Russian Intelligence War in the Uk

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by Itse

Now, US involvement in Turkish operations is indirect, but it's pretty definite. They are selling arms to Turkey which the Turks are then directly handing over to the "Arab militias" doing much of their groundwork, and there's nothing about this that's much of a secret.

U.S - Turkish relations are at their lowest point since WW2. Erdogan's regime is flirting with Russia over missile defence systems and new fighter jet procurement, and behaves pretty much as it likes in Syria. There are real doubts about Turkey's future in NATO. Turkey and NATO are Growing Apart - The Unhappy Marriage: https://www.economist.com/news/europ...-growing-apart

The U.S. has little influence in Turkey since the most pro-Western elements of the Turkish establishment - the military officer class - were purged in Erdogan's crackdown on the 'coup attempt.'

So no, the U.S. is not 'supporting ethnic cleansing against the Kurds.' An erstwhile ally has pretty much gone rogue, and the U.S. doesn't have the stomach to deploy boots on the ground to fight against that erstwhile ally.

Comparing the U.S. to Russia is a monstrously false equivalence. If the U.S. really was no different from Putin's regime, we wouldn't be watching Samantha Bee and John Oliver getting in twitter fights with Trump - we'd be watching their corpses being pulled out of the Hudson River.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

Ok two things:


1: they US must be pretty #### at it if they can't get it done 638 attempts

2: seems like an unbiased source.

US sources have 8 as the number of attempts on Castro.

But let's remember, the US have under both the Bush administration and the Obama administration openly advertised that they are hunting and killing people on foreign soils without judicial procedure and without the consent of local countries. Osama Bin Laden is the most famous example, but many of those "targeted killings" are done by airstrikes, which routinely kill many more people than the target. Infamously whole wedding parties or funerals have been wiped out this way.

The US also for example kidnapped and tortured an Islamist cleric in Italy, which is something we (the public) mostly know about because they were too brazen about it and the Italian police made a big deal of it. (Something like a dozen Americans were actually convicted to prison in absentia.)

When you consider that this is just the stuff we hear about, you don't have to imagine very hard to realize that there's probably a good bunch of nasty stuff the US is doing which we just never know about.

[Bagor]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

To me using a persistent nerve agent does two things. It pretty much guarantees that its an easier mission. you don't have to be anywhere near the scene for it to work.

What?

We need Ivan dead. Here's your choice of weapon. You can either take this nerve agent and make sure it is absorbed into his body, but just be careful you get none on yourself at the same time or take this gun and put a cap in his head anytime and place of your choosing.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by Bagor

What?

We need Ivan dead. Here's your choice of weapon. You can either take this nerve agent and make sure it is absorbed into his body, but just be careful you get none on yourself at the same time or take this gun and put a cap in his head anytime and place of your choosing.

A gun leaves more forensics. makes a louder noise which draws attention.

If you track a guy every day and know on Wednesday for example that he and his daughter eat at this pub, and sit at this table, then you can show up earlier, apply a dab to the table or chair, and calmly walk out, and nobody is the wiser.

Plus the victim doesn't die right away, he gets up and walks out and then it looks like he suffers from a heart attack or stroke to the untrained eye.

[Bagor]

And if he doesn't eat at the pub? Somebody else sits there?

You're introducing uncertainties which make my point for me that it is far from a easy means of killing someone.

Sure a gun makes noise. That's it. That's the only disadvantage. It's louder. But I'm sure the Russians can afford a clean gun and dispose of it later. It's also more certain. As things stand the target(s) are still alive.

A gun killing also opens the doors to lots of theories as to who could have done it whilst the agent points back to a narrower path.

And not a hope in hell, if he had died right away that the Brits would just write it off as a natural event.

[Red Ice Player]

I don't know how to embed tweets but these are words of wisdom from Gary Kasparov, the smartest Russian I know of. How refreshing that he's on the right side of history.

@Kasparov63
Modern kleptocracies like Putin's are built on laundering & keeping their looted riches in the free world. This is also their greatest weakness, one the West has not exploited, preferring the fiction of common ground & engagement.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

An erstwhile ally has pretty much gone rogue, and the U.S. doesn't have the stomach to deploy boots on the ground to fight against that erstwhile ally.

They don't need boots on the ground, they have an airforce, and the Islamist militias are not wearing Turkish colours. If the US wanted to intervene they could.

But as you said, they still consider Turkey an ally. An "erstwhile" or "rogue" ally, but still an ally, to the point that once again when push comes to shove between what is really a pretty straightforward good guys vs. bad guys situation in Afrin, staying on the good side of the bad guys is more important than interfering in a possible / likely ethnic cleansing of the good guys.

(Seriously the Kurds are as close to good guys as it comes in the area.)

Let's also not forget that the Islamist extremists are armed among others by Saudi Arabia, another ally that US eagerly sells weapons to with full knowledge that they are ending up in Afrin to be used against the Kurds there. (And Yemen, and many other places.) So the question of whether or not US is "supporting" ethnic cleansing is really mostly semantics. It doesn't really make a difference in Afrin if the US kind of feels bad about whats going on.

Comparing the U.S. to Russia is a monstrously false equivalence. If the U.S. really was no different from Putin's regime, we wouldn't be watching Samantha Bee and John Oliver getting in twitter fights with Trump - we'd be watching their corpses being pulled out of the Hudson River.

That's such a fundamentally American way to measure things: with American lives.

We need to make a difference between two things here; country to live in and government action. US is undoubtedly a better country to live in than Russia, but their governments and international policies are just as morally bankrupt, and US has been far more destructive. Russians are treating their own citizens worse, but especially in the Soviet times they were a lot less expansionist and aggressive.

When ever the US government gets away with incredible crap, they do if it's convenient. They are literally willing to bomb women and children to get to people who oppose them or their allies, aka "combatants". They don't want to discuss the fact those combatants are essentially fighting against a foreign invasion force. Doesn't make them nice guys, many of them are not, but that's not the reason the US bombs them, because we know they don't bomb the bad guys on their side. US drone attacks alone have killed thousands of people, including hundreds of children. Russia murdering journalists or even dropping that civilian airliner doesn't really make this race close.

Yeah, Russia invaded Donbass and Crimea, displacing over 2M people and some thousands of civilians dead, plus thousands of soldiers. That's terrible. The US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, death toll in the hundreds of thousands and an unholy mess that is still not over. They've been bombing Iraq for 27 years in a row. Plus they have that whole "creating Islamist militias in Afghanisthan thing" on their conscience. And yeah, they've always known those militia leaders were terrible people. They didn't care, because they weren't communists. That's just evil.

Yeah, it's nice that US is a more free country to live in, but they really need to stop killing thousands of foreigners to have some moral high ground internationally.

Of course alternatively you could argue the US are not evil, just idiots with a lot of power. You might have a case there.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by Red Ice Player

I don't know how to embed tweets but these are words of wisdom from Gary Kasparov, the smartest Russian I know of. How refreshing that he's on the right side of history.

@Kasparov63
Modern kleptocracies like Putin's are built on laundering & keeping their looted riches in the free world. This is also their greatest weakness, one the West has not exploited, preferring the fiction of common ground & engagement.

In the old days you could always trust that nobility would put aside their differences when the peasants revolted.

These days you can always trust that the rich will protect the wealth of other rich people from government interference.

[nik-]

Originally Posted by Itse

They don't need boots on the ground, they have an airforce, and the Islamist militias are not wearing Turkish colours. If the US wanted to intervene they could.

But as you said, they still consider Turkey an ally. An "erstwhile" or "rogue" ally, but still an ally, to the point that once again when push comes to shove between what is really a pretty straightforward good guys vs. bad guys situation in Afrin, staying on the good side of the bad guys is more important than interfering in a possible / likely ethnic cleansing of the good guys.

(Seriously the Kurds are as close to good guys as it comes in the area.)

Let's also not forget that the Islamist extremists are armed among others by Saudi Arabia, another ally that US eagerly sells weapons to with full knowledge that they are ending up in Afrin to be used against the Kurds there. (And Yemen, and many other places.) So the question of whether or not US is "supporting" ethnic cleansing is really mostly semantics. It doesn't really make a difference in Afrin if the US kind of feels bad about whats going on.



That's such a fundamentally American way to measure things: with American lives.

We need to make a difference between two things here; country to live in and government action. US is undoubtedly a better country to live in than Russia, but their governments and international policies are just as morally bankrupt, and US has been far more destructive. Russians are treating their own citizens worse, but especially in the Soviet times they were a lot less expansionist and aggressive.

When ever the US government gets away with incredible crap, they do if it's convenient. They are literally willing to bomb women and children to get to people who oppose them or their allies, aka "combatants". They don't want to discuss the fact those combatants are essentially fighting against a foreign invasion force. Doesn't make them nice guys, many of them are not, but that's not the reason the US bombs them, because we know they don't bomb the bad guys on their side. US drone attacks alone have killed thousands of people, including hundreds of children. Russia murdering journalists or even dropping that civilian airliner doesn't really make this race close.

Yeah, Russia invaded Donbass and Crimea, displacing over 2M people and some thousands of civilians dead, plus thousands of soldiers. That's terrible. The US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, death toll in the hundreds of thousands and an unholy mess that is still not over. They've been bombing Iraq for 27 years in a row. Plus they have that whole "creating Islamist militias in Afghanisthan thing" on their conscience. And yeah, they've always known those militia leaders were terrible people. They didn't care, because they weren't communists. That's just evil.

Yeah, it's nice that US is a more free country to live in, but they really need to stop killing thousands of foreigners to have some moral high ground internationally.

Of course alternatively you could argue the US are not evil, just idiots with a lot of power. You might have a case there.

The Russians never stoked communist insurgencies. The Russians never invaded Afghanistan. The Russian never starved 5 million Ukranians to death. The Russians never invaded your ####ing country. The Russians weren't responsible for pushing, globally, an ideology which oversaw the deaths of 70 to 100 million people.

The Americans invaded Iraq, unlawfully, and a lot of people died, therefore the Russians are absolved. Your outlook on history is tragically narrow.

People my grandmother knew, friends of her parents, left a safe life in Canada to go fight for the freedom of their home country, YOUR country. Now, three generations later we've got a massive apologist here defending a country that has really never changed.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Basically, Itse seems to have followed Noam Chomsky off a cliff of moral confusion, whereby the primary way (or really only way, based on this thread) to determine a nation's degree of moral blameworthiness for its actions internationally is to tally up the total body count. Intentions do not matter, policy grounds do not matter, just look at how many people were killed by your weapons and compare it to how many people were killed by other country X's weapons, and you'll be immediately able to judge which country is "worse". This sort of analysis isn't particularly rare, unfortunately.

This of course leaves aside the fact that we were, initially, talking about the threats presented by Putin's Russia right now, not trying to conduct a historical analysis of foreign policy nation by nation. Next we'll be castigating Mongolia for its actions in the 13th century, apparently...

[Handsome B. Wonderful]

Originally Posted by Itse

Russians are treating their own citizens worse, but especially in the Soviet times they were a lot less expansionist and aggressive.

Look at this guy, pretending World War 2 and its aftermath never happened.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by nik-

The Russians never invaded your ####ing country.

Umm, what? Hello, Finn here?

The Americans invaded Iraq, unlawfully, and a lot of people died, therefore the Russians are absolved. Your outlook on history is tragically narrow.

Relax, take a deep breath.

If you looked at what I'm saying, I'm mostly talking about ongoing stuff, not history. I'm not talking about "absolving" Russia.

Basically what I'm saying is superpowers gonna superpower.

[nik-]

Originally Posted by Itse

Umm, what? Hello, Finn here?



Relax, take a deep breath.

If you looked at what I'm saying, I'm mostly talking about ongoing stuff, not history. I'm not talking about "absolving" Russia.

Basically what I'm saying is superpowers gonna superpower.

Sorry, I thought the sarcasm was clear, since you know, the Russians did all of those things.

Your whole post is whataboutism. The tallies aren't equal, stop pretending they are. So regardless of what you're saying your talking about, the theme of your actual posts are going in another direction.

[longsuffering]

Originally Posted by blankall

I think people are really underestimating how difficult it is to reign Putin in at this point.

Firstly, any kind of military option is off the table. You can send your own espionage/assassination teams back, but Russia is playing with a different set of rules. Extrajudicial killings are very difficult to authorize in Western nations, while Russia has no issues. Russia also doesn't have any standard liberties. They monitor whomever they want. If they suspect you are a spy, they kidnap and torture you.

Economic sanctions? Those only work where a population is free enough to put pressure on their own government to lift them. Russia doesn't care if its people starve. In fact, that's regularly part of their game plan. Russia also always responds to sanctions with a plethora of shady and backdoor deals with various other dictatorships. The EU and the USA already have heavy sanctions in place, and they do nothing.

It's basically been the same song and dance since Russia came into being over 1000 years ago. The Russian trump card is that they are always ready and able to sacrifice more than anyone else.

A major issue with perception is that there's constantly these comparisons being made between Russia and Western governments, most notably the USA, to push some kind of moral relativism. The fact of the matter is that Russia is playing by a different set of rules and is another tier when it comes to abuse of liberties. Russia presents themselves as a functioning democracy and their propaganda machine is constantly spewing stories about the abuse and poverty in the West, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Kidnap and torture of suspected spies? People are not disappearing in the night. Putin is not Stalin.

Russians starving as a result of economic sanctions? I think that's more than a bit over the top. Actually it is completely false.

Like it or not, Putin is genuinely loved by the average Russian. You could say he appeals to his base in much the same way Trump appeals to his.

[rubecube]

Sorry, but is the U.S. currently turning a blind eye to homosexuals being systematically murdered in say Puerto Rico?

[longsuffering]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

In the States required congressional oversight would probably say differently. because the only way they would pull this off is if the CIA got sign off from the President for example and he would have to inform the Intelligence Committee. Otherwise it would be an illegal operation and yes, then the president could be impeached.

I'm not sure how British law works in this case, but there are rules in terms of black ops.

You mean like Ollie North's Iran Contra operation?

[afc wimbledon]

They used this poison precisely because they wanted to send a message and they (he, Putin) didn't care whether others were killed, the whole point of this was to send a message to the world, any potential spies, his population.

This was Putin telling all of us he is a strong leader who will do what ever he needs to to make Russia Great again.

[Pointman]

Originally Posted by Handsome B. Wonderful

Look at this guy, pretending World War 2 and its aftermath never happened.

That's weird comment. WW2 was started by Germany (or Japan if you consider Japan-China war as the beginning).

Russia was invaded by Hitler, suffered casualties that are unparalleled in history of the mankind, and, along with USA and Britain, destroyed Hitler - the biggest evil to walk the earth.

If you think, that WW2 was some sort of expansion war by Russia, you are out to lunch.

[Pointman]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

Basically, Itse seems to have followed Noam Chomsky off a cliff of moral confusion, whereby the primary way (or really only way, based on this thread) to determine a nation's degree of moral blameworthiness for its actions internationally is to tally up the total body count. Intentions do not matter, policy grounds do not matter, just look at how many people were killed by your weapons and compare it to how many people were killed by other country X's weapons, and you'll be immediately able to judge which country is "worse". This sort of analysis isn't particularly rare, unfortunately.

This of course leaves aside the fact that we were, initially, talking about the threats presented by Putin's Russia right now, not trying to conduct a historical analysis of foreign policy nation by nation. Next we'll be castigating Mongolia for its actions in the 13th century, apparently...

The reason why people resort to stuff like toll count and put less emphasis on intentions is because you can be misled by propaganda and false testimonies (Saddam's weapons of mass destructions anyone)?

But in the bigger picture it is not even about counting who is more evil. The point is that just like in the NHL everyone is playing more or less the same system, in foreign politics every one is playing roughly the same dirty game.

Lies, propaganda, false flags, spying, assassinations, airstrikes, proxy wars are staples of a foreign policy game of any major country. USA is no different. Better country to live in? Sure. I can go as far, as to say that in my experience Americans are better people than Russians. But the way USA acts on the world scene is no better than Russia's, or any other major country for that matter.

[nik-]

It's sad. Poor Russians man.