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Russia Is a Threat, But Not Because They’re Hacking John Podesta’s Emails
A Russian fleet is steaming toward Syria from the North Sea through the English Channel. The New York Times, formerly a newspaper, has no information about this anywhere on the front page and none on its world page either. You can read about how Egypt is having a sugar shortage and people with a sweet tooth are undergoing hardship because of it — no, really, you can — but you won’t be able to read about the real growing threat from Russia.
Published in General
I can’t link to the site because of the denial of service attack, but if Todenhöfer’s the guy I think he is, he isn’t a reliable source — if I recall rightly, he got severely played by the Syrian government, which pretended to be ISIS. You’re right that money and weapons are fungible, but that’s very different from “arming al Qaeda.”
There was a Financial Times story I can’t get at for the same reason. Is Fehim Taştekin a reliable reporter? I came across an alMonitor story of his (pre-coup) that Turkish intelligence was arming al Qaeda in Syria.
Do you know if anything has happened to operations like that (if true) as a result of the purge of the Gulenists? IIUC a lot of the senior Turkish officers who were the regular liason with western militaries were purged.
I did read the proposal. Perhaps I am just to cynical towards government actions.
The proposal states that legal frame works for media licencing need to be adjusted to insure legal measures exist to combat Hate speech. It suggest more powerful ethics committees for Journalists to go after those who dis-inform and hide behind the cover of Journalism.
These might be fine if applied only to disinformation tactics of Russia. My concern is that once this tool exists it will be used against more than just Russian media tactics.
Legal measures against Hate speech could easily be applied to a social conservative. The left has some real broad definitions for Hate speech.
Ethics committees could go after Journalists for dis-information on Climate Change.
Is the Wikileaks information in bounds or out of bounds? It may have a Russian link but it discusses the opinions and actions of actual American politicians and operatives.
Rereading the quotation, it’s still not a bad question. Or Latvia, Estonia, or Lithuania; or Ukraine for that matter. And if the USA can’t expect its fellow original NATO members to do it, what next?
Usually, yes. (I can’t read this link in particular because half the Internet’s down, probably thanks to Ivan.) Turkey’s been quite open about wanting Nusra off the terrorist list; I wouldn’t be at all surprised. But the charges that it’s been arming them are very difficult to assess because of the information pollution that’s occurred owing to the war between Erdoğan and Gülen. The very well-known story of the Nusra-bound weapons (the photos of the truck were published by a Turkish journalist who’s now in jail) may be true, or it may be a Gülenist smear; there’s honestly no way to know. (RTE claims they were en route to Turkmens.)
I don’t know if it’s true that there have been a disproportionate number of Western liaison officers purged. I know what’s-his-name caused a diplomatic incident by seeming to imply this, but I think he just meant that we work closely with the Turkish military — so of course a purge of this scale effects our liaison relationships. It was an unfortunate comment because it was heard as “We were behind the coup attempt” in Turkey.
Ah, the site’s back up. Yes, that’s the story I was thinking about. Yeah, there’s just no way to know whether the Gendarmerie General Command wrote (and leaked) that memo to ensure that Erdoğan/MiT would be portrayed as “supporting al Qaeda” or whether he was, in fact, shipping them to Nusra. I’d have a better sense of it if I were still in Turkey, but obviously no one is going to talk to me from here. I do know that it’s wholly plausible that Gülenists would manufacture and leak a smear like that. It’s also wholly plausible that Erdoğan is shipping arms to Nusra. And there are a few other ways this could be murky. We can’t know. I hope we have intelligence that gives us a hint — and I figure we probably do.
It’s in bounds with the caveat that we don’t know what’s accurate and what’s not. Once it’s out there, it’s foolish not to learn from it, I think.
We… what an ambiguous word these days. For example:
“Online communication in Russian…”
Well, I’ve long suspected that studying Russian in school got me on a list or two.
No, it really doesn’t say that. Go back and re-read that sentence. It says, “Legal frameworks need to be analyzed widely through a lens of disinformation campaigns i.e. legal measures against hate speech or false alert messaging.” It isn’t proposing the enactment of hate speech laws — most European countries already have these. They’re saying these need to be analyzed in light of what we know about Russian disinformation. I agree that it’s clumsily worded, but this is clearly what they mean from the context. The context includes other ways they think jurists should be made aware of this problem, e.g., “Juristic experts need to be trained with emphasis placed on this specific topic. If an existing case is available (e.g. national mutation of Sputnik), states should proceed once they are fully prepared for the legal case.” There is no other reference to hate speech in the document.
Thank you.
You mean like foreign contributions to the Democrats? And an independent minded press corps is critical too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYfdc36HnHo
Agree – what we now know about Clintons, she would not be the stronger leader. She was the foreign policy advisor to O as SoS. The Iran “deal”, and on and on gave an opening to Russia – all working together with Assad. In the meantime, China and Philippines situation – Trump I think will listen to the generals, and not do things like an Iran deal – he will put the best people in charge, put the best judges in the courts, etc. Clinton is a disaster, on foreign and domestic fronts.
I fear it may be too late for this – Putin doesn’t care – he’s moving forward, and the EU has had decades to get it together (the whole reason they did form the union) to have a strategy of protection against an aggressive foe. Now is not the time when a crisis is looming. We won the Cold War but it was a hell of a fight and many died, Europe was destroyed. We have the ability to help Europe again, but O has been lax to offer help when Poland needed it, Israel and many other allies. He showed interest in his last year! We have the intelligence, it hasn’t been fully used, and in fact, defunded and deflated. The world should be ready for these dictators – they don’t change – they lie in wait for opportunity.
He appears to be the same guy. I don’t know how many Jürgen Todenhöfers there are roaming around loose. One is more than enough.
Why wouldn’t we expect it? France withdrew its navy from NATO’s North Atlantic fleet in 1963 and abandoned NATO’s integrated military structure in 1966; it only returned after the Cold War. But even when France’s military was not part of the alliance’s military command, it remained a member of NATO. Germany was divided and demilitarized. But all three countries were part of NATO during the Cold War and certainly risked their soldiers’ lives to contribute to collective defense. I’m not sure how much of a role Italy has played, but French and German soldiers have participated in many NATO missions that put their lives at risk — in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Horn of Africa, Somalia, and, of course, in Eastern Europe. Why wouldn’t we expect that to happen, exactly?
There is a lot of discussion of whether the Russians prefer Trump or are trying to hurt Clinton. The truth may be neither.
Russia can stir things up for a short time but doesn’t have the resources for a prolonged fight. But they can effectively exploit disorder and in the absence of another power promoting the status quo can have an outsized influence on world affairs to pursue its objectives.
Their interference in the election is only to keep us distracted
Yes but that would not fit the narrative that HRC and NeverTrump wants so we can not discuss.
Trink, is that a military suggestion? Can you elaborate or not?
In part because that was then and this is rapidly becoming now. France and Germany have downsized their military substantially; France’s doctrine calls for two aircraft carriers but building the second has been put off indefinitely. While Putin is aggressive and disruptive, but I think his expansiveness is only partly the same as the USSR’s. Yes, he is encroaching on his the near abroad, but he has less specific interests in what form foreign governments take than the USSR did. His disinformation and disruption is targeted differently. I didn’t quote Spiegel
to justify the ways of Putin to Man, but to point out that Putin is not making things up out of whole cloth. Furthermore, Putin’s threat is not the USSR’s. Similarly brutal and ruthless, yes. But his ambitions are different. That’s one reason why your reference to French and German Cold War contributions to NATO operations is not very useful.
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Perhaps an approach to Putin that acknowledges that would be more useful than the “we’re the good guys and the bad guys we’re using as proxies are because we’re using them really good guys” that has been the hallmark of US domestic propaganda. The Russians don’t care that NATO weapons shot at them were provided to “whitewashed bad guys” who fungibly provided them to “really, really, bad guys” any more than they cared that the Stinger missiles that shot them down in Afghanistan were sanitized through various covert channels. They view that sort of fig leaf as for domestic consumption in the USA and not really an adult beverage.
Putin’s threat is not the USSR’s. That’s one reason why your reference to French and German Cold War contributions to NATO operations is not very useful.
There is another difference between then and now: NATO countries are all facing demographic problems.
Take France:
Insee reports that there are approximately 4.5 million males between 16 and 27 in France this year; this is the recruiting pool for the French military for the next few years.
Based on other sources here, here, and here, about ⅓ of the men in that age cohort are Muslim; religion is “important” or “very important” for about 80% of them. That’s ¼ of the potential recruits – and three times as many “important” or “very important” Muslim respondents than from all other religions in that pool combined.
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What’s a better analogy to the USSR’s infiltration and subversion is the Muslim Brotherhood which is firmly embedded in political Islam in France since Sarkozy let the UOIF into the CFCM. Not a perfect analogy, though.
Of course, Brotherhood infiltration isn’t just a military security problem; it’s aimed at the total transformation of French society. On the military personnel side, one presumes that hotheads like returnees from Syria etc. will not be permitted to enlist in the French military though the Brotherhood aims to be as embedded everywhere it operates as Gülen was in Turkey.
In the short run, though, there will probably be less problem getting devout Muslims to go kill Russians than it might be to send them for large scale operations in the Middle East.
Whistling in the dark aside, as we head across the English Channel, there’s more bad news:
The EEC was mainly a trade block to keep out mainly US goods. Its evolution into the EU was largely an exercise in slippery slope and O’Sullivan’s Law.
A key driver of this was the French trying to gain status they could not achieve on their own merits. They diminished the United Kingdom by cutting it off from the Commonwealth and the US and pitting the other continental countries against it.
They knew Germany was too timid post-war to attempt to assume its natural place atop the European hierarchy. Thus, France could fill that vacuum and Germany would be content to play second fiddle.
Although collective European defense was often discussed, it never really proceeded. That would have diminished France’s status relative to Germany.
The aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov is 26 years old and belched black smoke as it passed through the Channel on Trafalgar Day.
According to British news reports, many of the toilets on board might not even be working.