2 More Police Killed In Diyarbakir, Turkey Car-Bomb

Car bomb in Turkey kills 2 as country steps up anti-terrorism efforts

By Gul Tuysuz and Holly Yan CNN

ISTANBUL, Turkey (CNN) — A car bomb exploded Sunday in southern Turkey, killing two security officers and wounding four other people, officials said.

The attack was launched when a vehicle carrying security personnel was ambushed on its way to an emergency call, the Diyarbakir provincial office said.

Diyarbakir is a province in southeastern Turkey, a heavily Kurdish area, and is home to the city of the same name.

No one has been arrested in connection with the explosion, officials said

The bombing comes as Turkey grapples with a wave of violence near its southern border with Syria and is ramping up its effort to fight terrorists.

Combating violence

On Thursday, at least five ISIS militants in northern Syria approached the border and fired on a Turkish border unit, killing a soldier and wounding two others, the Turkish military said.

Authorities say ISIS was also to blame for a suicide blast Monday that killed more than 30 people in Suruc, a Turkish town that borders Syria.

And after the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, killed two Turkish police officers Wednesday, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu vowed to take action.

“We will not stay silent in the face of those who kill our police officers in their sleep,” Davutoglu said.

Turkey initially decided to attack ISIS during a national security meeting Thursday headed by Davutoglu. Turkish forces arrested 590 suspected terrorists, bombed ISIS positions in northern Syria and targeted the PKK in strikes in a daylong operation Saturday.

It was the first time Turkey had attacked ISIS and the PKK simultaneously.

“This is a big deal for the U.S. and the coalition, to get the Turks on their side,” retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rich Francona, a military analyst, told CNN. “This is a game-changer.”

The U.S. reached a tentative agreement with Turkey last week to increase U.S. and coalition access to Turkish air bases.

“We attach great importance to our cooperation with the U.S. and believe that it will result in an effective fight against the ISIS threat,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said.

An act of ‘retribution’

The PKK issued a statement declaring a 2013 ceasefire agreement with Turkey to be over, according to the pro-PKK Firat News Agency. The statement referred to the slaying of the two police officers, calling it an act of “retribution” carried out by “local branches” without orders from the central PKK command.

Kurdistan Regional President Masoud Barzani expressed concern about Turkey’s bombardment of PKK positions in Iraq’s Kurdish area, but he called on all parties to stay calm “because peace is the only solution to problems, and years of dialogue is better than an hour of fighting.”

Turkey believes the PKK is exploiting ISIS’ efforts. The PKK has been fighting for independence since 1984 and is feared to be making gains.

The group is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, but PKK militants have come to the aid of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters who have been fighting ISIS in northern Iraq.

Gul Tuysuz reported from Istanbul, and Holly Yan wrote from Atlanta. CNN’s Susanna Capelouto, Ony Nwaohuocha and Salma Abdelaziz also contributed to this report.

TM & © 2015 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.

The world of threats to the US is an illusion

[The Boston Globe reporter who penned the following article was declared an “enemy of the state” by Turkish Pres. Erdogan (SEE:  Erdoğan has Stephen Kinzer declared ‘enemy of the state’ over article).]

JOE KLAMAR/AFP/Getty Images

A Japanese officer watches as a Landing Craft Air Cushion transports US Marines and sailors and soldiers from Japan during a joint military exercise in California in 2014.

By Stephen Kinzer Globe Staff

When Americans look out at the world, we see a swarm of threats. China seems resurgent and ambitious. Russia is aggressive. Iran menaces our allies. Middle East nations we once relied on are collapsing in flames. Latin American leaders sound steadily more anti-Yankee. Terror groups capture territory and commit horrific atrocities. We fight Ebola with one hand while fending off Central American children with the other.

In fact, this world of threats is an illusion. The United States has no potent enemies. We are not only safe, but safer than any big power has been in all of modern history.

Geography is our greatest protector. Wide oceans separate us from potential aggressors. Our vast homeland is rich and productive. No other power on earth is blessed with this security.

Our other asset is the weakness of potential rivals. It will be generations before China is able to pose a serious challenge to the United States — and there is little evidence it wishes to do so. Russia is weak and in deep economic trouble — not always a friendly neighbor but no threat to the United States. Heart-rending violence in the Middle East has no serious implication for American security. As for domestic terrorism, the risk for Americans is modest: You have more chance of being struck by lightning on your birthday than of dying in a terror attack.

Promoting the image of a world full of enemies creates a “security psychosis” that misshapes our view of the world. It tempts us to interpret defensive steps taken by other countries as threatening. In extreme cases, it pushes us into wars aimed at preempting threats that do not actually exist.

Michael Cohen: Are threats to US bigger than ever? No

The reality is that international affairs these days are actually pretty easy.

Arms manufacturers profit from the security psychosis even more directly than militarists. Americans take our staggeringly large defense budget almost for granted, and lament continuously that other countries do not build as many exotic weapons systems as we do. Finding new threats is always good business for someone.

With the United State so dominant in global politics, it’s time to secure this low-threat world. Our strategic goal should be to keep our country as safe as it is now. That means bringing troublemaking countries out of their isolation. Ignoring their interests, or seeking “full-spectrum dominance” to assure that they cannot rise, provokes reactions that will be bad for us in the long run.

Last year, after Russia began encouraging upheaval in Ukraine, NATO decided to “suspend all practical civilian and military cooperation” with Russia. Moments of crisis, however, are precisely the times when contact is most urgent. We took advantage of Russia when it was powerless a quarter-century ago. Future peace requires taking its security concerns seriously rather than treating the country as an enemy that is always seeking to best us.

Our policy toward China is less aggressive, but beneath its surface is often a presumption that one day there must be a showdown between our two countries. The recent deal between Western nations and Iran is being sold as the taming of an enemy — although Iran is not our enemy. Neither is Cuba, despite the warnings of revanchists in Washington and elsewhere. Nor are most of the enemies-for-a-day that we eagerly seek, from Sandinistas in Nicaragua to Houthis in Yemen.

I recently asked a United States Navy officer what threats he believed the United States might confront in the future. To my astonishment, he answered, “Venezuela.” The South American country is in political crisis and careening toward bankruptcy. Its combat navy counts six frigates and two submarines, none of them seaworthy. Yet last month President Obama designated Venezuela an “extraordinary threat to US national security.” The search for enemies can lead to odd places.

This impulse is not peculiarly American. Feeling threatened strengthens group solidarity. Some thinkers have gone so far as to suggest that since societies become more united and resolute in the face of enemies, those that have none should find some.

“It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love,” Freud wrote, “so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” Nietzsche believed the nation-state’s “profound appreciation of the value of having enemies” produced a “spiritualization of hostility.” A young country especially, he said, “needs enemies more than friends: in opposition alone does it feel itself necessary.”

When Americans see threats everywhere, we fall into this trap. Believing we are besieged is strangely comforting. To recognize how safe we are would require a change of national mindset that we seem reluctant to make.

Stephen Kinzer is a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Follow him on Twitter @stephenkinzer.

Paris Court Finds Turkish Intelligence Agent Guilty In Murder of 3 PKK Leaders

Sultangazi police attacked the crowd gathered to walk Gunay Özaslan’s funeral was killed in an operation held yesterday in the Gazi district in Bağcılar. Tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd streets after the intervention was made ​​with water. (DHA)

SEE:  Marxist radical killed in Istanbul police raids: reports]

A female member(Günay Özaslan’) of a radical Turkish Marxist group was killed Friday in clashes with police during an operation to arrest suspected militants, the official Anatolia news agency reported.  The woman was a member of the far-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party Front (DHKP-C)

Police and Justice

Assassination of Kurdish activists in Paris: justice emphasizes the involvement of Turkish secret services

The coffin of one of three Kurdish activists murdered in Villiers-le-Bel (Val-d’Oise), 15 January 2013.

On 9 January 2013, at lunch time, three Kurdish activists are murdered in central Paris, in the Rue La Fayette apartment hosting a community association. Sakine Cansız, 54, a founding member of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), Fidan Dogan, 29, nicknamed “the diplomat” and Saylemez Leyla, 25, known as “the warrior”, were coldly shot several bullets in the head.

After two and a half years of investigation, the Paris prosecutor rendered on 9 July, the final indictment, that Le Monde was able to consult. He asks, as revealed by Le Canard chained in its edition of July 22, referral to an Assize Court of the main suspect, Omer Guney, for murder in relation to a terrorist undertaking. This document of over 70 pages is unique: for the first time, the French justice evokes the possible involvement of a foreign intelligence service, namely MIT (Turkish equivalent of the Directorate General of Internal Security) in a political crime committed in France.

Having failed to positively identify the sponsors of this crime, the prosecution remains cautious about the degree of involvement of MIT. This service is in fact run by a relative of the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, engaged since 2012 in a peace process with the PKK that deeply divides the Turkish state apparatus. After the instruction, the trail of a conspiracy by factions opposed to negotiations is still on the table.

“Many elements of the procedure allow MIT to suspect involvement in instigating and preparing the killing, the prosecutor wrote. Indeed, it is established that Omer Guney had proven espionage, he had numerous secret contacts with or individuals located in Turkey (…). However, it should be noted that the investigation did not establish whether the MIT agents attended these facts officially, with the approval of their superiors, or if they did it to the Unbeknownst to their service, to discredit or undermine the peace process. “

Read also: Omer Güney was planning to escape from prison with the help of a Turkish officer

“Grey Wolf”

If an “uncertainty” remains on the identity of the originator, the performer, he was promptly arrested and imprisoned for ten days only after the fact: Omer Guney, a 32 year old Turk arrived in France to Age 9 years. Its presence in the streets of La Fayette apartment the alleged time of the crime is proven, traces of gunpowder were found on her purse and partial DNA of one victim on his parka. He has continued to deny the facts.

When arrested, the young man nevertheless commits an illuminating slip requesting that the Turkish Embassy in Paris is alerted. Surprising reflex on the part of an individual who continues to run the police as a “heart of Kurd” PKK sympathizer. His family, themselves, qualify it as “ultranationalist” fierce opponent of the Kurdish cause, and claim that it defined itself as a “gray wolf”, the name of the youth branch of the MHP, the Turkish nationalist party .

This feigned sympathy for the PKK had allowed him to infiltrate a year earlier the Kurdish community of Ile-de-France. French perfectly, he regularly acted as interpreter and driver in the movement of senior living in Paris. Thus he made the acquaintance of Sakine Cansız emblematic figure of the PKK, a political refugee in France after spending eleven years in Turkish jails. He was also responsible to escort the car to the street Lafayette apartment the day she fell under the bullets with his two comrades.

A “mysterious correspondent”

The investigation has established that Omer Guney made three trips to Turkey in the six months before the murders. He used the occasion of his travels a phone line “secret”, reserved for specific contacts. One particular interest to investigative services. A “mystery caller” who has never been identified, the Turkish authorities refused “strangely” to respond to the letters rogatory sent to this effect, makes it clear the floor. Which illustrates an understatement as the frustration of French justice that the disorder role of Ankara in this case.

In this context opaque, it is ultimately the Turkish press that will give a dramatic boost to education. Sign of violent conflict reveal that these murders within the state apparatus, innumerable information will in turn feed the thesis of state crime and internal conspiracy. Three weeks after the murder, a former Turkish intelligence agent said in a newspaper Güney Omer is an agent of MIT and that “the massacre of Paris is the business of the tough faction in the MIT.” Heard by the judge, it will return on all its declarations.

On 12 January 2014, a voice recording of three men is posted on YouTube from Germany. In voice-over, the author of the video says that this recording was made by Omer Güney himself, during a meeting in Turkey with two members of the MIT to “plan” its mission. We hear the three individuals mentioned targets among European Kurdish activists.

“Sabotage” peace process

Two months later, on 14 March, a Turkish website opens a new track: he says that the two unidentified voice on the record is that of a certain Omer Kozanli, billed as “the police imam Gülen movement “, a moderate Islamist current. The movement of Fethullah Gülen, exiled in the United States, supported the rise to power of Erdogan before taking his distance, while remaining very influential within the state apparatus.

peace, “Who did this? An individual of Pennsylvania, the servants of the individual, his supporters. Of course, these people have also infiltrated the judiciary. Unfortunately, they are also in the police and other state institutions … “

The efforts of Erdogan to distance themselves from the triple murder are partly ruined with the publication on 14 January 2014 another Turkish site of an internal note of MIT, presented as a project to assassinate PKK executives in Europe. The same day, MIT published a denial. Several sources confirm later the German newspaper Der Spiegel the document’s authenticity.

Who ordered the murder of three Kurdish activists in Paris on 9 January 2013? The Turkish government, to upset a peace process that he himself had committed? A hard MIT factions infiltrated by the Gülen movement? Or the MHP, the Nationalist Action Party, close to the army, which was said Omer Güney near?

Faced with this investigation without fulfillment, Antoine Comte, civil party lawyer, praised the quality of the work of French justice. “This is the first time that the judicial authority shall also clear position on the possible involvement of a foreign State in a political assassination. Political power, he has always been careful not to comment on the case. “

The PKK and the “process of Imrali”

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish nationalist organization, was founded in 1978 by Abdullah Ocalan to promote the creation of an independent Kurdish state on the borders of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. A series of attacks earned him to be considered a terrorist organization by several European countries, including France in 1993. Captured in 1999, Ocalan is serving a life prison on Imrali Island. The PKK then engages in a peace process with Turkey and renounces the claim of a Kurdish state in favor of federalism recognizing Kurdish identity.

End of 2012, Ocalan from his cell launches the “process of Imrali,” a round of negotiations with the AKP, the ruling party in Turkey. This process is strongly criticized Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Turkish state apparatus, infiltrated by more radical currents. It is in this complex context that three Kurdish activists were murdered in Paris on 9 January 2013.

picture: http://s2.lemde.fr/image/2014/04/26/24×24/1100512122_4_cc4f_13985325317617-photo-5-bis-copie_41b05cf75dfd64085ec59f9ca778eae7.jpg
Soren Seelow
Reporter

Rusted-Out WWII Derelict Shipwreck Philippines’ S. China Sea Outpost

[SEE: A Game of Shark and Minnow]

Analysis: Growing The Philippines South China Sea Outpost

By: Armando J. Heredia

July 20, 2015 11:48 AM

Since the grounding, the Philippines has rotated a small group of marines to occupy and report on the shoal; seen as vital to the Philippines activity since China began ramping up their island expansion in the region.

In a bit of political subterfuge, BRP Sierra Madre remains a commissioned vessel in the navy, making it an official extension of Philippine sovereign territory, despite the fact the hull is no longer seaworthy. The conditions aboard are harsh—the corrosive effects of the saltwater environment have eaten away at the vessel; there are safety and habitability concerns everywhere. Planks cover enormous holes in the decks, and makeshift shelters are built into what’s left of the superstructure. The marines rely upon a limited supply of consumables; lightly armed, the outpost would not be able to resist a determined attack. At least two China coast guard cutters hover nearby, eager to interdict any resupply attempts to the beleaguered outpost.

For years, Manila maintained the official stance that it would not escalate the situation at Second Thomas Shoal, nor anywhere else in the contested area per the so-called Declaration of Conduct. While relying upon a long-awaited arbitration reading from a U.N. tribunal on China’s actions, the Philippine outposts within the Spratleys were kept in status quo; no expansions, or even maintenance to the infrastructure were made. The nation made it painfully clear that it was abiding by the rules, even as other regional players scrambled to consolidate their presence. While this deferral was quite public, it’s fair to say that much of it was related to budgetary and logistical constraints as much as political hand-wringing.

The acceleration of Chinese encroachment has changed the situation again. With Mischief Reef only 15 miles away from Second Thomas Shoal, the Philippine navy has quietly begun “maintenance” of the Sierra Madre. Reportedly, cement, welding tools and other reinforcing materials were brought in via several shipments that made it past the Chinese blockade. The effort, which the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs considers to be legal, has garnered China’s ire.

Improvements to shelter aside, the outpost still has to deal with habitability challenges, including a lack of organic ability to generate electricity and fresh water. In order to continue sustaining the outpost, some recent and forthcoming defense acquisitions could help. Former Australian landing craft and a brand new support vessel arriving in 2016 would bring much needed faster, far-ranging and heavier lift to sustain the blockade runs. Air drops, currently executed by aging Philippine air force Norman-Britten Islander transports, could be relieved by newer NC-212s under construction in Indonesia.

Overall, the drama of reinforcing BRP Sierra Madre is not the endgame, only a move in a larger match. A favorable outcome of the Philippines’ so-called lawfare approach, via the tribunal court, would finally put a legal stake in the ground that China’s actions are illegal. It would then fall heavily upon Beijing to either prove it’s a worthy international partner by abiding and agreeing to external arbitration, or continue on its path of the South China Sea claims, to the detriment of future relations within the region.