Tag: poland
Latest Strikes On Civilian Targets In Ukraine Show Russia Is A Terrorist State

Latest Strikes On Civilian Targets In Ukraine Show Russia Is A Terrorist State

With news breaking on Tuesday afternoon that two Russian missiles may have struck a grain processing plant in Poland near its border with Ukraine, killing two Polish civilians, one question immediately arises: Why would Russia be firing missiles at targets within Ukraine that are close enough to the Polish border that a misfired, or off course, missile might land within the territory of Poland, a NATO ally?

All the facts are not in yet, but military experts interviewed on MSNBC, including General Barry McCaffrey and Admiral James Stavridis, the former Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, seem confident that two Russian missiles apparently struck Polish soil. The town where the grain processing facility is located, Przewodow, is four miles from the border with Ukraine and is about 60 miles north of the Ukrainian city of Lviv, which was the target of a major Russian missile attack today.

Both Lviv and Przewodow are within the range of a Russian Iskander SS-26 missile fired from within the territory of Belarus, directly north of both Lviv and Eastern Poland. The Iskander missile, launched from a mobile platform on a truck chassis, has been used repeatedly by Russia against civilian and military targets inside Ukraine. It is thought to be one of the missiles being used to target Ukrainian energy facilities which are within its reach if fired from either Russian or Belarussian soil.


Everyone, including former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, agrees that the Russian missile strikes on Monday night and early Tuesday against civilian targets in Ukraine were made in retaliation for Ukraine’s recent victory in Kherson, when several days ago they ran Russian forces out of the important Ukrainian port on the Black Sea.

But, wait a minute! If you are a great power with a large army, a strong navy, and a powerful air force that has long range bombers and the latest up-to-date fighter jets, aren’t you supposed to respond to an enemy assault on the ground militarily? Shouldn’t Russia be marshaling its forces in the south of Ukraine for a major counterattack with the aim of re-taking the territory it lost around Kherson?

That would be the case if Russia was indeed a great power with a powerful army, navy, and air force, including, it must be noted, nuclear weapons. But nine months after its abortive invasion of Ukraine, Russia has shown itself to be a second or even third-rate military power that has suffered defeat after defeat since its invasion of Ukraine in February.

Russia’s forces are holding onto a sliver of territory taken in the early months of the war along Ukraine’s eastern border, and in its south along the Sea of Azoz and the Black Sea, at least until Ukraine re-took Kherson last week. Instead of assembling a military force in the south capable of re-taking Kherson and launching a counterattack, Vladimir Putin has struck back at Ukrainian civilians and its energy infrastructure.

This is what terrorist states and terrorist actors do when they perceive that they are weaker than their enemies. It’s what al Qaeda did in 2001, when lacking an air force and a well-equipped army, they launched their now infamous attack on America by hijacking airliners and flying them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C.

Putin isn’t that weak. He didn’t have to resort to hijackings and hostage taking. Instead, he launched missiles against civilians in Ukraine, and it now appears, in Poland as well. It is not known at this time which missiles were launched against Ukraine, although reports from Ukraine say a “mass launch of KH-101 cruise missiles” took place from the Vologograd-Astrakhan Region in Russia earlier today.

It is thought that the Iskander SS-26 missile could also have been used against targets in Ukraine, as it was earlier in the war. It is a short-range semi -ballistic missile, which is to say, after launch, the missile is unpowered, following a trajectory programmed by the ground launch system. The missile is maneuverable with small fins and has a relatively flat trajectory, staying within the earth’s atmosphere. The Iskander is equipped with an optical guidance system which is employed as the missile nears its target. Aerial photographs of a target can be programmed into the missile which the missile is supposed to lock onto in flight and follow as its trajectory descends toward the target. The KH-101 cruise missiles also have an optical guidance system used as the missile nears its target.

But the Russian missile is “guided” only in a very basic sense, and it is not very accurate. Its optical homing system used by both the Iskander and the KH-101 is vulnerable to low-lying clouds, heavy rain, and other bad weather. The Russian missiles which apparently struck the grain facility in Poland may have been set to hit targets in and around Lviv, which took a heavy missile barrage around the time of the strikes in Poland. The Russian missiles may have been caused to go off-target by either weather or anti-missile battery fire. All of this is, at this point, unknown.

What is known by the strikes on Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other population centers earlier today, is that the missiles were sent to hit civilian targets. Several civilian apartment buildings were hit in Kyiv and Lviv. Ukrainian energy infrastructure also came under missile attack.

This is not the military behavior of a great power that has gone to war against a weaker enemy. It is the behavior of a desperate dictator striking out wildly against a country he has made his enemy by fiat and against which he is losing the war he launched. Ukraine didn’t perceive itself to be an enemy of Russia before it was invaded. The perception of Ukraine as an enemy of Russia was entirely Vladimir Putin’s, just as the perception of the U.S. as an enemy was entirely Osama bin Laden’s. Ukraine didn’t ask for the Russian attack on its soil any more than the U.S. asked for the attack by al Qaeda against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Terrorists carried out those attacks, and terrorists carried out the attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine today and every other day since the war was started by Russia on February 24. Poland being struck by Russian missiles was avoidable by Putin any time before he launched his invasion of Ukraine nine months ago.

Military leaders of NATO nations are meeting under Article Four of the NATO treaty. This is the article NATO follows before engaging Article Five, which famously pledges that an attack on any NATO nation is an attack against all of them.

The situation now,, after the Russian missiles apparently landed on Polish soil, is unstable. By attacking Ukraine, Putin thought he could keep his neighbor country out of NATO. Now he has driven Ukraine into an even tighter military alliance with NATO than existed before February 24. Ukraine has become a NATO member country in all but name. It is Putin’s nightmare. Whether it will turn into Europe’s nightmare as well, only time and careful military analysis will tell.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter

Poland’s Holocaust Bill Is a Hate Speech Ban

Poland’s Holocaust Bill Is a Hate Speech Ban

In Poland, as in several other European countries, it is a crime to deny the Holocaust. Soon, thanks to a bill that was approved by the lower house of the Polish parliament on Friday, it may also be a crime to discuss the Holocaust too frankly.

The pending ban on references to Polish complicity in Nazi genocide, which has provoked outrage in Israel and around the world, may seem inconsistent with the ban on Holocaust denial. But the two taboos are of a piece with each other and with Poland’s prohibition of ethnic insults — a fact that should give pause to American fans of European-style speech regulation.

The Polish bill makes it a crime, punishable by fines and up to three years in prison, to accuse “the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.” The legislation was motivated largely by anger at the common use of phrases like “Polish death camps,” which could be read to mean that the war crimes committed by Germans in occupied Poland were a project of the Polish government.

“German Nazi crimes are attributed to Poles,” Deputy Justice Minister Patryk Jaki complained last week. “And so far the Polish state has not been able to effectively fight these types of insults to the Polish nation.”

Some of these “insults” happen to be true, since part of “the Polish nation” was “complicit in the Nazi crimes.” Poles saved Jews, but Poles also murdered Jews, under Nazi instruction and on their own initiative.

Acknowledging that complicated and troubling reality could expose people to criminal liability under the proposed law, notwithstanding its focus on statements “contrary to fact” and its exemption for people engaged in “artistic or scientific activities.” The bill, which applies to mistakes as well as deliberate misrepresentations, charges the government with determining what is true and whose motives are elevated enough to shield them from prosecution.

The impact of such a system goes far beyond the people who are actually fined or imprisoned, since the possibility of an investigation encourages self-censorship. The result — people afraid to speak their minds, lest they attract unwanted attention from the government — hardly seems consistent with the “freedom to express opinions” and “disseminate information” guaranteed by the Polish constitution.

The same could be said of the Polish laws that make a criminal out of anyone who minimizes or denies Nazi war crimes or who insults or incites hatred against people based on their nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. These are fuzzy categories that invite arbitrary and unpredictable enforcement, chilling speech that might offend the sensibilities of protected groups.

The proposed ban on charges of Polish complicity in the Holocaust is similar in logic as well as impact, since it criminalizes “insults to the Polish nation,” a kind of group defamation. The same principle that is aimed at protecting minorities from verbal oppression can be easily adapted by majorities seeking to suppress speech that makes them uncomfortable.

We need not look abroad to see how slippery the concept of hate speech can be. Last year Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, argued that the University of California at Berkeley’s decision to cancel a speech by conservative commentator Ann Coulter did not raise any constitutional issues because “hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.

Dean was wrong about that, since “hate speech” is not a legally relevant category in the United States, and his loose use of the phrase demonstrated why making it so would be dangerous. Why bother to argue with your opponents when you can have them arrested?

The Polish legislators who want to criminalize speech that offends them are trying the same shortcut. The only way to close it off is by rejecting, once and for all, the illiberal idea that people have a right not to be offended.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @jacobsullum. To find out more about Jacob Sullum and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

PHOTO: Holocaust survivors walk under the sign that reads Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work makes you free”) after paying tribute to fallen comrades at the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland, on January 27, 2015

 

 

Survivors Return To Auschwitz As Leaders Warn Of Anti-Semitism

Survivors Return To Auschwitz As Leaders Warn Of Anti-Semitism

Oswiecim (Poland) (AFP) – Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, ageing survivors gathered at the site synonymous with the Holocaust on Tuesday as world leaders sounded the alarm over a fresh wave of anti-Semitism.

French President Francois Hollande and his Czech counterpart echoed warnings by a leading Jewish organisation, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg over violence against Jews in modern-day Europe.

Telling French Jews that “France is your homeland,” Hollande described as “unbearable” the rise in anti-Semitic attacks in France, underscored by the Islamist killings at a kosher supermarket in Paris earlier this month.

Anti-Semitic acts in France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, doubled in 2014 to 851 from the previous year, France’s main Jewish group CRIF said Tuesday.

The European Jewish Congress chief Moshe Kantor had warned that Europe is “close to” a new exodus of Jews, saying that “jihadism is very close to Nazism”.

Merkel said it was a “disgrace” that Jews in Germany faced insults, threats and violence, as she joined survivors Monday in Berlin to observe 70 years since the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz.

As he prepared to visit the camp, Spielberg, who won an Oscar for the Holocaust drama Schindler’s List, condemned “the growing effort to banish Jews from Europe”.

The director, who has also videotaped the testimony of 58,000 survivors, met with hundreds of them, mostly in their nineties, as they returned to Auschwitz for the liberation ceremonies on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Royals from Belgium and The Netherlands are expected to attend the event at Birkenau’s somber snow-cloaked crematorium memorial.

Hollande, German President Joachim Gauck and Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko are to participate in the commemoration along with a dozen other leaders, but Russia, the United States and Israel have chosen to send lower-ranking representatives.

Also attending is Celina Biniaz, who was among the 1,200 Jews who escaped Auschwitz by being placed on Oskar Schindler’s famous list.

Still elegant at 83, as a child she left the death camp to work in a nearby factory run by the German industrialist.

“I so wish they would settle that problem in the Middle East because I so believe that it has a definite impact on what’s happening with anti-Semitism all over Europe,” Biniaz, who came from California for the ceremonies, told AFP.

“The Muslims have been disenfranchised and their young have no hope for the future, so they are desperate and it sounds glamorous for them to join things like ISIS,” she said, referring to the Islamic State group.

However, Czech President Milos Zeman struck a different note by calling for further military action against the jihadists to prevent a “super Holocaust” with hundreds of millions of victims.

For another survivor David Wisnia, his return to Auschwitz is bringing on nightmares and flashbacks for the first time.

“It’s a lifetime ago really,” the 88-year-old said.

“Last night sleeping… I had a horrible dream and woke up and looked out the window and sort of thought that I was back in Birkenau in cell block 14 where I started in 1942.”

The grandson of the infamous Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hoess has also come.

“I can’t forgive my father or my grandfather. I’m completely different,” Rainer Hoess, who is devoted to fighting anti-Semitism, told reporters as he visited Auschwitz.

Roza Krzywolwocka-Laurow, 79, was sent to Auschwitz in 1944 as an eight-year-old Polish partisan.

“If I survived it was to warn against this ever happening again,” she told AFP at the bullet-riddled “Wall of Death”, where the Nazis shot thousands.

Part of Adolf Hitler’s genocide plan against European Jews, dubbed the “Final Solution”, Auschwitz-Birkenau operated in the occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim between June 1940 and January 1945.

Of the more than 1.3 million people imprisoned there, some 1.1 million — mainly European Jews — perished, either in the gas chambers or by starvation or disease.

The Nazis killed six million of pre-war Europe’s 11 million Jews.

Historical records show that by 1942, the Polish resistance provided Allied powers with eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. Inexplicably, Washington and London failed to act.

“The debate as to why the Allies did not bomb the supply lines to Auschwitz remains unresolved,” survivor Marcel Tuchman told AFP.

“Whether there was a sinister reason behind it or whether it was just tactical, in that they didn’t want to divert their air force remains unclear,” the 93-year-old New York-based professor of medicine said.

“A little bomb in the proper place would have really helped.”

Photo: Survivors walk under the sign saying “Work makes you free” after paying tribute to fallen comrades at the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland, on January 27, 2015 (AFP/Odd Andersen)

European Court Condemns Poland For Hosting Secret CIA Prisons

European Court Condemns Poland For Hosting Secret CIA Prisons

Strasbourg (France) (AFP) — Europe’s top human rights court condemned Poland on Thursday for hosting secret CIA prisons on its territory, saying Warsaw knowingly abetted unlawful imprisonment and torture of Guantanamo-bound detainees.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of a Palestinian and a Saudi national who were held in a U.S. detention centerfor several months in Poland in 2002-2003 before being transferred to the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Polish government “enabled the U.S. authorities to subject the applicant to torture and ill-treatment on its territory”, the ECHR said in its rulings over the cases of Palestinian Abu Zubaydah, 43, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 49, of Saudia Arabia.

The men’s lawyers had argued before the Strasbourg court that during their detention, they were repeatedly tortured by waterboarding.

The ECHR also found Warsaw guilty of allowing the men to be sent to places where they faced torture, further detention, and “flagrant denial of justice”.

The government was ordered to pay 100,000 euros (135,000 dollars) in damages to each plaintiff.

A decade later, both men remain at Guantanamo, and have as yet not had a hearing before a U.S. judge.

Poland has three months to appeal the decision to the Strasbourg court.

A spokesman for the foreign ministry told AFP the government had “no comment for the moment”, and that it would prepare a reaction for later on Thursday.

Poland’s president at the time, Aleksander Kwasniewski, was quoted by Polish news agency PAP as saying, “I respect the verdicts of independent tribunals, but I will not comment on them.”

An investigation into the detainees’ treatment was opened in Poland in 2008 but is still not concluded — a situation that has been condemned by the UN’s anti-torture body.

Poland is one of a number of European countries accused of having assisted the United States in its extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists from the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan to Guantanamo, in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

Macedonia was condemned by the ECHR in December 2012 over the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin who was arrested in Macedonia at the end of 2003 and transferred to a CIA prison in Afghanistan, where he was held in secret for five months.

AFP Photo / Mladen Antonov

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