Epstein Secrets

ons to deal with. That has been a fundamental premise throughout the Soviet /Russian existence. Can you give a recent example? Yes. In the case of Chechnya, the Russians were extremely nervous during the initial phases of that war [1994-1996] that there'd be some sort of UN resolution that argued for a

s to put down the rebellion there against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is the remake of a really bad movie that starred Bashar's father, Hafez, exactly 30 years ago this month. I know. I saw the original. It was April 1982 and I had just arrived in Beirut as a reporter for The New York Ti

February in the Syrian town of Hama, led by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Word had it (there were no Internet or cellphones) that then-President Hafez al-Assad had quashed the rebellion by shelling whole Hama neighborhoods, then dynamiting buildings, some with residents still inside. That May, I got a visa

nemies. In 2004, Russian secret agents assassinated Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a warlord and vice president of the EFTA00706395 breakaway republic of Chechnya, as he ferried his 13-year-old son down the streets of Doha and away from the mosque where they had just participated in Friday prayers. An intense

ians do." The Syrian-Russian relationship was always rather complicated, full of mutual suspicion and attempts by Moscow to impose an ideology that Hafez al-Assad didn't much care for, in exchange for military and intelligence assistance that Syria couldn't do without. But Damascus isn't just a resurrected st

have in fact challenged the fundamentals of Syria's security state, a harsh system of controls over every aspect of society, put in place by the late Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, who ruled for 30 years from 1970 to his death in 2000. By all accounts, the debate HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030032 --- PAGE BREAK --- 4 ab

hat foreigners have the right to intervene to prevent human rights abuses in a sovereign nation. The same goes for the Russians, with their record in Chechnya. India, Brazil and South Africa are democratic countries with no need for a contingency plan to shoot their own citizens. But their colonial historie