrich Müller was hired by the CIA¹s station chief in Bern, Switzerland, James Kronthal in 1948, he had misgivings about working for his former enemies but pragmatism and the lure of large amounts of money won him over to what he considered to be merely an extension of his life-work against the agents of the Comintern. What he discovered after living and working in official Washington for four years was that the nation¹s capital was, in truth, what he once humorously claimed sounded like a cross between a zoo and a lunatic asylum. His journals, in addition to personal letters, various reports and other personal material, give a very clear, but not particularly flattering, view of the inmates of both the zoo and the asylum.
Müller moved, albeit very carefully, in the rarefied atmosphere of senior policy personnel, military leaders, heads of various intelligence agencies and the White House itself. He was a very observant, quick-witted person who took copious notes of what he saw. This was not a departure from his earlier habits because Heinrich Müller had always kept a journal, even when he was a lowly Bavarian police officer, and his comments about personalities and events in the Third Reich are just as pungent and entertaining as the ones he made while in America.
The reason for publishing this phase of his eventful life is that so many agencies in the United States and their supporters do not want to believe that a man of Müller¹s position could ever have been employed by their country in general or their agency in specific.
Thursday, 7. June, 1951.
I have worked out a tentative but relatively firm itinerary for my trip to Europe.
To fly to Germany on an Army special plane on 20 July, then to Munich for personal business, and then. Tannhäuser at the Prinz Regenten in Munich on the 28. Lorenz will sing T. and (Dietrich, ed.) Fischer-Dieskau, Wolfram. Box seats at DM 20 each.
There will be a descent on some of the better galleries on the Brienner Street followed by a drive to Bayreuth on 5 August (Sunday) for a performance of Meistersinger. This will be the exact same performance, cast and all, that performed for Hitler. The season will open with Beethoven’s 9th but I will miss that.
Then we drive down to Salzburg (Hotel Stein) for the Mozart Festival. I am told the autobahn bridge on the way to the city is still out but otherwise a speedy journey is expected. On Friday, 10. August, Zauberflöte with (Erich, ed.) Kunz singing Papagano and, most especially, Furtwängler conducting! The last time I heard him was in Berlin under completely different circumstances! On Saturday, the 11, to the Stiftskirche St. Peter for the Mozart C-moll mass, Paumgartner conducting.
A meeting at Bad Reichenhall with Willi who has a stack of papers for me concerning the Gehlen circus and then to Frankfurt and a plane back.
Twenty-five days or so and I think Bunny will survive my absence. The doctor tells me that early September is the most probable date for the birth so I will be back in plenty of time. I have traded several Russian scores to a collector for a Bach work, which I will give to Bunny when I get back.
It was suggested that I not go into the office this week because (Hans Bernd, ed. ) Gisevius will be there to see his dear friend Dulles! I mentioned this to Viktor who told me that G. is now working for Dulles, again (he was in Bern during the war), and is privy to a number of secrets, all of which he quickly passes to the Soviets! So like Gisevius to work for two people at the same time. He was originally Gestapo, was tossed out before I took over for making trouble for everyone, worked for the anti-Hitler people, went to Bern and worked for the OSS, got caught in Berlin and was examined by me and then went back to Switzerland and sent us reports on Dulles. At the same time, he also worked for the Russians and apparently still does. I have no intention of mentioning his name, especially since he knows me by sight. Let Dulles have his “trustworthy sources.” I wonder how many NKVD men are now in the CIA? More than a few I would wager.
Also, Dulles’ mistress had an affair with G. in Switzerland that turned out to be quite messy in the end.
Pohl was hanged today. He was quite a decent man and certainly not guilty of any war crimes. There has been quite a search by the CIC and others to find a large file P. had concerning American firms that worked with us right up until the last weeks of the war. A reward of a hundred thousand dollars has been offered but so far, no luck. If I found these, I would certainly strengthen my hand here vis a vis the louts who might consider making trouble for me. Ohlendorf also died and the press release indicated that he was convicted of executing 90,000 civilians in Russia. I suppose now we will read that they were all Jews, not Soviet partisans, and someone will add another zero to the total.
As I recall the figures on his action, 9,000 partisans and partisan supporters were exterminated in severe fighting but the victor writes the history in the end. I suppose an extra zero won’t be noticed. I had a note from Willi (Krichbaum, ed.) a few months ago in which he made rather cynical mention of the “newly discovered” figures about the deportations from Budapest in 1944-1945 that he had a hand in both as my agent and as head of the GFP. It doesn’t seem to be talked about that the Hungarian government begged us to ship off all their Jews. I know the actual figures from my head (I should check these out in my files before I go to Germany just for entertainment) and about thirty thousand were shipped to Auschwitz. Now, I understand this number has magically grown to three hundred thousand! By the time the creative writers have finished, we will have put fifty million to death by throwing them into enormous bonfires complete with the Berlin Symphony playing the “Good Friday” music (from Wagner’s “Parsifal”, ed.) in the background!
And there is Willi who’s GFP killed more Jews than anyone, now working for the CIA as a major personage! Well, they have me too and so much for that.
I heard a former refugee, now a university professor, solemnly assuring a small group of people that three million German Jews were slaughtered by the Gestapo during the war. Since there were only about five hundred thousand Jews in all of Germany, this must have been quite a feat. I suppose the good doctor gets a nice lecture fee for all this creativity. I encountered this man, who weeps on schedule, and told him that as a Swiss historian, I understood that German Girl Scouts were responsible for the actual killing, all of which was done on the Alexander Platz (in Berlin, ed.) with pinking shears while Hitler stood by smiling and throwing flowers at the energetic girls. I probably shouldn’t have said this because this stupid carp (he looks like one in profile) will incorporate this into his next lecture.
He made a passing reference to German atrocities perpetrated against the Belgians during the course of the 1914 war. Germans were accused of making the Belgians slaves, of torturing and beating them to death and most interestingly, in cutting off their hands! The carp ought to study more real history instead of copying the propaganda from that period. It never seems to fail that the guilty always blame their criminal actions on others. I suppose it makes them feel better about what they have done.
The King of Belgium, Leopold, ran the Congo as his own private company and extracted huge amounts of money from that sorry land. This was not money for the state but for himself and in amassing his enormous personal fortune, Leopold instituted and encouraged terrible actions in Africa. Millions of quite innocent blacks were beaten and tortured to death, their heads and hands hacked off by Belgian colonial police, women raped, children impaled and villages burnt to the ground. At least two millions died and although these monstrous atrocities became well-known thanks to outraged newspapermen and the clergy, it took years to do anything about it and from what I hear, ruthless exploitation is still in progress in the Congo but this time under the control of the Belgian government, not the Crown.
And at the same time, of course, the British and Americans were performing other similar acts throughout their colonial possessions.
Like Beria, Leopold liked very young girls but unlike Beria, Leopold did not torture them to death but made them Belgian nobility and gave them castles…paid for by the state.
Gisevius (1904-1974) served all men badly, worked for all and was loyal to none. After the war, he was a witness at Nuremberg and then went to live in the United States and later, in Switzerland. Another shining light of the Resistance was a man named Karl Herbert Frahm. Frahm fled Germany in 1933 and went to live in Norway where he began to work for MI6. During the Spanish Civil War, Frahm went to Spain as a member of the Communist German Thaelmann Brigade. Later he worked, simultaneously, for the KGB and CIA. From 1949 through 1957, Frahm was a member of the Bundestag and in 1957, became mayor of West Berlin. He is much better known as Willy Brandt, later German Chancellor and head of the Social Democratic party of West Germany.
The Pohl file, or a copy of it, ended up in the hands of SS General Globocnik and was hidden by him in Carinthia, Austria, at the end of the war. Pohl was head of the SS Economics Office and the SS had extensive financial connections with American business interests via Switzerland during the war. If Pohl had these files, he might have gained a pardon from McCloy, the American High Commissioner in Germany who pardoned many others on less important grounds.
The GFP or Geheime Feld Polizei, was a group of Gestapo and SD men attached to the German High Command whose job it was to perform counterintelligence activities for that august body. The GFP, under the command of SS Colonel Krichbaum, also engaged in anti-partisan activities in Russia with devastating results. As the CIA’s chief recruiter for the Gehlen Organization, Krichbaum was able to stuff that group with many of his former associates.
The Congo atrocities are well documented but reference to them is rarely if ever found in standard historical works.
During the First World War, British and American official propagandists merely replaced the Belgians with Germans and repeated the well-proven accusations against the former but crediting them to the Germans.
The stories of raped nuns, bayoneted babies and lopped off hands faded away after the war and led, in good part, to the establishment of what is known as the Revisionist School of British and American historical writings.
However, sufficient time has not yet elapsed to permit any historian to attack the similar propaganda engendered by the Second World War.
In Siberia in 1908, a huge explosion came out of nowhere
Over 100 years after the most powerful explosion in documented history, researchers are still trying to figure out exactly what happened
July 7, 2016
by Melissa Hogenboom
BBC News
On 30 June 1908, an explosion ripped through the air above a remote forest in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River.
The fireball is believed to have been 50-100m wide. It depleted 2,000 sq km of the taiga forest in the area, flattening about 80 million trees.
The earth trembled. Windows smashed in the nearest town over 35 miles (60km) away. Residents there even felt heat from the blast, and some were blown off their feet.
Fortunately, the area in which this massive explosion occurred was sparsely inhabited. There were no official reports of human casualties, though one local deer herder reportedly died after he was thrust into a tree from the blast. Hundreds of reindeer were also reduced to charred carcasses.
One eyewitness account said that “the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire…
“At that moment there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash… The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns firing.”
This “Tunguska event” remains the most powerful of its kind recorded in history – it produced about 185 times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb (with some estimates coming in even higher). Seismic rumbles were even observed as far away as the UK.
And yet, over a hundred years later researchers are still asking questions about what exactly took place on that fateful day. Many are convinced that it was an asteroid or a comet that was responsible for the blast. But very few traces of this large extraterrestrial object have ever been found, opening the way for more outlandish explanations for the explosion.
The Tunguska region of Siberia is a remote place, with a dramatic climate. It has a long hostile winter and a very short summer, when the ground changes into a muddy uninhabitable swamp. This makes the area extremely hard to get to.
When the explosion happened, nobody ventured to the site to investigate. This was partly because the Russian authorities had more pressing concerns than sating scientific curiosity, says Natalia Artemieva of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
Political strife in the country was growing – World War One and the Russian Revolution were just a few years away. “There were only some publications in local papers, not even in St Petersburg or Moscow,” she says.
It was only a few decades later, in 1927, that a Russian team led by Leonid Kulik finally made a trip to the area. He had stumbled across a description of the event six years earlier and convinced Russian authorities that a trip would be worthwhile. When he got there, the damage was still immediately apparent, almost 20 years after the blast.
He found a large area of flattened trees, spreading out about 31 miles (50km) wide in a strange butterfly shape. He proposed that an extraterrestrial meteor had exploded in the atmosphere.
It puzzled him that there was no impact crater, or in fact, any meteoric remnants at all. To explain this, he suggested that the swampy ground was too soft to preserve whatever hit it and that any debris from the collision had been buried.
Kulik still hoped that he could uncover the remains, as he wrote in his 1938 conclusions. “We should expect to encounter, at a depth of hardly less than 25 metres, crushed masses of this nickeliferous iron, individual pieces of which may have a weight of one or two hundred metric tons.”
Russian researchers later said that it was a comet, not a meteor that caused the damage. Comets are largely made up of ice – not rock, like meteorites – so the absence of alien rock fragments would make more sense this way. The ice would have started to evaporate as it entered Earth’s atmosphere, and continue to do so as it hit the ground.
But that was not the end of the debate. Because the exact identity of the explosion was unclear, strange alternative theories soon started to appear.
Some suggested the Tunguska event could have been the result of matter and antimatter colliding. When this happens, the particles annihilate and emit intense bursts of energy.
Another proposal was that a nuclear explosion caused the blast. An even more outlandish suggestion was that an alien spaceship crashed at the site on its search for the fresh water of Lake Baikal.
As you might expect, none of these theories stuck. Then, in a 1958 expedition to the site, researchers discovered tiny remnants of silicate and magnetite in the soil.
Further analysis showed they were high in nickel, a known characteristic of meteoric rock. The meteor explanation looked correct after all – and K. Florensky, author of a 1963 report on the event, was keen to put the more fantastical theories to rest:
“While I am aware of the advantages of sensational publicity in drawing public attention to a problem, it should be stressed that unhealthy interest aroused as a result of distorted facts and misinformation should never be used as a basis for the furtherance of scientific knowledge.”
But that did not stop others coming up with even more imaginative ideas. In 1973 a paper was published in the reputable journal Nature, suggesting that a black hole collided into Earth to cause the explosion. This was quickly disputed by others.
Artemieva says ideas like this are simply a by-product of human psychology. “People who like secrets and ‘theories’ usually do not listen to scientists,” she says. A huge explosion, coupled with a lack of cosmic remnants, is ripe for these kinds of speculations.
But she also says scientists must shoulder some responsibility, because they took so long to analyse the explosion site. They were more concerned with bigger asteroids that might cause global extinctions, just as the Chicxulub asteroid did. It wiped out most of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
In 2013 one team put a stop to much of the speculation of the earlier decades. Led by Victor Kvasnytsya of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the researchers analysed microscopic samples of rocks collected from the explosion site in 1978. The rocks had a meteoric origin. Crucially, the fragments they analysed were recovered from a layer of peat dating back to 1908.
The remnants had traces of a carbon mineral called lonsdaleite, which has a crystal structure almost like diamond. This particular mineral is known to form when a graphite-containing structure, such as a meteor, crashes into Earth.
“Our study of samples from Tunguska, as well as research of many other authors reveals meteorite origin of Tunguska event,” says Kvasnytsya. “We believe that nothing paranormal happened at Tunguska.”
The main problem, he says, is that researchers had spent too much time looking for large pieces of rock. “What was necessary was to look for very small particles,” such as the ones his team studied.
But it is not a definitive conclusion. Meteor showers occur often. Many small ones might therefore sprinkle their remnants onto Earth unnoticed. Samples with meteoric origin could presumably come from one of these. Some researchers also cast doubt that the peat collected dates from 1908.
Even Artemieva says she needs to revise her models to understand the total absence of meteorites at Tunguska.
Still, in line with Leonid Kulik’s early observations, today the broad consensus remains that the Tunguska event was caused by a large cosmic body, like an asteroid or comet, colliding with Earth’s atmosphere.
Most asteroids have quite stable orbits, many of which are found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. However, “various gravitational interactions can make them change their orbit more dramatically,” says Gareth Collins of Imperial College London, UK.
Occasionally these rocky bodies can cross over into Earth’s orbit which can put them onto a collision course with us. At the point one enters into our atmosphere and begins to fragment, it is known as a meteor.
What made the Tunguska event so dramatic was that it was an extremely rare case of what researchers call a “megaton” event – as the energy emitted was about 10-15 megatons of TNT, though even higher estimates have also been proposed.
This is also why the Tunguska event has been difficult to make full sense of. It is the only event of that magnitude that has happened in recent history. “That limits our understanding,” says Collins.
Artemieva now says there are clear stages that took place, which she has outlined in a review to be published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the second half of 2016.
First, the cosmic body entered our atmosphere at 9-19 miles per second (15-30km/s).
Fortunately, our atmosphere is good at protecting us. “It will break apart a rock smaller than a football field across,” explains NASA researcher Bill Cooke, who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “Most people think they come whaling in from outer space and leave a crater, and there’s a big smoking piece of rock on the ground. The truth is kind of the opposite.”
The atmosphere will generally break rocks up a few kilometres above the Earth’s surface, producing an occasional shower of smaller rocks that, by the time they hit the ground, will be cold.
In the case of Tunguska, the incoming meteor must have been extremely fragile, or the explosion so intense, it obliterated all its remnants 8-10km above Earth.
This process explains the event’s second stage. The atmosphere vaporised the object into tiny pieces, while at the same time intense kinetic energy also transformed them into heat.
The process is similar to a chemical explosion. In conventional explosions, chemical or nuclear energy is transformed into heat,” says Artemieva.
In other words, any remnants from whatever entered Earth’s atmosphere were turned into cosmic dust in the process.
If events unfolded this way, it explains the lack of large chunks of cosmic material at the site. “It is very difficult to find a millimetre-size grain in a big area. It is necessary to search in the peat,” says Kvasnytsya.
As the object entered our atmosphere and broke apart, the intense heat resulted in shockwaves that were felt for hundreds of kilometres. When this airburst then hit the ground it flattened all the trees in the vicinity.
Artemieva suggests an enormous plume resulted from the updraught, which was then followed by a cloud, “thousands of kilometres in diameter”.
But Tunguska’s story is not over. Even now, other some researchers have proposed that we have been missing an obvious clue to explain the event.
In 2007 an Italian team suggested that a lake 5 miles (8km) north-north-west of the explosion’s epicentre could be an impact crater. Lake Cheko, they say, did not feature on any maps before the event.
Luca Gasperini of the University of Bologna in Italy, travelled to the lake in the late 1990s, and says it is difficult to explain the origin of the lake in any other way. “Now we are sure it was formed after the impact, not from the main Tunguska body but of a fragment of the asteroid that was preserved by the explosion.”
Gasperini firmly believes that a large piece of asteroid lies 33ft (10m) below the bottom of the lake, buried in sediment. “It would be very easy for Russians to get there and drill,” he says. Despite heavy criticism of the theory, he still hopes someone will scour the lake for remnants of meteoric origin.
That Lake Cheko is an impact crater is not a popular idea. It is just another “quasi-theory” says Artemieva. “Any ‘enigmatic’ objects at the bottom of this lake could be easily recovered with minimal efforts – the lake is not deep,” she says. Collins also disagrees with Gasperini’s idea.
In 2008, he and colleagues published a rebuttal to the theory, stating that “unaffected mature trees” were close to the lake, which would have been obliterated if a large piece of rock had fallen close by.
Regardless of the details, the influence of the Tunguska event is still felt. Research papers on the subject continue to be published.
Today, astronomers also peer into the skies with powerful telescopes to look for signs that rocks with the potential to cause a similar event are heading our way, and to assess the risk that they pose.
In 2013 in Chelyabinsk, Russia, a relatively small meteor around 62ft (19m) wide created visible disruption. This surprised researchers like Collins. His models had predicted it would not cause as much damage as it did.
“What’s challenging is that this process of the asteroid disrupting in the atmosphere, decelerating, evaporating and transferring its energy to the air, is a very complicated process. We would like to understand it more, to better predict consequences of these events in future.”
Chelyabinsk-sized meteors were previously believed to occur roughly every 100 years, while Tunguska-sized events had been predicted to occur once a millennium. This figure has since been revised. Chelyabinsk-sized meteors could be happening 10 times more frequently, says Collins, while Tunguska style impacts could occur as often as once every 100-200 years.
Unfortunately, we are and will remain defenceless against similar events, says Kvasnytsya. If another explosion like the Tunguska event took place above a populated city, it would cause thousands if not millions of casualties, depending where it hit.
But it is not all bad news. The probability of that happening is extremely small, says Collins, especially given the huge surface area of Earth that is covered in water. “When a Tunguska-type event happens again, the overwhelming probability is that it will happen nowhere near human population.”
We may never find out whether the Tunguska event was caused by a meteor or comet, but in a way that does not matter. Either could have resulted in the intense cosmic disruption, which we are still talking about over a century later.
SECRECY NEWS
From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2016, Issue No. 57
July 7, 2016
NATOS WARSAW SUMMIT, AND MORE FROM CR
The July 8-9 NATO summit meeting in Warsaw, Poland, is previewed in a new report from the Congressional Research Service.
“Among other things, NATO leaders are expected to announce the rotational deployment of 4,000 troops to Poland and the three Baltic states, an expanded training mission for Iraqi soldiers, and additional NATO support for Afghanistan and Ukraine. NATO leaders will also assess member state progress in implementing defense spending and capabilities development commitments, a key U.S. priority. Finally, NATO is expected to formally invite Montenegro to become the 29th member of the alliance,” the report said.
The new report includes data on alliance defense spending and defense spending by individual NATO member states. See NATO’s Warsaw Summit: In Brief, June 30, 2016.
Other new and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.
“Right-Sizing” the National Security Council Staff?, CRS Insight, June 30, 2016
Diversity, Inclusion, and Equal Opportunity in the Armed Services: Background and Issues for Congress, updated July 1, 2016
Sanctuary Jurisdictions and Criminal Aliens: In Brief, updated July 1, 2016
Brazil in Crisis, CRS Insight, updated July 6, 2016
State Voter Identification Requirements: Analysis, Legal Issues, and Policy Considerations, updated July 5, 2016
Derivatives: Introduction and Legislation in the 114th Congress, July 1, 2016
Overview of Health Insurance Exchanges, updated July 1, 2016
Military Benefits for Former Spouses: Legislation and Policy Issues, updated July 1, 2016
The Freedom of Information Act Turns Fifty & Is Revised, CRS Legal Sidebar, July 1, 2016
Suspect in Dallas police attack wanted to ‘kill white people’: chief
July 8, 2016
by Lisa Maria Garza
Reuters
DALLAS-At least one sniper in Dallas killed five police officers and wounded seven more in a coordinated attack that ended when police used a bomb to kill a shooter who told them he wanted to kill white officers, authorities said Friday.
The attack came during one of several protests across the United States against the killing of two black men by police this week, the latest in a long string of killings that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Police described Thursday night’s ambush as carefully planned and executed and said they had taken three people into custody before killing the fourth after a long standoff in a downtown garage.
“We had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect. We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown told reporters at City Hall.
“The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter,” said Brown, who is black. “He said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated that he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
In talking with police negotiators, the suspect said he was not affiliated with any group, according to Brown.
The attack came in a week that two black men were fatally shot by police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and outside Minneapolis. The killings, both now the subject of official investigations, inflamed tensions about race and justice in the United States.
Quinyetta McMillon, who had a child with Alton Sterling, the black man slain by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, earlier this week, condemned the Dallas attack in a statement.
“We wholeheartedly reject the reprehensible acts of violence that were perpetrated against members of the Dallas Police Department,” McMillon said. “Regardless of how angry or upset people may be, resorting to this kind of sickening violence should never happen and simply cannot be tolerated.”
A Twitter account describing itself as representing the Black Lives Matter movement sent the message: “Black Lives Matter advocates dignity, justice and freedom. Not murder.”
Some of the largest police forces in the United States were on high alert on Friday, following the attacks in Dallas, with departments in New York and Boston ordering officers to patrol in pairs.
PANIC IN THE STREETS
The shots rang out as a protest in Dallas was winding down, sending marchers screaming and running in panic through the city’s streets.
It was the deadliest day for police in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
Post, Share, Arrest
Israel Targeting Palestinian Protesters on Facebook
July 7 2016
by Alex Kane
The Intercept
On the morning of August 28, 2014, two days after the end of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Sohaib Zahda hopped into a shared taxi in Hebron that was going to Ramallah, where he had a job interview.
Thirty-three-year-old Zahda, who owns a paintball company, is an unlikely terrorist. An avid cyclist who speaks Arabic, Italian, French, and English, he is a member of Youth Against Settlements, a nonviolent organization that protests against Israeli settlers who live in and around Hebron. He is opposed to Hamas firing rockets into Israel. He likes to tell visitors his grandfather had Jewish friends in Hebron in the 1920s.
Hebron and Ramallah are about 25 miles apart. To get between them, Palestinians must pass through the “container checkpoint,” manned by Israeli soldiers on a road that connects the southern West Bank to its central and northern cities. At the checkpoint — named for a shipping container once located at the barrier — Palestinian pedestrians queue up to get their IDs checked, while cars wait for inspection and for soldiers to wave them through. When Zahda’s taxi drove up, masked Israeli soldiers stopped the vehicle, asked him to get out, and then handcuffed him.
They took his mobile phone and his bag and brought him to a room near the checkpoint. After two hours, he was told he was being investigated for threatening an Israeli army leader. The alleged threat was made on a Facebook page calling for an uprising in Hebron. Zahda was then blindfolded and placed in an Israeli military jeep.
The soldiers took Zahda to a counterterror unit of the Israeli police, which held him for the crime of incitement to violence. At one point during Zahda’s interrogation, the police showed him content they had collected from his personal Facebook page. But Zahda wrote Facebook posts from the West Bank, an area governed not by Israeli civilian law but by Israeli military law. The police had no jurisdiction over Zahda, said Nery Ramati, his attorney. Instead of releasing him, the police transferred Zahda to an Israeli military prison. When asked about his arrest and interrogation, the Israeli army responded, “Because Mr. Zahda’s case is still open, we are unable to elaborate on any specific details.” The Israeli police did not respond to detailed requests about the interrogation.
Zahda’s case, still ongoing, is part of a new battleground in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinians using social media to spread news about arrests and deaths, and Israeli intelligence and law enforcement officers scouring the web for clues about the next stabbing or protest.
Facebook has not changed the fundamental contours of the conflict, but it has accelerated it. A demonstration against the Israeli occupation can be organized in a matter of hours, while the monitoring of Palestinians is made easier by the large digital footprint they leave on their laptops and mobile phones.
Israeli officials have blamed social media for inciting a wave of violent attacks by Palestinians that began in October 2015. Since then, Israeli security forces have arrested about 400 Palestinians for social media activity, according to Palestinian rights groups Addameer and Adalah. Most of the arrests have been for postings on Facebook, a popular network among Palestinians.
In that year alone, the Israeli attorney general opened 155 investigations into alleged social media incitement, a marked increase from previous years, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (although the law on social media incitement applies to all citizens and residents, the vast majority of cases have been directed at Arabs in Israel).
The arrests of Palestinians for Facebook posts open a window into the practices of Israel’s surveillance state and reveal social media’s darker side. What was once seen as a weapon of the weak has turned into the perfect place to ferret out potential resistance.
I met up with Zahda last June, in the Hebron home of a Palestinian family that cooks food for tour groups. He was born in this historic, holy city, and his life has been marked by the first intifada in 1987, which Zahda remembers as a time when Israeli soldiers killed young stone throwers; the hope of the Oslo Accord, signed in 1993; the bitterness of the accord’s failure; and the violence of the second intifada, which began in 2000.
Israeli barriers to Palestinian movement, which increased after the second intifada, frustrate Zahda. His passion is sports, which he studied in Algeria, but even that is constrained by the Israeli occupation. Zahda founded a Palestinian cycling group, but “when we want to ride 100 kilometers, for example, on bikes, we cannot because we have to pass by checkpoints,” he said. “If we want to go from Hebron to Jerusalem, it’s 30 kilometers. There’s more than two, three checkpoints.”
The modest, square home where I interviewed him sits 300 meters past the Bab al-Zawiya checkpoint, where a soldier in an olive-green uniform toting a gun checks passports and identity cards. The house is on Shuhada Street, where the drab green doors of former shops have been soldered shut since 1994, when Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born Israeli settler, massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque. Two of the Palestinian victims were Zahda’s cousins. In response, the Israeli military closed down hundreds of shops on Shuhada Street, then Hebron’s main commercial artery, to protect Israeli settlers who lived on or near the street. Today, the storefronts are covered with ugly black graffiti; Israeli settlers have painted “Death to Arabs” and marked the doors with Jewish Stars of David. Locals call Shuhada Street a “ghost town.”
Zahda insists that he never incited anyone to violence, but during the summer of 2014, as the Israeli army put Hebron on lockdown and began to bomb the Gaza Strip, Zahda ran a Facebook page called “Intifada al-Khalil” — “the uprising of Hebron.” He used the page to post information about the war and encourage people to demonstrate.
“At first, I had 1,000 likes. In three days, I had 7,000 likes,” he says.
The violence of 2014 angered Zahda. It began with Palestinian militants kidnapping and killing three young Israelis near Hebron, spread to Jerusalem with a gruesome revenge murder of a young Palestinian, and culminated in a 51-day war in Gaza, which killed over 2,100 Palestinians and 72 Israelis. Zahda directed the Facebook posts at Ghassan Alian, the commander of the Golani Brigade, which on July 20, 2014, bombarded the Gaza neighborhood of Shuja’iyya, killing at least 60 people in 24 hours.
The fact that Alian is a Druze Arab serving in the Israeli army enraged Zahda. (Christian and Muslim Arabs living in Israel do not typically serve in the military, but most Druze Arabs do.) Zahda posted numerous statements to his Facebook page, saying that people in Shfar’am, the northern town where Alian is from, “consented for your sons to murder us this way,” and that “the massacre of the Gaza children, signed by a Druze man from Shfar’am,” would “go down in history.”
The profile picture for the page showed images of guns behind text that read, “We are with the resistance.” Zahda told me this was a popular image circulating among Palestinians during the war. In addition, Zahda asked for the phone numbers of people in Shfar’am who knew the family of Alian. The military interpreted this as a threat to the officer. Zahda says he wanted the phone numbers in order to ask people in Shfar’am to pressure Alian to stop his participation in Israel’s war in Gaza.
The military also claimed Zahda published a message calling a demonstration in Hebron the “night of the Molotov.” Zahda took the Facebook page down after soldiers threatened him, saying “his day was coming soon” if he did not erase it. The military did not respond to questions about the alleged threat. Zahda confirms he wrote angrily about Shfar’am but says the comment about the Molotov cocktail came from other Palestinians posting to his page, not him.
In court, however, Nery Ramati, Zahda’s attorney, did not contest the military’s version of the Facebook posts. He noted the indictment did not mention any other people and said if he contested the facts by pointing to others’ activity on the page, the prosecution might change strategy and use such activity as part of its case against Zahda.
Since Facebook users share over 2 million pieces of content every minute, there was a chance Zahda’s posts would go unnoticed by the Israeli authorities. But according to Ramati, Zahda’s posts caught the attention of an online group of right-wing Israelis who were upset that law enforcement had announced a probe into Jewish incitement that summer, a time when Israelis on Facebook were calling for Arabs to be killed. This group brought Zahda’s page to the Israeli police’s attention, Ramati said. The police’s cyber unit began to track Zahda’s page and postings, and the attorney general approved a police investigation into his activities.
While Zahda was in custody, Israeli law enforcement obtained complete access to the page through a court order to Facebook, requiring the company to turn over data that showed the Hebron page was created by Zahda. Although the police had monitored Zahda’s page during the war, they needed official Facebook data to definitively confirm Zahda was the owner of “Intifada al-Khalil,” a fact he initially denied to the police. The company complied with the order, according to Zahda’s lawyer. Zahda did, in fact, own the page. Facebook did not respond to repeated questions about the company’s cooperation in this case.
Zahda was the first Palestinian in the occupied territories to be arrested by the army for social media postings. Before his detention, the Israeli police had arrested Palestinians living in Israel for Facebook posts, including Razi Nabulsi, a Palestinian citizen of the state who was arrested in 2013 for posting about his hope that the “nightmare will be over” one day and writing against “Israeli terrorists” and in support of Palestinian prisoners, according to Nabulsi and his lawyers. (In court, the Israeli police claimed the evidence against Nabulsi was secret, even though it was based on public Facebook posts.)
In late 2014, the police arrested eight East Jerusalem residents for posting in support of violence against Israeli Jews. Omar Shalabi, one of those arrested, became the first person convicted for social media postings by an Israeli court, and in May 2015, he was sentenced to nine months in prison. According to the New York Times, after two Palestinians killed five Israeli Jews, Shalabi wrote, “Ask death to grant you life; glory is bestowed upon the martyrs.”
Investigations of Palestinians for social media postings center around Israeli laws against incitement. For those who fall under Israeli civilian law, the attorney general has relied on Israel’s law against “Incitement to Violence or Terror.” The measure, passed in 2002, prohibits speech by Israeli citizens or East Jerusalem residents that supports or encourages violence or terrorism and would likely result in an attack. Civil rights attorneys say the law chills speech and is applied disproportionately to Israeli Palestinians and Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, most of whom are not citizens but are still governed by Israeli civilian law.
Palestinians in the West Bank are governed under Israeli military law, which has its own broad prohibition against incitement. Zahda bounced back and forth between different branches of Israeli security forces: arrested by the army, turned over to the police, then returned to the army. His case illustrates a bewildering state of affairs in which cooperation and intelligence sharing among agencies with different jurisdictions, at least nominally, is routine.
Zahda was officially charged with “threats posed against a senior [Israel Defense Forces] officer” and calling “upon residents in his area to attack Israelis using Molotov cocktails,” an army spokesperson told me. Before those charges were laid out, however, the police investigated him for violating Israel’s civilian prohibition against incitement, despite the fact that Zahda is not an Israeli citizen, his lawyer said.
“Israel has access to anything it wants because when you think about it, the Israeli army can go and do whatever they want in the West Bank and no one can stop them,” said Amit Meyer, a former member of the military’s Unit 8200, Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency. “So if they want to go and dig a hole and add another cable … they can just do it, and then all the communication goes to them as well.”
Meyer says collecting information from social media platforms became more of a priority while he served from 2010 through 2013. Facebook users, he explained, place a lot of information in the open, which makes the job of understanding Palestinian social networks easier. Facebook is considered open source information, i.e., content that is freely available for intelligence services without using special tools. Newspaper articles, Twitter posts, radio segments, demographic information, and academic papers are all open source information ripe for exploitation by intelligence agencies.
In the pre-Facebook era, intelligence agents had to go into the field to find out who was part of a target’s network. Facebook has simplified that need. “It’s all there,” Meyer said. “It’s perfect for intelligence gathering.”
The Israeli police also collect data on Palestinians. The main difference between the branches lies in the area of oversight. The Shin Bet and the Unit are only accountable to the prime minister and the Israeli minister of defense, who give them wide latitude to spy on Palestinians. By contrast, the Israeli police are authorized to wiretap phones and collect internet data, but only by a judicial order. So when the police wanted to investigate Sohaib Zahda, they went to a judge; when they wanted to prove Zahda was the owner of the “Intifada al-Khalil” page, they obtained a judicial order to send to Facebook.
The police request for data on Zahda’s page was one of 343 law enforcement requests made to Facebook from Israel in 2014, according to the company’s data; in 2013, the police went to Facebook 242 times. In both years, the company handed over information in response to about half of the Israeli requests.
In October 2015, Israel’s surveillance state was confronted with a new problem. Seemingly day after day, a young Palestinian would attack an Israeli soldier or civilian, using a car or, more often, a knife. Unlike the first intifada, the young men and women using knives were not part of an organized group, nor did they discuss their plans with family or others in their community in a way that would tip off Israeli intelligence.
Israeli leaders blamed social media, which was filled with videos of Israeli soldiers or police officers killing young Palestinians, who, in many cases, had tried to stab them. In October 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “situation in which Osama bin Laden meets Mark Zuckerberg.”
The Israeli security forces and judicial system are now escalating their tactics. Since October 2015, the Israeli military has arrested 71 Palestinians for social media postings, a dramatic increase in the number of detentions. The crackdown has also become harsher on the other side of the Green Line, within Israel proper. Instead of merely arresting Palestinians for Facebook posts and releasing them days later, they have begun to indict Palestinian citizens of the state, leading to a trial and potentially prolonged jail time.
Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesperson, told me that preventive action based on social-media monitoring has become increasingly important since October 2015. “We’re seeing potential suspects or terrorists themselves put out or change their social network pages, their Facebook pages, in the morning at 9 o’clock and a terrorist attack is in the afternoon,” he said. “It’s tremendously important for us to try to find those potential terrorists before they can get on the street.”
On October 16, 2015, the Israeli police arrested 19-year-old Anas Khateeb, and the prosecutor indicted him for incitement six days later, making him the first Palestinian citizen of Israel to be indicted for social media posts. (The first Palestinian indicted and convicted for Facebook posts was an East Jerusalem resident, but he was not a citizen.) Khateeb’s crime was writing things on Facebook like, “Long live the intifada,” “Jerusalem is Arab,” and “I am on the waiting list.” Four days after Khateeb’s arrest, an Israeli judge subpoenaed Facebook for the IP address and “all information or documents which can be useful to catch the suspect related to user name: Anas Khateeb.” The company complied, according to Khateeb’s attorney. Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.
As for Zahda, he still organizes with Youth Against Settlements. He also continues to post political messages on his personal Facebook page, despite the fact that his Facebook use put him on Israeli law enforcement’s radar and eventually got him arrested. While in court, Israel’s military prosecutors argued that Zahda had threatened and insulted Alian, the Golani Brigade commander; incited people to demonstrate, which is illegal in the West Bank; published a political post; and encouraged the throwing of Molotov cocktails.
Under Israeli Military Order 101, Palestinians under military law are prohibited from demonstrating and publishing anything relating to a “political matter.” Zahda was released about a week after his initial arrest in August 2014. But on June 1, 2016, an Israeli military court convicted him on two charges stemming from the 2014 detention: calling for participation in an illegal demonstration and attempting to threaten an army officer. The military judge acquitted him of the rest of the charges. The allegation that he threatened an officer turned into an allegation that he attempted to threaten an officer because there was no evidence that Alian read Zahda’s posts.
Zahda’s sentencing is expected to take place later this month. Nery Ramati, his attorney, told The Intercept that after Zahda is sentenced, he will appeal the conviction.
Zahda is still outraged that he was arrested for posting to social media. “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I didn’t throw a Molotov; I didn’t throw stones.”
US State Department to reopen Hillary Clinton email probe
The US State Department says it will reopen an investigation into whether Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information. An FBI probe this week found Clinton and her aides had been “careless” with sensitive data.
July 8, 2016
DW
State Department spokesman John Kirby said the internal review would resume now that it was clear the Justice Department would not be pursuing criminal charges against Hillary Clinton.
The Democratic presidential hopeful has been facing harsh scrutiny over her use of a private email account and server while serving as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
The State Department launched a probe into the emails in January after stating that 22 messages sent from Clinton’s private server were “top secret.” The review was put on hold in April, however, so as not to interfere with an FBI inquiry to determine whether she had broken the law. That investigation ended this week, with the Justice Department announcing it would accept the FBI’s recommendation not to prosecute Clinton.
“Given the Department of Justice has now made its announcement, the State Department intends to conduct its internal review,” Kirby said.
“We will aim to be as expeditious as possible, but we will not put artificial deadlines on the process,” he added. “Our goal will be to be as transparent as possible about our results, while complying with our various legal obligations.”
Not out of the woods
The FBI’s yearlong investigation found that 110 emails containing classified information were sent or received on Clinton’s server. The agency’s director, James Comey, said it also revealed that Clinton and her aides had been “extremely careless” but had not violated any laws.
Republican lawmakers, who have sought to use the email controversy to question Clinton’s judgment, on Thursday voiced their discontent with the FBI’s decision not to recommend criminal charges. Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz said he would forward Clinton’s testimony before the House Benghazi Committee to the FBI to investigate whether or not she lied under oath when she said she didn’t send or receive emails marked as classified.
Most of Clinton’s top advisors left soon after her secretary of state post ended in early 2013. Kirby said this week that former officials could still face “administrative sanctions,” including ths loss of security clearances.
Besides Clinton, the State Department probe is also expected to examine confidants Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan and Huma Abedin.
Chilcot and the End of the Anglosphere
Bush’s poodle subordinated British sovereignty – and precipitated a disaster
July 8, 2016
by Justin Raimondo
AntiWar
Do we really need a 2.6 million word report on how Bush’s poodle, a.k.a. former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, allowed his country to be pulled into a conflict that claimed hundreds of British lives, thousands of American lives, and at least 150,000 Iraqi lives, while plunging the entire region into a maelstrom of terroristic chaos?
A good decade after being announced, the Chilcot report has finally been released, and what it shows is that the phrase “Bush’s poodle” is blatantly unfair to poodles: after all, even a poodle is known to have gone off its leash every once in a while – but not Tony. Included in the report is a letter from the Prime Minister to Bush that, as Mark Hosenball reports for Reuters, lays the essential issue bare:
“In the very first sentence, Blair promised Bush: ‘I will be with you, whatever.’
“The inquiry report quoted a top Blair aide as saying that he and another adviser had tried to get the prime minister to drop the sweeping promise. But the aide told the inquiry Blair ignored their recommendations.”
The rest of the letter laid out the possible complications that could – and did – arise in the wake of invasion and occupation of Iraq, and here Blair’s qualms come out. But none of that matters because the first sentence obviates all possible objections and underscores what was and still is at stake: British sovereignty.
The neoconservatives who ginned up the Iraq war are enamored of the concept of the “Anglosphere”: Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States acting in concert as a stabilizing democratizing force on the world stage. Another variant of this schema is “Atlanticism,” i.e. a permanent military alliance between the US and Britain embodied in NATO as some kind of world police force. Indeed, the Atlanticists have their very own lobbying group, the Atlantic Council, which includes all the requisite foreign policy bigwigs united behind the idea that the United States and Britain have a moral responsibility to recreate the old British Empire, albeit with Washington rather than London its imperial epicenter.
This New Statesman essay traces the influence of the Anglosphere idea on the British conservative movement, counterposing it to the left’s vision of a Britain immersed in the European Union. You’ll note that both alternatives are essentially identical in that the British would renounce their sovereignty in favor of submergence in a larger entity. Independence isn’t an option.
Now that the British people have decisively rejected the EU, we can expect that this right-wing version of the same nonsense will rear its ugly head in “elite” circles. Which is yet more proof that these self-described “elites” just don’t get what is happening in Britain, and the world at large: the revival of nationalism, regionalism, and secessionism, as against the globalist daydreams of utopian world planners and world-savers.
What these folks refuse to understand is that the global trend is against globalism of any sort: in the US, nationalism is on the rise, as the unlikely victory of Donald “America First” Trump has made painfully clear to our panicked political class. In Britain, the victory of “Brexit” – led, in large part, by the insurgent United Kingdom Independence Party and Nigel Farage, its fiery spokesman – was a victory for “Britain First.” And on the continent, nationalist-populist movements are arising that threaten the supranational constructs erected by political elites, including not only the EU but also NATO. Secessionist movements, like the drive for Catalonian independence, are on the rise, much to the dismay of the globalists.
The Chilcot report shows the dangers of subordinating national sovereignty to some overriding concept: British intelligence passively accepted the clearly doctored “evidence” of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.” This was the operational corollary of Blair’s craven subservience to the Bush White House – although, as the massive Chilcot report is examined more closely, I’m sure we’ll find some instances in which the British improvised all on their own. You’ll recall, for example, that President Bush cited the British as the source for his assertion that the Iraqis had sought uranium to make a nuclear weapon from “an African nation” that turned out to be Niger. This was based on a transparently fraudulent bundle of documents, and the saga of the Niger Uranium forgeries is one of the enduring mysteries of the lies that lured us into war.
The Chilcot report also tells us that Blair was fully aware that the invasion of Iraq would increase the incidence and severity of terrorism, both in the region and in the West. British intelligence warned that terrorism would “increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-U.S./anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West.”
These warnings were ignored, naturally, because the neocons who were intent on regime change in Iraq and throughout the Middle East were and are fanatics, for whom the loss of human life and security is not only incidental but an opportunity for them to advance their agenda of militarism, domestic repression, and perpetual war.
When Ron Paul defied the (bipartisan) conventional wisdom during the 2008 Republican presidential debates and declared that jihadist terrorism is “blowback” for decades of Western intervention in the Middle East, he was viciously attacked by the clueless Rudy Giuliani and the usual array of neocons, who all declared he was through as a serious candidate. That proved not to be the case: indeed, that moment catapulted him to national prominence, and energized a grassroots movement that is still growing today. And what Chilcot shows is that the British intelligence community privately agreed with his view that they hate us for our policies and not our freedom, Yet the political class, both here and across the Atlantic, went ahead with their harebrained scheme to “democratize” the Middle East in spite of the risks and dangers it imposed.
No, we didn’t need a 2.6 million word report telling us what should be clear to any person with the least amount of common sense: that aggression invites retaliation. But the injured cries of phony remorse mixed with defiance and denial coming from the War Party are music to my ears, a concert of hypocrisy and brazen refusal to accept responsibility that will show anyone who cares to listen what I could’ve told you – and did tell you – from the first day of the war: that these people are monsters who have to be kept as far away from the levers of power as possible.
Malware hits millions of Android phones
July 8, 2016
BBC News
Up to 10 million Android smartphones have been infected by malware that generates fake clicks for adverts, say security researchers.
The software is also surreptitiously installing apps and spying on the browsing habits of victims.
The malware is currently making about $300,000 (£232,000) a month for its creators, suggests research.
The majority of phones that have been compromised by the malicious software are in China.
Remote control
A spike in the number of phones infected by the malware was noticed separately by security companies Checkpoint and Lookout. The malware family is called Shedun by Lookout but Hummingbad by Checkpoint
In a blogpost, Checkpoint said it had obtained access to the command-and-control servers that oversee infected phones which revealed that Hummingbad was now on about 10 million devices. China, India, the Philippines and Indonesia top the list of nations with most phones infected by the software.
Hummingbad is a type of malware known as a rootkit that inserts itself deep inside a phone’s operating system to help it avoid detection and to give its controllers total control over the handset.
The ability to control phones remotely has been used to click on ads to make them seem more popular than they actually are. The access has also been used to install fake versions of popular apps or spread programs the gang has been paid to promote.
“It can remain persistent even if the user performs a factory reset,” wrote Kristy Edwards from Lookout in a blogpost. “It uses its root privileges to install additional apps on to the device, further increasing ad revenue for the authors and defeating uninstall attempts.”
Ms Edwards said the recent spike in infections could be driven by the gang behind the malware adding more functions or using their access to phones for different purposes.
The malware gets installed on handsets by exploiting loopholes in older versions of the Android operating system known as KitKat and JellyBean. The latest version of Android is known as Marshmallow.
In a statement, Google said: “”We’ve long been aware of this evolving family of malware and we’re constantly improving our systems that detect it. We actively block installations of infected apps to keep users and their information safe.”
Google released the latest security update for Android this month and it tackled more than 108 separate vulnerabilities in the operating system. So far this year, security updates for Android have closed more than 270 bugs.
‘It is now a fact’: Western journalists visit Crimea, say it’s now ‘Russian territory’
July 8, 2016
RT
Reunification with Russia has served a beneficial purpose for Crimea and its people, western reporters observed after visiting Sevastopol. They noted the “impressive” work on the 19-km bridge that will link the peninsula with the rest of Russia by 2019.
Journalists from the US, the UK, Germany, South Korea, Bulgaria, Romania and Iraq have arrived to Crimea on the invitation of Russia’s Foreign Ministry.
Some of have admitted Crimea’s reunification with Russia did led to some positive developments and even acknowledged that it was really the choice of the Crimean people after they visited the peninsula and spoke to the locals.
“We have seen some positive developments here … people tell me about many things in their daily life getting better,” Jury Rescheto, the head of the German Deutsche Welle Moscow office, told RT, stressing that he saw “many positive developments … particularly for the local residents” during his visit.
He also emphasized that “Crimea now became a Russian territory regardless of whether we [the West] want it or not,” adding that “it is now a fact, a reality.”
Joining Russia was the choice of the Crimean people, Zhong Su Ha, the head of the Moscow KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) office, told RT, adding that, when he “asked the people of Crimea whether they voted for joining Russia, many people answered ‘yes.’ And when [he] asked them if they regret their decision they said ‘no.”
The Korean journalists also said that the situation in the peninsula is now calm and comfortable adding that he “feels safe.”
Many journalists also expressed their admiration for the 19km-long Crimean Bridge under construction. Once finished, this bridge, which will connect Crimea with Krasnodar region in mainland Russia, will become one of Russia’s largest.
Corey Flintoff from Washington-based National Public Radio (NPR) has called the Crimean Bridge “an amazing piece of engineering.”
“A very complex and very difficult things have been done here. So I’m very interested in seeing, how this is done. The project takes so much time and so much energy to do something that has never been successfully done in this part of the world before,” the US journalist stressed.
His colleague from German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Evgeny Ushakov, said that reports in the media didn’t do justice to the scale of the work already been done in the Kerch Straight.
“The impressions are very good. I had no idea that the construction was going at such a pace, but when the technological bridge is ready; when the piles are hammered; supports are placed – it is impressive,” he said.
Following the cool down in relations between Moscow and the West over Russia’s reunion with Crimea in 2014 and the conflict in Ukraine, “it’s interesting for Europe to see how the people really live here; what’s the infrastructure and how Russia is going to connect with Crimean Peninsula,” Liviu Iurea, a correspondent for TV Romania, stressed.
With the construction underway in “such an accelerated tempo,” the bridge is likely to meet its deadline, Iurea stressed.
Khalid Abdalrahman from an Iraqi broadcaster, Rudaw, said that the bridge “is a huge and interesting project for Crimea, for Russia and also for the tourists.”
Once finished, the 19 kilometer- (12 mile-) long Crimean Bridge will become one of largest ever built in Russia.
It’s expected to span Crimea with Krasnodar region in mainland Russia, allowing fast, reliable and cost-effective transportation link for passengers, goods and services.
The bridge will have a four-lane highway and two-lane railroad, capable of providing access for up to 40,000 and dozens of trains a day to the peninsula over the Kerch Strain.
The Crimea Bridge is scheduled to be opened by late 2018 and to become fully operational by 2019.
In May, Russia has completed the construction of the energy bridge from mainland to Crimean Peninsula.
Four power lines were laid on the bottom of the Kerch Straight, cutting Crimea’s dependence on Ukraine in terms of receiving energy.
Last November, local authorities had to declare a state of emergency after all four Ukrainian power lines providing electricity to the peninsula were blown up, leaving Crimea in a total blackout.