Bharat Rakshak

Singha wrote:
I am yet to see any shred of overt support for kasab from any indian ulema, no allegations of victimization, no false flag theories.

who exactly is the INC trying to pander to?

RamaY wrote:^ Beautiful. So we are back to mad-dog and its owner. Now what should the opponent do? Kill the mad dog and leave its deceptive owner OR Kill the owner and leave the dog OR put both the mad owner and dog to rest?

abhischekcc wrote:

RamaY wrote:^ Beautiful. So we are back to mad-dog and its owner. Now what should the opponent do? Kill the mad dog and leave its deceptive owner OR Kill the owner and leave the dog OR put both the mad owner and dog to rest?

Raise your own mad dog, whether or green or any other color!

Singha wrote:as they have colour footage of kasab moving around shooting people from day1, what exactly is stopping conclusion of the trial and sentencing now?

Istanbul (CNN) -- A Syrian official said his country's forces might have thought the Turkish jet it downed last week was from Israel.

"As you know there is a country called Israel there and as you know this Zionism country's planes are very similar and because they both are from the same factory, from the U.S., maybe Syria thought it was an Israeli plane," Syrian Information Minister Omran Al Zubi told the Turkish A Haber channel on Wednesday.

Israel and Syria are longtime neighboring adversaries and don't have diplomatic relations.

Al Zubi adopted a friendly tone toward Turkey in the interview, which belied the increase in tough rhetoric in recent days over the downing of the jet. Relations between the two neighbors have deteriorated during the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

The act drew sharp condemnation from NATO, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday his country is changing its military rules of engagement and will now treat a military approach toward its borders by Syria as a potential threat that "will be dealt with accordingly."

Both sides say the jet strayed into Syrian airspace, but Turkey says the incursion was accidental and quickly corrected.
Unsettled neighbors

"I underline that Syria did not launch an attack and I wish that the Turkish-Syria relations are at a better point. The current issue is that the Turkish plane entered Syrian space and it was responded as an unknown target. It was not downed because it was Turkey's plane," Al Zubi said. "We never want to do any harm to the Turkish people and Turkey."

Both countries are searching for the jet's pilots.

"We have no information about the two pilots currently. Our wish is that they are alive and well," Al Zubi said.

Erdogan, dressed in a bomber jacket for a photo op inside the cockpit of a Turkish military jet in Ankara, stressed that his country isn't an aggressor but will respond to it bluntly.

"I express this at every opportunity: we never have our eyes on any country's lands. We don't show a hostile attitude against any country. We never threaten the security of any country," Erdogan said, in remarks aired on CNN Turk.

"We never hesitate to respond in the harshest way and do what is necessary with all our existing power as well as with the power and inspiration that we get from our history, against hostile attitudes, attacks and threats against us."

NATO did not promise any action in response to the incident. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Turkey did not invoke the NATO article calling for collective defense of members.

The NATO consultations were held under Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's founding charter. The article allows any member to call for consultations "whenever, in the opinion of any of them, their territorial integrity, political independence or security is threatened," the charter says.

Syria raised the stakes Monday in the war of words over the incident.

Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said the plane was shot down in Syrian airspace, disputing Turkey's claim that it was downed over international waters after briefly straying into Syrian airspace by mistake.

"What happened was a violation of Syrian airspace. Even Turkey says Syrian sovereignty was violated. Regardless of whether it was a training mission, a reconnaissance mission, it was a violation," Makdissi said.

He insisted that Syria was the wronged party, not Turkey.

Also Monday, a spokesman for the Turkish Foreign Ministry told CNN that Syria on Friday fired at a second Turkish plane that was part of a search-and-rescue mission sent in after the jet was shot down. The plane, which entered Syrian airspace in search of the jet, was not hit, said Selcuk Unal.

"There was no injury, nobody was harmed. But that plane immediately returned to Turkish airspace. And through military diplomatic channels we (asked) them: 'What's going on?'" Unal said.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry said Sunday that it considered the shooting to be a hostile act. Turkey delivered the message in a diplomatic note to the Syrian consulate in Istanbul, Unal told CNN.

In addition to NATO, Turkey also submitted a letter about the incident to the U.N. Security Council. The country made no request for action, but outlined its version of events.

"This attack at the international airspace, causing possible loss of two Turkish pilots, is a hostile act by the Syrian authorities against Turkey's national security. Thus, we strongly condemn it," read the letter, dated Sunday.

It identified the downed plane as a Turkish RF-4 reconnaissance aircraft, a version of the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II. It was flying alone, without arms, in international airspace when it was shot down, the letter read.

Turkish search-and-rescue teams found the wreckage of the jet in the Mediterranean Sea on Sunday, about 1,300 meters (4,260 feet) underwater, Foreign Ministry spokesman Unal said.

ramana wrote:I think Turkey is making itself useful to justify its EU ambitions by helping to keep the Arabs in check?

shyamd wrote:No chance. There will be no invasion IMO as long as Iran and Russia are in the picture.

With its rapidly reducing dependence on Middle Eastern oil, the U.S. has little reason to stay on in the region — a looming problem for India

In coming years, India will become evermore dependent on oil from an evermore troubled region.

In time, the U.S. might draw back from the Middle East on this receding tide of oil — a nightmare for India and other growing Asian powers. Ever since 1947, the U.S. has used guns and cash to impose order across the Middle East. Now, India could be left needing evermore oil from a region that is ever-less stable. India, like China, has watched helplessly as Western-led policies in the Middle East have led oil-producing Iraq and Libya into quasi-anarchy. Iran's nuclear programme could, conceivably, spark-off murderous regional confrontation.

The reason the U.S. locked itself into an alliance with Pakistan in the first place, though, was to protect the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia — and the future, could care less about regional security.

OPEC's founder, Juan Peréz Alfonzo, had warned of oil's exceptionally toxic political properties back in 1976: “we are drowning”, he famously said, “in the Devil's Excrement”. The petro-states on which growing economies like India rely to fuel their search for prosperity, he had realised, simply cannot be stable.

The petro paradox

There's a simple reason why the world's economy is powered by such a politically toxic fuel. Bizarre as it might sound at a time when petrol costs Indians well over Rs.70 a litre, the Devil's Excrement is relatively cheap [See Table 2]. From 1946 to 1973, the price of crude in the U.S. stood at just over $20 per barrel, measured at 2012 prices. In the wake of OPEC's efforts to ramp up oil prices, and the Iranian revolution, it surged to over $100. Then, the data show, oil prices again hovered around the pre-1973 historical average until 2001, when 9/11 ushered in a new era of war. But even now, crude oil is cheaper in real terms than in 1980.

Even more important is this: incomes in the U.S., the world's largest consumer of oil, have risen faster than oil prices. In 1929, an average American would have had to pay 1.49 per cent of her or his annual income of $84.90 to buy a barrel of crude oil, which then sold for $1.27. Fifty years later, in the wake of the Iranian revolution, oil prices soared to $31.61. But the annual earning of the average American had risen even more sharply, to $7,956. That meant that a barrel of oil would cost them just 0.39 per cent of their earnings — a quarter of what it did in 1929. In 2008, oil prices soared to $96.91. The average American earned $35,931 that year, which means a barrel of oil would cost them 0.26 per cent of their earnings. Now, consumers in the world's great economies are paying more than ever for oil — but those who sell it aren't prospering, either. Barring Norway, the world's largest oil exporters are now poorer, relative to the world's great economies, than they were five decades ago. “The conclusion must be,” the commentator Amir Taheri wrote in 2006, “that those who buy oil get rich and those who sell it do not.”

. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush set America on a new course towards oil independence. “America is addicted to oil,” he warned. He vowed to “make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.” Few paid attention, because past Presidents like Jimmy Carter had said much the same thing, to little avail — but the figures show it is now happening.

“Persian oil,” as Franklin D. Roosevelt said to a British diplomat in 1944, “is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it's ours.” To that end, the West propped up tyrannies — giving birth to a host of political obscenities.

India, China and the other Asian powers whose future prosperity depends on access to the Devil's Excrement are the future inheritors of the disorder western withdrawal will leave behind. They must begin to together prepare for the fallout, or together pay the price.

shyamd wrote:War likely within 48 hours.
Heavy diplomacy going on

(Reuters) - Egypt's army will continue to be the guardian and ultimate arbiter of the state after moving to secure real power before the victory of Mohammed Mursi, the Islamist president who triumphed in last week's election run-off.

While the generals saw no alternative to respecting the popular vote for Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood, they see it as their obligation to forestall any attempt by Egypt's new leadership to create an Islamic state under sharia law, senior officers, intelligence officials and diplomats told Reuters.

But a reconstruction of the last two, dramatic weeks, in which Egypt looked primed to explode as the military-backed establishment gripped power more tightly and delayed the result of the presidential contest, also shows the army recognizes that democracy should now be a permanent feature of Egyptian life.

Yet such is the military's mistrust of the Brotherhood, an organization it vigorously repressed and forced underground for six decades, that a flurry of decrees, before, during and immediately after voting, aided by a dramatic court ruling, leave it unclear what powers President Mursi will really have.

The deep-seated antipathy between two historic rivals will be hard to smooth over and has already caused strains over the ceremonial formalities of the handover from military rule, under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) led by Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, to an Islamist civilian head of state.

One sticking point for the generals, officers say, is that as head of the armed forces, Tantawi may during the ceremony to transfer power have to salute a leader from a movement the army has always portrayed as a fundamental threat to Egypt. Though purely symbolic, this matters to the military. At any rate, they said, Tantawi would not let himself be filmed saluting Mursi.

DISSOLUTION, DECREES

The legal framework that Mursi - and more senior Brotherhood figures around him - must work within is the product of a few hasty days of activity by SCAF, which pushed Hosni Mubarak aside to appease last year's street protests, and by judges who, like the military, were appointed under the old regime.

The "deep state" that lingers from the Mubarak dictatorship - the military, civil service, judiciary and big business - had reasserted itself, said one Western diplomat.

"This is about whether the 'deep state' will ever leave Egypt to govern itself," said the diplomat, after the powers of the president were curbed to let him appoint a cabinet while being hemmed in by the army-backed establishment.

For the Brotherhood, however, the diplomat added, "An imperfect presidency is better than none at all ... It's part of a new and delicate art of political compromise."

The new set-up dates back to June 14, a day after the SCAF-appointed government had shocked rights activists by effectively renewing martial law powers for the army to arrest civilians, and two days before the two-day presidential run-off election between Mursi and former air force commander Ahmed Shafik.

The constitutional court ruled that January's parliamentary election, won by the Islamists, violated rules. SCAF ordered the parliament dissolved two days later as the presidential vote was under way.

The following evening, on June 17 as polls closed, SCAF issued a "constitutional declaration", a super-decree of many parts, in which, notably, it took for itself the legislative powers of the parliament and raised the possibility that it might replace the parliamentary body drafting a constitution.

Subsequent details on Mursi's powers to form the government and presidential administration show a division of power that leaves full control of the powerful interior and defense ministries with SCAF. The army also retains sole oversight of the military budget, as well as its extensive commercial empire.

The Brotherhood, through Mursi, will have control of finance and foreign policy, worrying liberal officials appointed during the Mubarak era who now fear for their jobs. Tantawi will remain the head of the military council as well as defense minister.

TAKEOVER FEARS

This struggle for control had been months in the making.

Although it was the radical youth of Tahrir Square who toppled Mubarak, it was the army and the Brotherhood, as by far Egypt's best-organized opposition movement, which became rivals for his inheritance.

The unexpectedly large Islamist victory in the parliamentary election held over the winter - with the Brotherhood taking 46 percent of seats and its hardline Salafist allies a further 24 percent - spurred the generals into action.

One Arab intelligence official said SCAF had moved to clip the wings of the incoming president after listening in to meetings Brotherhood leaders held in Cairo, Istanbul and Doha, at which they had discussed plans to push aside the army after taking power.

"In one of the reports that military intelligence received," this source said, "the Brotherhood said ... the president will push the army out and will carry out a popular referendum to do that after the election."

Mursi and other Brotherhood officials insist they are committed to a pluralist democracy, reject comparisons with the clerical rulers of Iran and say they respect the rights of women and minorities, as well as Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. But an 84-year-old program of establishing Islamic law - promoted energetically by Brotherhood members in parliament this year - leaves many Egyptians, and Western allies, suspicious.

Such suspicions mean it is not just the army in Egypt which has acted to curb the political power of the Islamists.

Some diplomats believe the judges who ruled against the parliamentary election were acting not under military pressure but in their own self-interest; many Mubarak-era appointees are fearful of a full-scale takeover of Egypt's institutions by the Brotherhood, and the judges had reason to believe their days on the bench would be numbered because the Islamist-led assembly had started drawing up legislation to replace them.

A Western diplomat said some members of the judiciary had indicated their opposition to the Brotherhood, and needed no direct instructions from the military on how to rein the group in. "They don't need SCAF to tell them," he said.

LIBERAL BACKLASH

The Brotherhood may now reflect on the breadth of the backlash against it in Egyptian society.

Many outsiders were startled at how little public resistance there was to Mubarak-era holdovers trampling on a democratically elected parliament. Yet that reflected how far liberals and the left had come to fear the Brotherhood's social agenda and apparent ambitions to spread its control across all the country's institutions - much as the military had done before.

At a time of national crisis and economic emergency, with a constitution yet to be written, Islamists in parliament had devoted much of their few months in office to drafting measures aimed at curbing social freedoms and the rights of women.

"Some of them stood up saying really awful things" about women's issues, said one Western diplomat, adding that it sent the wrong message about priorities when politicians needed to focus on rebuilding a shattered economy.

There were divisions between pragmatists in the Brotherhood and those hardliners bent on imposing sharia, said the diplomat. But the result was that it became army policy to prevent the transfer of any power to such a parliament, because its moderation could not be relied on.

"People felt parliament has not done anything," the diplomat said, noting a common complaint leveled against the Brotherhood during Mursi's election campaign. "But we all know that it did not have power to do anything."

ELECTION HONOURED

Parliament's poor performance in securing popular enthusiasm following its election may have emboldened the generals to act against it, and encouraged the deep state to throw its weight behind Shafik against Mursi in the presidential ballot.

Shafik, who was Mubarak's last prime minister, looked as though he might defeat Mursi right up to the moment officials announced the result a full week after the election. In a country with a history of vote-rigging, no one could be sure.

During that long week, SCAF debated intensively how to react to the result, once it became clear that Mursi was in the lead. Its ultimate reaction reveals a recognition of limits Egypt's new taste for democracy has set on its still sweeping powers.

Major-General Mohamed Assar, a member of SCAF, told Reuters two days after voting ended that the council had had nothing to do with the court decision to dissolve parliament, whose election he described as "one of the most important achievements of the military council".

"We were not happy with this court decision," he insisted. But, he added, the council's hands were tied: "We are working under the principle of the sovereignty of law and respect for the authority of the judiciary."

He went on to stress SCAF's commitment to respecting "the first president in the history of Egypt who was chosen by the people" and said: "The elected president will receive full powers with all due respect and he will lead."

The military council's legislative powers, an effective veto on any laws Mursi might want to pass, would last only until a new legislature could be elected, Assar added.

MILITARY ACCEPTANCE

Sources close to the military council also said Mursi would be free to choose many of the ministers he wanted and to propose new laws for implementation.

"The president will have the power to form the cabinet and choose the prime minister," one SCAF member said. "It is the cabinet which will submit the draft laws to the military council which then hands it over to the president who will make a decision on whether to pass the law or reject it."

The same member acknowledged that after a vote that was the most transparent in Egypt's history, the military would have risked conflict had it tried to oppose the will of the people.

"We have to accept that there is a reality that we cannot change," the military council member said. "The first election results showed Mursi winning, and where would Shafik get an extra 600,000 votes from?" In the event, the final tally gave Mursi a more decisive margin of 880,000 votes.

"There was no way we could annul the election," the senior officer told Reuters last week, as all Egypt was on tenterhooks waiting to see which way the army would jump.

"Democratic rules are the only guarantees for the Egyptian state that we don't become like Iran," he said - in other words, a state where Islamists used initial popularity, or electoral success, to perpetuate their rule by curbing voters' choice.

"This is the beginning of real and true democracy," he said. "This election will be followed by other elections; the people will have another chance."

TURKISH MODEL

The council member also gave a stark outline of the military's intention to go on steering Egyptian politics.

Not hesitating to offer counsel to the new president, he said Mursi ought to pursue reconciliation: "The president should extend his hand to those who have not elected him before he extends his hand to those who elected him," he said, adding that he expected Mursi to follow a moderate, pragmatic course now he is confronted by the enormous economic problems Egypt faces.

But there was also a military warning: should Mursi and the Brotherhood try to take Egypt in the direction of Iran, where clerical rulers decree who may stand for election and which laws parliament may pass, they would come up against an army that takes its lessons from the Turkey of Ataturk.

Recalling how the founder of the republic which followed the collapse of the Ottoman empire "banned the veil and imposed restrictions on religion" as he built a secular state to replace the religiously endowed emperor, the SCAF member told Reuters that Egypt's army stood ready to act, as Turkey's had done for nearly a century, in rejecting outright Islamic rule.

"They should know that the armed forces are the pillar of stability, and the constitution should say so," he said of the Muslim Brotherhood. "We don't want privileges; we don't want a political role for the military establishment," he said of criticisms the generals simply want to entrench their power and the extensive economic privileges built up under military rule.

But, the council member concluded: "If they want to impose Islamic sharia, the army will save the country. The army won't allow the country to be taken in the wrong direction."

(Additional reporting by Edmund Blair and Marwa Awad; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

U.S. Intelligence, Contradicting Ankara, Indicates Aircraft Was Shot Down by Syria in Its Own Airspace, Officials Say
By JULIAN E. BARNES, ADAM ENTOUS and JOE PARKINSON

U.S. intelligence indicates that a Turkish warplane shot down by Syrian forces was most likely hit by shore-based antiaircraft guns while it was inside Syrian airspace, American officials said, a finding in tune with Syria's account and at odds with Turkey.

A Turkish military truck transports a mobile missile launcher in Hatay province near the Turkish-Syrian border on June 28.

The Turkish government, which moved tanks to the Syrian border after the June 22 incident, says the debris fell in Syrian waters, but maintains its fighter was shot down without warning in international airspace. Ankara also has said the jet was hit too far from Syrian territory to have been engaged by an antiaircraft gun.

Damascus has said it shot down the plane with an antiaircraft battery with an effective range of about 1.5 miles.

"We see no indication that it was shot down by a surface-to-air missile" as Turkey says, said a senior defense official. Officials declined to specify the sources of their information. The senior U.S. defense official cautioned that much remains unknown about the incident.

A Turkish official said he wasn't aware of the American doubts, and reiterated the government's position that a Syrian missile downed the plane in international airspace.

The Turkish government has scheduled a special meeting for Saturday morning on Syria. A spokesman for the prime minister said the U.S. intelligence on the incident would likely be discussed.

The downing of the jet spurred fears of a widening regional conflict and led the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, following a presentation on Tuesday by Turkey, to condemn Syria's action.

The use of antiaircraft fire would suggest the Turkish plane was flying low to the ground, and slowly, U.S. officials said—though Syria said the jet was traveling at 480 miles an hour.

If hit by antiaircraft fire, the jet likely came closer to the Syrian shoreline than Turkey says, U.S. officials said.

The plane's pilots haven't been found, and the Turkish Navy has continued to search for them. U.S. officials say they believe the pilots perished.
Syria in the Spotlight

Take a look back over the highlights of the past year in Syria in a timeline, and review the latest events in a map.

More photos and interactive graphics

Some current and former American officials believe Ankara has been testing Syrian defenses. The version of the Turkish F-4 Phantom that was shot down typically carries surveillance equipment, according to U.S. defense officials.

A former senior U.S. official who worked closely with Turkey said he believed the flight's course was meant to test Syria's response. "You think that the airplane was there by mistake?" the former official said.

"These countries are all testing how fast they get picked up and how fast someone responds," said a senior U.S. official. "It's part of training."

The Turkish official said the plane wasn't on a surveillance mission. "All NATO members have condemned the Syrian hostile act and have supported Turkey," the official said.

The emerging discrepancies could prove embarrassing to Ankara and strain continuing discussions between the U.S. and Turkey, a NATO ally that shares a long border with Syria.

Turkey occupies a critical role in the U.S. and Western strategy for dealing with the Syrian crisis. American officials and defense analysts say the U.S. approach depends largely on Turkey's willingness to keep pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

NATO officials said Turkey's presentation on the incident on Tuesday was very detailed, but diplomats didn't closely question the Turks on their version of events. The U.S. backed Turkey and, American officials said, pushed NATO to issue a statement sharply condemning Syria.

The incident has put NATO in a tough spot. Alliance members are eager to back Ankara, but don't want to be dragged into a military conflict in Syria.

If the plane had been struck by a missile, a senior military official said, it would be an indication that Damascus had authorized the action. But the use of antiaircraft fire may mean a local commander decided on his own initiative to fire at the Turkish plane, according to officials and analysts.

U.S. defense officials said they weren't alarmed by Turkey's movement of forces to its border with Syria. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, praised Turkey's "very measured" approach. "I've asked them, and they are not seeking to be provocative," Gen. Dempsey said.

The U.S.-Turkish relationship is unlikely to be affected by the apparent discrepancies in accounts of the downing of the jet. Cooperation between Ankara and Washington has grown closer in recent months, after a period of significant strain in 2009 and 2010.

That marks a turnaround for Turkey, which 18 months ago moved to cultivate relations and trade with neighboring Muslim regimes, including Mr. Assad's, while downgrading ties with former ally Israel, raising concerns in Washington.

The revolutions of the Arab Spring, however, upended that policy. In a major change, Turkey agreed last fall to house a NATO missile-defense system, which was designed by the U.S. to contain Iran.

Turkish analysts said the debate in Turkey is now focused on the escalating tensions along the country's 565-mile border with Syria.

"What's important for most Turks is that the government has been seen to respond by boosting troop capacity on the border, which will further pressure Assad," said Atilla Yesilada, a partner at Istanbul-based political risk consultancy Istanbul Analytics.

Write to Julian E. Barnes at [email protected], Adam Entous at [email protected] and Joe Parkinson at [email protected]

A version of this article appeared June 30, 2012, on page A9 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Doubts Cast on Turkey's Story of Jet.