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Saudis Turn to Russia in Move to Re-Balance Mideast

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Photo Credit: WND Saudi Arabia is proposing a sweeping deal to Russia that solidifies Moscow’s position in the Middle East and Persian Gulf largely at the expense of the United States, according to informed Egyptian security officials.

The deal incorporates increased Russian involvement in Egypt, Syria and the Persian Gulf, and even involves a Saudi guarantee to aid against terror plots targeting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

The Egyptian officials said the deal seeks to replace the U.S. with Russia as the major weapons dealer to Egypt.

However, the weapons sales to Cairo are only the tip of the potential re-balancing iceberg that follows a major fallout with the Saudis after President Obama’s outreach efforts to Iran.

The Saudis asked for the removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while Riyadh would help establish a permanent central Russian role in the future of Syria, with a military presence in the country, the officials said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pentagon and CIA Fighting State Dept. Plan to Allow Russian Space Agency to Build GPS Stations on U.S. Soil

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Photo Credit: Pedro Ladeira/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesIn the view of America’s spy services, the next potential threat from Russia may not come from a nefarious cyberweapon or secrets gleaned from the files of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor now in Moscow.

Instead, this menace may come in the form of a seemingly innocuous dome-topped antenna perched atop an electronics-packed building surrounded by a security fence somewhere in the United States.

In recent months, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have been quietly waging a campaign to stop the State Department from allowing Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to build about half a dozen of these structures, known as monitor stations, on United States soil, several American officials said.

They fear that these structures could help Russia spy on the United States and improve the precision of Russian weaponry, the officials said. These monitor stations, the Russians contend, would significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of Moscow’s version of the Global Positioning System, the American satellite network that steers guided missiles to their targets and thirsty smartphone users to the nearest Starbucks.

“They don’t want to be reliant on the American system and believe that their systems, like GPS, will spawn other industries and applications,” said a former senior official in the State Department’s Office of Space and Advanced Technology. “They feel as though they are losing a technological edge to us in an important market. Look at everything GPS has done on things like your phone and the movement of planes and ships.”

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State Dept. Cites Russia, But Won’t Comment on S. Arabia’s Death Penalty for Gays

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Photo Credit: APAlthough the U.S. State Department recently singled out Russia by name to criticize its law prohibiting homosexual propaganda aimed at youth, the same State Department refused to comment on Saudi Arabia where homosexual conduct is punishable by death.

On Oct. 24, Uzra Zeya, the acting assistant secretary of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, spoke at the ILGA-Europe annual conference in Zagrab, Croatia. ILGA is the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. In her remarks, Secretary Zeya said that promotion of human rights, including those for LGBT people, is a “foreign policy priority” of the United States.

Zeya praised new hate crimes legislation in Europe and then said, “But the United States remains extremely concerned about negative trends in a number of countries. The anti-gay propaganda law in Russia and the proposed law to strip gay parents of their parental rights are alarming.”

“Laws, even when it is unclear how they will be enforced, are incredibly important,” she said. “They are a statement of a country’s values and they have a teaching effect. Laws that validate discrimination, as we have seen in Russia, can lead to an increase in violence and harassment. This is particularly true when authorities don’t act to protect all of their citizens and when they fail to investigate and prosecute crimes committed by or against particular groups.”

Assistant Secretary Zeya also said, “I’ve singled out Russia but, as you all know, it is not the only place where there were disturbing events in 2013.”

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Russian Spy Agency Seeks To Expand NSA-Style Internet Surveillance

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Photo Credit: The Guardian Russian authorities are moving to expand surveillance of the Internet by requiring service providers to store all traffic temporarily and make it available to the top domestic intelligence agency.

Under an order drafted by the Communications Ministry, providers would have to install equipment that would record and save all Internet traffic for at least 12 hours and grant the security services exclusive access to the data.

President Vladimir Putin has tightened his grip over Russia since his election to a third term in March 2012 amid a wave of opposition protests, and security is being stepped up further before the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

The draft order, made public on Monday, is likely to deepen concerns over tighter surveillance of the Internet, where debate is much freer than in Russia’s conventional media and which security officials have said should be better controlled.

Russia drew global attention concerning a similar spying program in the United States and Britain after granting former U.S. intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden temporary asylum.

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Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia

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Photo Credit: WikiLeaks, via Associated PressEdward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them.

Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow, and did not keep any copies for himself. He did not take the files to Russia “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest,” he said.

“What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of the materials onward?” he added.

He also asserted that he was able to protect the documents from China’s spies because he was familiar with that nation’s intelligence abilities, saying that as an N.S.A. contractor he had targeted Chinese operations and had taught a course on Chinese cybercounterintelligence.

“There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents,” he said.

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Edward Snowden Breaks Cover in Moscow to Collect Prize for ‘Integrity in Intelligence’

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Photo Credit: Getty Images Edward Snowden has been pictured in public today for the first time since leaving Moscow airport.

The National Security Agency whisteblower emerged to collect the Sam Adams Associates Integrity in Intelligence Award.

The picture was published on the same day his father Lon Snowden arrived in Russia to see his son

Dressed in a black suit and open-necked blue shirt, Snowden was seen smiling alongside UK WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, who took the leaker from Hong Kong to Moscow and also obtained his asylum.

The precise location of the award ceremony is not known, although it is believed to have been in Moscow.

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Edward Snowden ‘Pictured out Shopping in Russia’

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Photo Credit: LIFE NEWSA photograph purporting to show Edward Snowden, the US intelligence leaker, out in public for the first time since being granted asylum, has been published by a Russian news website.

In the blurry image published by Life News, a casually dressed man sporting a goatee with sunglasses perched on his head is pictured pushing a supermarket trolley full of groceries across a road.

A car with partly legible Russian plates and a crossing sign identify the scene as in Russia.

“The photograph was taken in Moscow,” said Life News, which is known for its close ties to the Kremlin and security services.

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Russia Bans the Quran?

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Photo Credit: Free Patriot

Photo Credit: Free Patriot

In an unusual court ruling, the “October” district court in the Russian port city of Novorossiysk, on the Black Sea, [held] that the “Meaning of Qur’an” in the “Russian Language” is “recognized as extremist”. After the ruling the Russian court made a bold move to ban the Qur’an from Russia and not allowing it to be translated or distributed in Russian. It also recognized possession and distribution of the Qur’an as extremist.

The court cited expert testimony from Forensic Centre at the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (MVD) for the region who stated that the book contained:

…statements in which a person or group of persons (in particular, non-Muslims ) is portrayed negatively on grounds related to a particular religion; …. statements which address talking about the advantages of a single person or group of persons to other people on the grounds of religion (particularly the Muslims over non-Muslims ); … statements containing the positive assessment of hostile action of one group of people against another group of people on the basis of religion, specifically, Muslims towards non-Muslims; …statements of an inciting character, which can be understood as calling for hostile and violent actions by one group of people against another group of people on the basis of religion, in particular the Muslims towards non-Muslims.

The [court] cited a 2002 translation into Russian from Elmir Kuliev, who is the Director of Department of Geoculture at the Institute of Strategic Studies of the Caucasus. He was considered the leading contemporary on Russian Muslim Philosophy, and his translation is used and cited in several resources including Quransearch.org for the definitive Russian translation of the Qur’an.

The lawsuit leading to the ban was brought by the transport prosecutor’s office in Novorossiysk under general procedure article 45 of the Russian civil procedure code (which allows a prosecutor to act in the interest of unspecified citizens even where no complaint has been filed). The transport prosecutor is believed to have challenged the refusal of a different prosecutor’s office to institute criminal proceedings on the grounds of an offense under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code (incitement of National, Racial, or Religious Enmity), after the book was delivered by mail order to a local address.

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Reagan was to Gorbachev what Putin is to Obama (+video)

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Photo Credit: World Economic Forum Creative Commons

Photo Credit: World Economic Forum Creative Commons

Putin Didn’t Save Obama, He Beat Him.

With the Russian proposal on Syrian chemical weapons, the United States is being escorted out of the Middle East.

Maybe Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin really did discuss the idea of putting Syrian chemical weapons under international control last week on the sidelines of the G20 conference. Putin sure doesn’t care that Obama’s taking credit for the proposal, or that the administration is posturing like a Mob enforcer. “The only reason why we are seeing this proposal,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney, “is because of the U.S. threat of military action.”

Right, Putin is laughing to himself. Whatever. If Obama wants to sell it like a Christmas miracle on Pennsylvania Avenue that’s fine with Putin, because Putin won.

Reset with Russia was originally a strategic priority for the Obama administration because it saw Moscow as the key to getting Iran to come to the negotiating table. Putin, from the White House’s perspective, was destined for the role of junior partner. Now Putin has turned “Reset” upside down. By helping Obama out of a jam with Syria, Putin has made himself the senior partner to whom the White House is now beholden. Accordingly, when Putin proposes the same sort of deal with Iran, with Russia having established its bona fides as an interlocutor for Syria, Obama is almost certain to jump at it.

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Russia Entering Cultural Abyss – Close to Two Percent of Potential Population Aborted Every Year

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Foreign policy expert Ilan Berman says Russia is falling apart — and that could bode ill for the United States.

“The scale of social and cultural rot in contemporary Russian society is truly staggering,” Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council and editor of the Journal of International Security Affairs, told The Daily Caller in an email interview about his new book, “Implosion: The End of Russia and What it Means for America,” to be released Monday.

“Take abortion, for instance. According to official estimates, almost 1.2 million abortions are performed in Russia every year. That equals out to 300 babies every hour. According to unofficial projections, however, the true abortion rate could be as much as double that figure — which means that close to 2 percent of Russia’s potential population is being terminated every year!”

“Equally grim statistics can be found in the state of national health, in its alcoholism and drug addiction rates, and in its failing struggle to contain HIV/AIDS,” he continued. “It’s no wonder that one in five Russians now wants to live abroad — and almost half of Russians between the ages of 18 and 35 are actively considering doing so. Russia, simply put, is a dying project — and the Russians themselves know it.”

But the cultural rot is only part of Russia’s problem, Berman says. He says the country is imploding because its “population is constricting by close to half-a-million people every year as a result of both death and emigration;” because its population is “transforming” in that its “radicalizing” Muslim minority “isn’t facing the same demographic stressors as its Slavic majority is;” and because of the ”challenge from China.”

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