ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

By Gilbert Doctorow A new French documentary depicts a long-denied truth that Ukraine is in the grip of extreme right-wing nationalists who seek to impose what the British scholar Richard Sakwa has called a monist view of nationhood, one which does not accept minorities or heterogeneity. Rainbow politics is not what the Maidan uprising was all about. Like the Communism which held power in Ukraine before 1992, this new extreme nationalism can impose its will only by violence or the threat of violence. It is by definition the antithesis of European values of tolerance and multiculturalism. Sen. John McCain appearing with Ukrainian rightists of the Svoboda party at a pre-coup rally in Kiev. This intimidation is what Paul Moreira’s Canal+ documentary, “Ukraine: The Masks of Revolution,” shows us graphically, frame by frame. That this repression happens to take place under an ideology that incorporates elements of fascism if not Nazism is incidental but not decisive to the power of the docu...

Egypt’s military regime is suppressing political opposition even more ferociously than the longtime Mubarak dictatorship while also collaborating in the strangulation of Gaza, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar. By Paul R. Pillar With U.S. attention toward the Middle East being recently focused on such matters as warfare in Syria and Iraq and on the relationship with Saudi Arabia, little attention span is left over for the relationship with the most populous Arab nation. But developments in Egypt have, in multiple respects, significant capacity for creating attention-grabbing problems for Washington in addition to problems to which Egypt already is contributing in significant though less salient ways. Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi The regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has become increasingly harsh, illiberal, and downright brutal—much more so than the last previous Egyptian general-turned-president, Hosni Mubarak. The State Department’s official human rights report on Egypt say...

Exclusive eye witness reports and documents, abandoned by retreating jihadists and found by RT Documentary crew members in a region liberated by Syrian Kurds, point to a commercial scale oil smuggling operations and the terror group’s cozy relations with Turkey. Exclusive and unprecedented footage, along with witness accounts, was filmed by the RT Documentary crew only ten days after the town of Shaddadi in Syrian Kurdistan was liberated from Islamic State terrorists. The area surrounding the town is well known for its vast oil reserves and extraction activity that for months was reaped by ISIS command to generate revenue. Following Kurdish soldiers around the destroyed and abandoned homes, RT Documentary found documents which showed a direct link between Turkey and Islamic State fighters operating in Syria. The jihadi paperwork included an entire pile of foreign passports with Turkish entry stamps, and booklets encouraging jihad against the the Syrian government, printed in Turkey. Bu...

by PETER LEE I’m expecting tactical nuclear weapons to reappear overtly in the US military equation for Asia… …but only after the US Navy gets its chance to feast at the pivot trough for its long-for but perhaps strategically less-than-vital conventional forces buildout in Asia. I have an article up exclusively on Asia Times, The Case of the Missing Nukes …and a Disappearing US Mission in Asia, concerning an interesting and, I fear, transitory lack of tactical nuclear weapons in theater in Asia. US land based tactical nukes for the army and air force were pulled out of Asia at the end of the Cold War and it would require major political and diplomatic handwringing to put them back. The US Navy got out of the tactical nuke business for surface vessels worldwide at the same time. The Pentagon then stripped the Navy of its submarine tactical nuke, the nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missile, the TLAM-N, formally and irrevocably retiring it in 2013 over the objections of Japan and a certain...

As the main Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam appeared in a French court for the first time since his extradition, his Belgian lawyer described his former client as a “little moron” and more of a follower than a leader, with the “intelligence of an ashtray.” Refusing to address charges formally brought against him by the French court on Wednesday, Abdeslam claimed to be tired from the “quite rough”extradition, when elite French military police flew him to France. The 26-year-old Abdeslam has been scheduled to appear in court on May 20. The sole survivor of the Islamist cell which killed 130 people in a series of shootings and suicide bombings in Paris on Nov. 13 stands accused of belonging to a terrorist organization, murder, kidnapping and possessing weapons and explosives. As Abdeslam was handed over to the French authorities and a French defense team, his Belgian lawyer, Sven Mary, who has spoken to the suspect on eight occasions following his capture in Brussels on March 1...

RT Barack Obama wants to leave a legacy that shows some sign of a successful presidency. However he continues to experiment in Syria, which may hamper the Geneva peace talks, says Hans-Christof Von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary-General. President Obama has announced the biggest escalation of American intervention in Syria to date with a further 250 troops, on top of dozens who are already on the ground. "Given the success, I've approved the deployment of up to 250 additional US personnel in Syria, including special forces to keep up this momentum," the US President said in a speech at a trade fair in Hanover , Germany. "They're not going to be leading the fight on the ground, but they will be essential in providing the training and assisting local forces as they continue to drive ISIL back," he said. RT: Mr. Sponeck, President Obama is now sending hundreds of American troops to help what he called “local forces” in Syria. That's a big vagu...

Washington DC’s Tenleytown and Friendship Heights Metro stations were evacuated after reports that an explosion in a mechanical room had caused a fire and heavy smoke. Witnesses describe a chaos and poor communications by metro staff. People reported hearing blasts and seeing flames and smoke underground. Social media messages described the panic on a smoke-filled Red Line train. DC Fire and EMS have tweeted out that there had been no casualties, but there is still smoke between the Friendship Heights & Tenleytown/AU stations. The incident was caused by “trouble inside a mechanical room,” DC Fire and EMS reported on its Twitter account. According to the emergency response team, the heavy smoke is concentrated around an insulator that caught on fire at the platform. RT America producer Shefali Kapadia got stuck at the Bethesda metro station because of the fire. She reported that crowds of people were rushing from the metro and across the street, trying to get to other means of tra...

Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) is selling antiquities looted from Syria to buyers in the US and Europe as a means of funding its terrorist activities. The jihadists are transporting the artifacts out of the country via Turkey according to documents from IS’s Ministry of Natural Resources, obtained exclusively by an RT documentary crew. Yaya J. Fanusie , director of analysis at the Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance told RT that this is a “very strategically important source of revenue for Islamic State”. “There’s definitely a pipeline that goes through the states that border the region, so Turkey is one location where there’s a lot of smuggling,” he said. Middlemen have told the center that buyers are coming from the US and Europe – but they haven’t documented the final buyers. Fanusie was among a number of experts who testified at a special hearing held by the US House Financial Services Committee’s Task Force to Investigate Terrorism Financing this week. The he...