Hasta La Gadget!

GROZNY, Russia (AP) — A gun battle broke out early Thursday in the capital of Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Chechnya, leaving at least three traffic police officers and six gunmen dead, authorities said. The fighting punctured the patina of stability ensured by years of heavy-handed rule by a Kremlin-appointed leader.

The violence erupted hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin was to make his annual state of the nation address in Moscow. Security officials said militants traveling in three cars entered the republic’s capital, Grozny at 1 a.m. local time, killing three traffic police at a checkpoint. The Moscow-based National Anti-Terrorist Committee, a federal agency, said the militants then occupied a multi-story Press House in central Grozny which was later destroyed by fire, killing six gunmen. Russian news agencies quoted unidentified Health Ministry sources as saying at least 10 officers were killed, but the number wasn’t officially confirmed.

The Anti-Terrorist Committee said more gunmen had been found in a city school and an operation was underway to “liquidate” them. No students or teachers in the school when it was seized by the militants,RIA Novosti quoted vice principal Islam Dzhabrailov as saying.

The mood was tense in Grozny on Thursday with heavy-caliber gunfire heard in the background and the area about the Press House and the school building cordoned off.

Although unrest is common across the North Caucasus, forceful security measures adopted by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov have spared Grozny significant violence for several years. That has allowed Putin to claim success in subduing an Islamic insurgency in Chechnya after years of war.

Dmitry Trenin, who heads the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote in a Twitter post that “the night attack in Grozny looks senseless, except as an attempt to embarrass Putin hours before his annual address to parliament.” Putin already was under pressure to reassure Russians as fears grow over soaring inflation and a plummeting ruble.

An Associated Press reporter saw the building — a publishing house — in flames and heard the sound of gunfire before dawn, several hours after the unrest erupted. The AP reporter also saw the body of someone in civilian clothing in the street near the publishing house as fighting continued, but it was not clear how and when the person had been killed.

The Anti-Terrorist Committee announced that it had imposed a counterterrorism regime on the center of Grozny. This officially allows heightened security measures to be enforced, and typically indicates the imminent use of heavy force.

Life News, a news outlet believed to have links to Russian security services, cited law enforcement officials as saying about 15 people seized three cars late Wednesday in the village of Shalazhi and drove to Grozny, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) away.

Kadyrov said on his Instagram account, which he uses to issue public statements, that the traffic police officers were shot dead as they attempted to stop the cars carrying the gunmen.

Kadyrov said the situation was calm and that all essential public services were operating, but he urged Grozny residents to be cautious.

“I ask residents in areas where (security) operations are being carried out to abide by safety measures, and not to go out onto the streets without cause or to go near their windows,” he wrote. “All the talk about the city being under the control of the military is absolutely false.”

In a message posted several hours later, Kadyrov said that six militants were killed in the standoff at the publishing house.

“Not one bandit managed to get out. I directly ran the operation myself,” he wrote.

Kadyrov posted a picture showing the lower half of an apparently dead gunman lying beside a rifle, but it was not immediately clear if it showed one of the presumed attackers.

The Kavkaz Center website, a mouthpiece for Islamic militant groups operating in Russia’s North Caucasus, carried a link to a video message by an individual claiming responsibility for the attacks. The man in the video claimed to be operating under orders from Chechen Islamist leader Aslan Byutukayev, known to his followers as Emir Khamzat.

The video could not immediately be verified.

A few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chechnya was plunged into a full-scale war when separatist rebels pursued independence for the republic. The violence was largely confined to that small republic, but rebels ventured into other parts of Russia.

A fragile peace settlement was reached with Moscow until 1999, when an insurgency movement increasingly inspired by radical Islamist ideas reignited the conflict. A military crackdown succeeded by years of aggressive rule by Kadyrov has quietened the region, pushing unrest to neighboring provinces.

Kadyrov has been widely denounced for human rights abuses, including allegations of killing opponents. He has also imposed some Islamic restrictions on the region, including mandatory public headscarves for women.

I wish we could turn of all the lights in the world just for one night and I wish that all the light pollution would disappear and I wish the darkness would reveal the night sky as it should look. As a stunning and glittering and spinning wonder that’ll make me forget about life down here and dream about the beyond.

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Ever crafted a Google+ post that was so important that you just had to make sure people saw it? There’s now an easy way to do exactly that. Much like Twitter, Google+ on the web now lets you pin a post to the top of your profile, making sure that peo…

“No Democratic president can go against military advice, especially if he has asked for it. So just do it. Do what they said.”

— Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta, in Bob Woodward’s Obama’s War’s

More than a week after his sudden ditching of Defense Secretary and would-be fall guy Chuck Hagel, President Barack Obama finally seems to have a nominee for the post which other leading candidates promptly turned down. Ashton Carter, Yalie and Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford doctorate in theoretical physics, most recently visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has a long history as a preeminent Pentagon technocrat. So returning Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain is signaling ultimate approval of the ex-deputy defense secretary, though at the end of of a process that casts a harsh light on Obama’s geopolitical stumbles of the past couple years, with a special eye on White House “micro-management” of military matters.

While this tawdry little melodrama has played out, events in Afghanistan — where the government is utterly dysfunctional and brazen Taliban attacks on the capital Kabul give the lie to vaunted security arrangements — point up the reality that Obama’s geopolitical problems are not only not new but also go back to his basic process of devising strategy and designing a government.

Specifically, the problem goes back to Obama’s National Security Council (NSC) set-up in the White Houe, which ran the Afghan policy review which gave rise to the Afghanistan surge. Which, like the Iraq surge, postponed inevitable developments. But in an even stupider way.

Having backpacked through Central Asia decades ago, it was obvious that nation-building in Afghanistan was an even dumber project than in Iraq. But the combination of liberal do-goodism and the customary Pentagon push for a bigger operation led to a second post-9/11 non sequitur strategy and massive waste of resources, time, energy, and credibility.

Instead of, say, a manned mission to Mars, doubling of the aircraft carrier fleet, and raft of new environmental and social programs we could have had instead, impressing the world, we have another debacle that no one wants to talk about.

The quote at the top from veteran California political figure and Washington hand Leon Panetta — elevated by Obama to posts he never thought he would get only to turn on the president while selling his book during the mid-term elections — is certainly a way to go. But it’s the wrong way to go.

After all, had John F. Kennedy simply followed his unified military advice during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we would have launched air strikes and mounted an invasion of Cuba. Which, we now know, would probably have triggered the use of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons, and a not unlikely whirlwind to follow.

Not that the military are always ultra-interventionist. There seemed little appetite for the Libya operation or for jumping into the middle of the Syrian civil war, the conflict Obama nearly careened into last year.

Obama’s NSC process on Afghanistan in 2009 mirrored his NSC process on Isis over the the past year. Slow. Overly deliberative. And wrong.

Obama’s Afghanistan process — and the insularity of his political and staff operation — also ended up burning up two major players who had an appropriate view of what could and could not be done there and could deal effectively with the Pentagon.

For Obama had not one but two articulate and impressive Marine four-star generals in James Jones and James “Hoss” Cartwright, respectively his first national security advisor and the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Obama failed to back up these huge assets for a Democratic president, and they departed after being severely undercut.

So now when there are complaints about White House “micro-management” of military affairs by a collection of national security aides with no military or intelligence backgrounds whatsoever, not to mention little in the way of prior world travel or published analysis, Obama stands exposed in the media.

Another example of faulty process and squandered resources in a presidency of great promise.

Now Obama, more Athenian than Roman in an insider culture which oddly still rewards the latter, faces an ascendant anti-Enlightenment party in Congress and daunting global challenges. Not the least of which is the long-term prospect of climate change making the planet uninhabitable.

A very challenging final two years for Obama is going to be more troublesome than it needed to be.

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William Bradley Archive

The malicious prosecution claim that television executive Garth Ancier filed against Hollywood sex abuse accuser Michael Egan and his former attorneys can proceed to a jury trial, a Hawaii federal judge ruled Wednesday, dismissing a motion brought by Egan’s former attorney Jeff Herman that sought to end the case.