Free Republic

FSB strikes back at ex-agent Litvinenko MOSCOW - Russia's Federal Security Service distributed photographs Friday purportedly showing a suspect in deadly 1999 bombings with a rebel warlord it claims paid him to organize the blasts - a day after an ex-security agent claimed the suspect had professed his innocence. The security service, known by the initials FSB, said the photos showed suspect Achimez Gochiyayev in Chechnya with Khattab, a rebel leader who was killed earlier this year in Chechnya. The photos were posted on the web site of the Russian news agency ITAR-Tass. The FSB accuses Gochiyayev of receiving...

Why Arab oil can no longer hold western countries to ransom THE last time the Arabs used oil as a weapon in 1973, the lights went out all over Europe, America was plunged into recession, and the economic shockwaves circled the globe. Three decades on, fiscal reality makes the threat of a repeat performance - as demanded by Iraq to teach the United States a lesson for its support of Israel - something of a damp squib. Despite stock market jitters at the prospect of an embargo, the world has moved on and the coffers of the oil-rich kingdoms...

Free speech soon to be in eternal eXile "What good is freedom of speech if you cannot provoke someone." - Salman Rushdie Of the dozen or so journalists and media personalities that have severely tested the limits of freedom of speech in Russia and indeed the Western world in the last decade, the name of Matt Taibbi, co-editor of Moscow's alternative the eXile newspaper will stand out. "Anti-Semitic," "fascist," "terrorist": these are the kinds of terms used to describe Taibbi by many journalists who have borne the brunt of his criticism in Russia and the United States. He has...

Porn upsets Palestinians PORN movies and programs in Hebrew are being broadcast by Israeli troops who have taken over three Palestinian television stations of Ramallah, irate residents of the besieged West Bank town have told AFP. The offices of three local television and radio stations were occupied by soldiers yesterday morning, a few hours after tanks and hundreds of troops stormed the town in Israel's biggest offensive against the Palestinian Authority and its leader Yasser Arafat. The soldiers started broadcasting the porn clips -- considered extremely offensive by most Muslims -- intermittently this afternoon from the Al-Watan, Ammwaj, and...

A $200 million press conference All large Russian fortunes were made in much the same way through dividing up former state assets. But they all get spent differently. As befits capitalists, many of Russia's wealthy spend their money making more money. But then there's Roman Abramovich, co-owner of one of Russia's largest oil companies, Sibneft. Abramovich has spent a lot of his money becoming governor of remote and sparsely populated Chukotka, which he says he wants to bring closer to modern civilization. Another Sibneft co-owner, Boris Berezovsky, spends his money financing the political opposition the recently formed Liberal Russia...

Chinese Corruption:A scandal rises from the vaults Growing evidence of mismanagement and corruption is besetting China's banks, say Richard McGregor and James Kynge Published: March 15 2002 19:30 | Last Updated: March 15 2002 19:33 Liu Mingkang, president of the Bank of China, faces a delicate task. As he prepares one of China's four big state-owned banks for a stock market listing overseas later this year, he has a bit of a public relations problem. He now should be burnishing the bank's credentials for a global financial community eager to find ways to invest in China. Instead, he finds...

Diamonds lurk behind misery of the Bushmen De Beers Is social welfare behind the removal of wandering people from their ancestral lands ... or the gems lying beneath? Sue Armstrong in Botswana reports IN Botswana, Bushmen are fighting a last desperate battle against eviction from their ancestral land. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) -- 52,000 square kilometres of hot sand and harsh, waterless bush -- has been home to Bushmen, southern Africa's aboriginal people, for at least 2000 years. But in 1997 the Botswana government began a process of forced removals, which saw more than 1200 people and...

Customs seize Berezovsky's videos about explosions in Moscow, Volgodonsk 'We've already convicted the Chechens...let's move on' Interfax. Sunday, Mar. 10, 2002, 1:07 PM Moscow Time MOSCOW. March 10 (Interfax) - State Duma deputy and member of the Liberal Russia movement Yuli Rybakov said in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio that the customs department of St. Petersburg's Pulkovo airport has confiscated 100 video cassettes about the explosions of apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk. The film was demonstrated by businessman Boris Berezovsky at a recent press conference in London, and is evidence of the Russian special services' involvement in...

Trying to get the message across without the lies LETTER FROM AMERICA: It was a spectacular own goal. In the short but tragic history of the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), nothing became it like its leaving - a classic demonstration of the office's own purpose, the use of information and disinformation as an instrument of power. In the week from the New York Times's disclosure that the OSI might be used by the administration to plant disinformation in the foreign media, the office had been subjected to a ferocious barrage - pattern bombing by cluster shells of righteous ...

Musharraf, Karzai agree major oil pipeline in co-operation pact"Pipelinestan" PAKISTAN/AFGHANISTAN: The Pakistani President, Gen Pervez Musharraf, and the Afghan interim leader, Mr Hamid Karzai, agreed yesterday that their two countries should develop "mutual brotherly relations" and co-operate "in all spheres of activity" - including a proposed gas pipeline from Central Asia to Pakistan via Afghanistan. "We have agreed unanimously ... on working together to develop strong brotherly co-operation, brotherly relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan in all spheres of activity," Gen Musharraf said after their talks. Gen Musharraf said Pakistan will provide $10 million to the Afghan interim government to pay ...

WTC: The money trail How was the attack on America financed? And is there a money trail that might help investigators trace the conspirators? SOMEONE at least seems to have made a lot of money out of the attack on America. In the days before September 11th, it is said one or more investors sold short a suspiciously large bundle of shares in three big insurance firms: AXA, Swiss Re, and Munich Re. Selling short-that is, selling borrowed shares-yields profits if the share price falls, as the price of shares in insurance firms might be expected to do when terrorists ...

Saudi alarm at identity of hijackers Abdelaziz al-Omari has been listed by the US as one of the suspected hijackers of the United Airlines Flight 175 that crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center last week. Not so, says Alsharq al-Awsat, a leading Saudi daily. Earlier this week, the newspaper published an interview with a man with the same name and date of birth but who insists his passport was stolen in 1995 in Denver, Colorado. "I'm not the one who hijacked and blew up the plane because on that day I was in Riyadh and I ...

CHAPTER ONE: The Terror Trail The roots of the worst terrorist attack in history THE evening had gone superbly well. Osama bin Laden bade farewell to his guests and retired to his room. February 22 1998 was a crisp, silent evening in Kandahar, and the desert surrounding the bombed-out town in southern Afghanistan was patrolled by small squads of Taliban fighters and a cadre of bin Laden's personal bodyguard. The Saudi millionaire, then aged 41, sat at his desk, picked up his pen and began to draft the most important announcement of his life. The handful of paragraphs he wrote ...

Zimbabwe:For a black farmer, the dream is over In Zimbabwe, the wrong party, not the wrong race, makes you a target, reports Lindsey Hilsum Zimbabwe's war veterans have a new hero. The first image you see on entering their office, in a grimy concrete block in downtown Harare, is a slightly wonky, black and white poster, bearing the legend "The Great Leader", and a picture of a familiar figure striding through the desert, swathed in long robes - Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi and his entourage swept through Zimbabwe in July. The Libyan leader has thrown his weight behind President Robert ...

Presidents under pressure Jacques Chirac, under pressure from the judicial establishment and harassed by the press, is not the only president in the world feeling the heat. In many countries, although in different ways, presidents (often democratically elected and still in office) are being accused and hounded with almost total disregard for their status, which until recently would have been considered virtually untouchable. Things have changed. Those who speak of a "final end to the ancien régime" have a point, because what was once the majesty of the presidential function is vanishing before our eyes. Even the "masters of the ...

SLAVERY-DAMAGES ISSUE NOW EN VOGUE BECAUSE OF U.S. CELEBRITY LAWYER Reparations question likely to play major role at anti-racism summit Johannesburg, South Africa - For decades now, the subject of reparation for the atrocities of slavery has been discussed in obscure Afro-American circles at the most. However, since US star attorneys discovered the lucrative dispute for themselves, it has become en vogue. Johnnie Cochran, the defence lawyer who saved ex-footballer and film-actor O.J. Simpson from imprisonment for murder, is preparing an action against the US government. More than a dozen city councils in the US are demanding public hearings ...

Bush wants Dole to lead Senate fightback ELIZABETH DOLE has emerged at the top of a wish-list of high-profile figures whom President Bush wants to lead a charge to win back the Senate and safeguard his political agenda. Just seven months into his presidency Mr Bush is back on the campaign trail this week, spearheading an intense White House effort to defeat the Democrats in next year's congressional elections and eliminate their ability to block his legislative initiatives. Mrs Dole is being tipped to run for the Senate from her native North Carolina should the conservative icon Jesse Helms decide, ...

China: Help at last for HIV-hit village"Up to 65per cent of villagers in Wenlou contracted HIV after selling their blood for 40 yuan ($9.40) a time at private collection centres set up in the 1980s." China, in a small, belated gesture recognising the gravity of its mounting epidemic, has taken steps to stem the further spread of HIV/AIDS in a village ravaged in an illegal blood-selling scandal. The move comes as Chinese and foreign health officials warn the country risks having 10million AIDS cases this decade. The Ministry of Health and local government officials have taken what the official media ...

North Korea Exporting Slaves [to Russia] To Work Off Debt MOSCOW - North Korea is paying off its Soviet-era debt to Russia by sending indentured servants to work unpaid in labor camps across Siberia, an official from the Economic Development and Trade Ministry said Friday. "Workers are working unpaid or for an insignificant salary," said the official, who requested anonymity. "This way they are paying off their country's debt." The Economic Development and Trade Ministry classifies such workers as "exports," and calculates that they account for 90 percent of all "goods" imported from North Korea every year. Pyongyang reduced its ...

Plan Colombia: drugs or OIL?U.S. Military Aid to Latin America Linked to Human Rights Abuses Few Americans know it, but the United States is currently embroiled in the biggest guerrilla war since Vietnam. Hundreds of American troops, spies and civilian contract employees are on the ground in Colombia and neighboring lands, helping to coordinate a $1.3 billion counterdrug program that will probably continue for many years. It is a bigger U.S. commitment?in personnel, cash and risk?than the previous leading post-Vietnam counterinsurgency campaign, the 1980s war in El Salvador. In light of the growing U.S. military involvement in Latin America's building ...