Democracy and Class Struggle

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

USA: Some 50 Dakota Access pipeline protesters have been arrested, Wednesday, after police shutdown a newly erected 'treaty camp' located on a hill near the Oceti Sakowin encampment, in Cannon Ball, North Dakota

Moscow Treason Arrests : Two senior Russian cyber security officials along with a top anti-hacking expert have been arrested in a US-linked treason case

Democracy and Class Struggle says long overdue cleansing in Moscow. Are we surprised ? the answer is No.

Two senior Russian cyber security officials along with a top anti-hacking expert have been arrested in a US-linked treason case.

A lawyer representing one of the suspects said on Wednesday that Sergei Mikhailov, the deputy head of the FSB's Centre for Information Security, and his deputy Dmitry Dokuchayev along with Ruslan Stoyanov, the head of the investigation unit at Moscow-based cybersecurity giant Kaspersky, had been detained by authorities in Moscow.

Ivan Pavlov said the three were suspected of committing treason.

He added that the case was linked to the United States but said the CIA spy agency was not specified in the documents related to the case.

This is believed to be one of the highest-profile treason cases to hit the Russian intelligence community in years.

Authorities have yet to officially confirm the arrests but sources in the Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin had been informed about the case when Russian media were earlier covering it.

Kremlin spokesman Demitry Peskov, however, denied there was any link between the case and recent allegations in the United States that Russia carried out cyber attacks on American organizations with the intention of paving the way for the election of Donald Trump as president.

Peskov said there could be no connection as Russia “categorically denies any claims on the possible Russian involvement” in any hacking.

Pavlov said more suspects were involved in the case but he would not elaborate. If confirmed, the case could be one of the most sensitive affecting Russia’s domestic intelligence agency FSB.

Sources in the CIA also said that they had no comment on the issue.

Kaspersky had confirmed the arrest of its former official last week although it said charges brought against Stoyanov were related to the time he was not an employee of the company

SOURCE:

http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2017/02/01/508736/Russia-cybersecurity-experts-treason

"The news of the arrest didn't come out until mid-January. Now we've had some charges announced. The big question is - and it is unanswered at the moment - what were they doing?" he said.

"There are a couple of not necessarily mutually exclusive theories about this. One is that when the CIA said that it had high confidence that Russia was behind the hacking of Democratic Party National Congress emails in the run-up to the US presidential elections, it was information from these guys that gave the CIA that high confidence," Challands said.

"Another theory is that these people were running a kind of shadow hacking group motivated primarily by profit - selling information on important people to anyone who would buy it, private buyers or foreign intelligence services."

Other claims suggest that the men had links to a hacking group known as Shaltai Boltai (Humpty Dumpty), best known for digging dirt on senior Russian political figures and making it public.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/02/russia-cyber-security-experts-treason-170201132135083.html

So far, Mikhailov and Dokuchayev are the only FSB officers to be identified, based on anonymous sources cited by several Russian media outlets, as suspects in the investigation. Media reports, however, indicate there may be a total of six suspects -- including a third FSB officer -- already detained.

Mikhailov's arrest, reportedly in December, was first revealed by Kommersant on January 25. He served as a department head at the FSB's Center for Information Security (CIS). Mikhailov is "well-known" among Russia's cybersecurity experts, according to Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist who has written widely about Russian intelligence services and their cybercapabilities

According to the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Mikhailov is thought to have tipped off US officials about Vladimir Fomenko and his server rental company ‘King Servers’, which was identified last September as an ‘information nexus’ that was used by hackers suspected of working for Russian state security in cyberattacks.

If the claims about Mikahilov and Dokuchaev are true, it would mean that Washington DC had a spy in the heart of Russian national security.

It was not the FSB that arrested Mikhailov, but the Federal Security Guard service (FSO), it is claimed.. Within Russia’s security apparatus, the FSO is the FSB’s main competitor.

Iran: If Ban is How Trump Approaches Iran , We Fear Nuclear Deal won't withstand tensions - Trita Parsi

Senator Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Justice Department, once praised a 1924 immigration law whose chief author in the House once declared was intended to end “indiscriminate acceptance of all races.”

Democracy and Class Struggle the shedding more light on the idea of "justice" under a Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions we republish part of an article from the Atlantic.

Senator Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Justice Department, once praised a 1924 immigration law whose chief author in the House once declared was intended to end “indiscriminate acceptance of all races.”

Sessions has long been a proponent of immigration restriction, and was one of the first to back Trump’s call on a ban on Muslims entering the United States during the primary.

During an October 2015 radio interview with Stephen Bannon of Breitbart, now a top adviser to the president-elect, Sessions praised the 1924 law saying that:

In seven years we'll have the highest percentage of Americans, non-native born, since the founding of the Republic. Some people think we've always had these numbers, and it's not so, it's very unusual, it's a radical change. When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly, we then assimilated through the 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America. We passed a law that went far beyond what anybody realized in 1965, and we're on a path to surge far past what the situation was in 1924.

Sessions comments were first flagged by the liberal blog Right Wing Watch.

The 1924 immigration law, known as the Johnson-Reed Act, drastically limited immigration and made permanent restrictions designed to keep out Southern and Eastern Europeans, particularly Italians and Jews, Africans, and Middle Easterners, barring Asian immigration entirely.

Asked about the interview, Sessions’s spokesperson Sarah Isgur Flores wrote in an email, “As Attorney General, Sessions will prioritize curtailing the threats that rising crime and addiction rates pose to the health and safety of our country and that includes enforcing our existing immigration laws.”

Representative Albert Johnson, a Washington Republican described by the historian Edwin Black as a “fanatic raceologist and eugenicist,” used his stewardship of the immigration committee to ensure that racist pseudoscience provided an “empirical” basis for immigration restriction.

Immigration historian Roger Daniels put it even more bluntly, writing in Guarding the Golden Door that Johnson’s “racial theories” would “in slightly different form” become “the official ideology of Nazi Germany.”

When the law passed, its primary Senate author, Rhode Island Senator David A. Reed, expressed relief in The New York Times, writing that “the racial composition of America at the time is thus made permanent.”

Sessions’s praise for the 1924 law highlights the difficulty of making the case for immigration restriction, which often relies on popular antagonism toward particular immigrant groups rather than the benefits of restriction per se. The centerpieces of Donald Trump’s immigration policies have been a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and a ban on Muslims entering the United States.

“I don’t know any historian who would tell you the 1920s law wasn’t a racist law. That was what it was all about. They didn’t try to hide that,” said David Reimers, a professor of history at New York University. The national origin restrictions in the 1924 law were not fully lifted until the passage of the 1965 Nationality and Immigration Act.

FOR FULL ARTICLE IN THE ATLANTIC

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/jeff-sessions-1924-immigration/512591/

Military Escalation in Eastern Ukraine in Last Days of January

Democracy and Class Struggle says with more NATO tanks on Russia's borders than Nazi Tanks during Operation Barbarossa and the Ukraine re-igniting only a fool would be an optimist.

Democracy and Class Struggle try to be realists but that soon drives us to pessimism as there are so many conflict areas whether it in in Europe, Middle East , South and Central America on the South China Sea or North Korea and to compound what would be a difficult situation anyway in 2017 we have an unstable and erratic USA..

Capitalist Imperialism and its Oligarchs means war and it is past it's sell by date which was 1917 - unless we see a global and not just US upsurge of militant resistance in 2017 - we are on the cusp of a downward spiral.

Stop Major NATO Provocation against Russia - Russian Military more reliable than Russian Trump supporting Politicians :More NATO tanks on Russian Borders than German Tanks during Operation Barbarossa for the Nazi Invasion of Russia in 1941

Democracy and Class Struggle says he Trump Kissinger Deception continues talking PEACE but making WAR preparations - STOP this mass provocation against Russia.

Apologetics for Trump in Russia should stop and Russian Military should be listened to as they are not so influenced by the irrationalism of some political analysts.

Democracy and Class Struggle see more continuity than rupture in US Policy towards Russia - the facts point clearly to this view but the propagandists of illusions about Trump are still active in Russian Media promoting Trump the Peacemaker.

Fake News spread by Trump supporters on White Nationalist murder of Muslims in Canada

Missile tests Iran’s inalienable defensive right: Qassemi

Democracy and Class Struggle see the Trump Administration criticism of Iran Missile test is exactly what we expect - The Trump administration will look for any opportunity to attack Iran even going so far as to create a false flag operation with Israel.

Iran says missile tests are an “inalienable and absolute” right of the Islamic Republic in order to defend its security and national interests, stressing that no country or international body can have any say in this regard.

“I emphasize the Islamic Republic of Iran’s principled stance that conducting any ballistic missile test by the Islamic Republic of Iran is in full compliance with its absolute rights and international obligations,” Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said on Tuesday.

He reaffirmed the “defensive nature” of Iran’s missile programs and said none of the country’s ballistic missiles had been designed to carry a nuclear warhead and they were, therefore, not banned under the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231.

Resolution 2231 was adopted on July 20, 2015 to endorse a landmark nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries.

Under the resolution, Iran is “called upon” not to undertake any activity related to missiles “designed to be capable of” delivering nuclear weapons. Iran says it is not involved in any such missile work and has no such warheads.

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi

The Iranian spokesperson emphasized that Iran would never seek permission from anyone to defend itself.

He said the country’s ballistic missile tests are not inconsistent with the UNSC resolution and condemned politically-motivated comments made by certain countries over the issue.

Some individuals in the United States are creating hype with political objectives and seek pretexts to decrease the international pressure on them following the US government’s thoughtless decision to prevent the entry of people holding legal visas or shun the responsibility for fully complying with Washington's obligations under the 2015 nuclear agreement, Qassemi said.

However, he added, the Security Council Resolution 2231 does not grant anyone such excuses.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Tuesday cautioned the United States against politicizing the Islamic Republic’s legitimate efforts at reinforcing its defense capabilities.

“We hope that the issue of Iran’s defense program… does not turn into a pretext for political games,” he said at a joint press conference with his visiting French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault in Tehran.
Iran warns US against politicizing defense program

Zarif said all the parties to the JCPOA, including both France and the previous US administration, have attested that Iran’s missile tests have nothing to do with the nuclear agreement.

Nabila Massrali, an EU foreign affairs spokeswoman, on Tuesday warned Iran over its ballistic missile tests.

She added, however, that since Iran's ballistic missile program was not included in the JCPOA, "the tests are not a violation."

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Remembering 1917 : A Misleading Description of the German October by O.W.Kuusinen (1925)

USA: Veterans Vow to Defend Standing Rock and Resisters the Dakota Access Pipeline