Category Archives: Lands

Aleppo has fallen: But the conflict is far from over

In a two-part article, Charles Lister writes: The fall of Aleppo represents the regime of Bashar al-Assad’s most significant victory in five-and-a-half years of war. However, the greatest victor is not Syria or its people, but the governments of Russia and Iran, whose differing strategic and geopolitical objectives have been won through a campaign of ruthless violence and diplomatic manipulation. Governments in the United States and Europe have appeared largely disinterested by the indiscriminate violence being meted out to east Aleppo’s 200,000 civilians and when prompted by evidence of war crimes, they have been unwilling or simply incapable of stopping it.

Brutality and criminality won and the much lauded values of human rights and freedom were left smoldering in Aleppo’s ruins. Dictators across the world watched and learned. Syria does not exist in a vacuum, after all.

For Russia, the methodical undermining of American credibility, political influence and humanitarian values has now been achieved. Despite it having taken nearly a year for its September 2015 intervention to show discernible results on the ground, and despite the pinnacle of its effort – the Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, labeled by state-owned media as “a quantum jump in Russian military capabilities” – having become a subject of international ridicule and a hazard to its own MiG jets, the collective ‘West’ chose to stand aside and continue its feckless ‘statements of concern.’ Russia now gratefully welcomes diplomatic and economic embraces from traditional U.S. allies in the region, including Qatar, which just invested $11 billion in Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer – thus acquiring a 19.5% share of a company currently under U.S. and EU sanction. And the Kremlin surely looks forward to an incoming administration in Washington that appears determined to develop close Russian ties. [Continue reading…]

Part two: Armed opposition seeks to redefine itself

Putin’s oil and gas deals magnify military power in Middle East

Bloomberg reports: After reinventing itself as a major power in the Middle East by force in Syria, Russia is now using its other strong suit, energy, to expand its influence across the region.

A series of agreements is allowing Russia and the Gulf states to cooperate in areas where their interests meet, looking beyond Syria where they have backed opposing sides in a brutal proxy war. Over the past month alone, Russia brokered the first deal between the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and non-OPEC nations in 15 years to cut oil production, secured a $5 billion investment by Qatar in oil giant Rosneft PJSC, and then saw Rosneft agree to pay as much as $2.8 billion for a stake in an Egyptian gas field.

“Russia is really keen to increase leverage in the Middle East by every means,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy.

It’s a reflection of how events in the region are combining in favor of Russian President Vladimir Putin as rarely before. A cooling of U.S. alliances in the Gulf in recent years, the havoc cheaper oil has wreaked in energy-dependent economies and a recognition that Russia can no longer be ignored on regional security issues mean Putin is pushing at an increasingly open door. [Continue reading…]

Russia signs cooperation agreement with anti-immigrant party in Austria

The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia’s ruling party signed a five-year “cooperation agreement” with the anti-immigrant Freedom Party of Austria, one of the clearest signs that the Kremlin is seeking to deepen ties with nationalist and antiestablishment forces in the West.

The two-page agreement, reached in Moscow after Freedom Party leaders met with officials from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, spells out a common commitment to holding regular joint meetings and public events while working to strengthen social and economic ties between Russia and Austria.

The agreement, seen by The Wall Street Journal, describes “mutual noninterference in internal affairs” and “equal, reliable, and mutually beneficial partnership” as key principles.

The accord is the latest example of Russian efforts to forge ties with antiestablishment, euroskeptic parties in Europe, many of which in turn promote closer ties to Moscow and rolling back the European Union. Marine Le Pen’s National Front has tapped a Russian bank for a loan to help fund its election efforts in France, for instance. Meanwhile, antiestablishment politicians such as Ms. Le Pen, Britain’s Nigel Farage and Geert Wilders, head of the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, have bashed the EU in interviews on Russian television. [Continue reading…]

After the USSR fell, the world fell asleep

Gary Kasparov writes: It is difficult to describe what life in the U.S.S.R. was like to people in the free world today. This is not because repressive dictatorships are an anachronism people can’t imagine, like trying to tell your incredulous children that there was once a world without cellphones and the internet. The U.S.S.R. ceased to exist in 1991, but there are plenty of repressive, authoritarian regimes thriving in 2016. The difference, and I am sad to say it, is that the citizens of the free world don’t much care about dictatorships anymore, or about the 2.7 billion people who still live in them.

The words of John F. Kennedy in 1963 Berlin sound naive to most Americans today: “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free,” he said. That for decades the U.S. government based effective foreign policy on such lofty ideals seems as distant as a world without iPhones.

Ronald Reagan’s warning that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” was never meant to be put to the test, but it is being tested now. If anything, Reagan’s time frame of a generation was far too generous. The dramatic expansion of freedom that occurred 25 years ago may be coming undone in 25 months. [Continue reading…]

Iran and Russia stand to gain immensely following the fall of Aleppo

Nabeel Khoury writes: Aleppo has fallen to Bashar Al-Assad’s forces, battered by unrelenting Russian bombardment and surrounded by Shiite militias from Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq. The Syrian regime is poised to reap the rewards of this regional and international onslaught. The rebels’ goal of ousting President Al-Assad has now become virtually impossible, at least in the near term. To be sure, there are further battles to be fought in Syrian territory still beyond the reach of the regime. Idlib is likely the next battlefront, but one can already project an empowered Syria-Iran-Russia axis planning the next steps ahead.

Toward the end of 2012, when Syrian rebel resistance to Al-Assad was gaining in strength and pressing hard against the regime’s bastions in Damascus and Latakia, the regime’s military strategy, no doubt recommended by Iran and Hezbollah, was to secure a line of defense around Syria’s major urban centers that would stretch from the Turkish border in the north to the Jordanian border in the south. Hezbollah started the process by besieging and taking the town of Qusayr in the summer of 2013.

This was a strategic turnaround for the regime, the significance of which the Barack Obama administration completely missed. By not intervening or helping the opposition hold on to Qusayr, the United States allowed the regime to stop arms smuggling to the rebels via Tripoli and the Lebanese border. Qusayr also helped consolidate a defensive line between Latakia and Damascus, allowing the regime to protect its core areas. The three years that followed saw the regime further strengthening its defenses along the Lebanese borders guaranteeing free movement for Hezbollah in and out of Syria. [Continue reading…]

Donald Trump’s network of unsavory Russian connections

James S Henry writes: A few of Donald Trump’s connections to oligarchs and assorted thugs have already received sporadic press attention — for example, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s reported relationship with exiled Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. But no one has pulled the connections together, used them to identify still more relationships, and developed an image of the overall patterns.

Nor has anyone related these cases to one of the most central facts about modern Russia: its emergence since the 1990s as a world-class kleptocracy, second only to China as a source of illicit capital and criminal loot, with more than $1.3 trillion of net offshore “flight wealth” as of 2016.

This tidal wave of illicit capital is hardly just Putin’s doing. It is in fact a symptom of one of the most epic failures in modern political economy — one for which the West bears a great deal of responsibility. This is the failure, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the late 1980s, to ensure that Russia acquires the kind of strong, middle-class-centric economic and political base that is required for democratic capitalism, the rule of law, and stable, peaceful relationships with its neighbors.

Instead, from 1992 to the Russian debt crisis of August 1998, the West in general — and the U.S. Treasury, USAID, the State Department, the IMF/World Bank, the ERDB, and many leading economists in particular — actively promoted and, indeed, helped to finance one of the most massive transfers of public wealth into private hands that the world has ever seen. [Continue reading…]

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Russian ambassador shot dead in Turkey as Syria roils region

Bloomberg reports: Russia’s ambassador was shot dead in the Turkish capital on Monday in an assassination apparently linked to Syria’s civil war, heightening tensions over a conflict that’s drawn in almost all the region’s main powers.

Andrey Karlov was shot in the back at an art exhibit in Ankara on Monday and died from his injuries, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. “Don’t forget Aleppo,” the gunman shouted, in a reference to the Syrian city where mostly Islamist rebels have been defeated this month by Russian-backed government troops. The attacker, who was killed by security forces, was a 22-year-old active-duty police officer. His possible connection with organized groups is being probed, Turkey’s Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said.

Russia and Turkey signaled that they don’t want the attack on the ambassador to turn into another flashpoint between countries that are engaged on opposite sides of the Syrian war, a recurring risk in a conflict with multiple armed parties and outside backers. Their relations came under heavy strain after the Turkish military shot down a Russian plane last year, and both governments have since made an effort to repair them.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in televised remarks that Karlov’s killing was an “open provocation” aimed at undermining the search for peace in Syria and the normalization of ties with Turkey, and he said the response will be stronger cooperation between the countries. Putin’s Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed, saying they’ll jointly investigate the attack and won’t allow it to disrupt a collaboration that’s crucial for the region. [Continue reading…]

The Daily Beast reports: Reaction in both Russia and Turkey has been swift, incensed and conspiratorial.

Alexey Pushkov, the former head of the foreign affairs committee of the Russian State Duma, or lower house of parliament, has claimed the killing was a direct result of media “hysteria” concerning Aleppo, purveyed by “enemies” of Moscow. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a far-right Russian nationalist parliamentarian, claimed that the West orchestrated the shooting to prevent Turkish-Russian rapprochement following close to a year of a breach, which has gradually narrowed in recent months.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova issued a statement: “Terrorism will not pass! We will fight it resolutely. Memory of this outstanding Russian diplomat, a man who did so much to counter terrorism in his diplomatic line of work, Andrei Gennadyevich Karlov, will remain in our hearts forever.”

Meanwhile, pro-government journalists in Turkey are beginning to suggest that the assassin was affiliated with the Islamist movement of exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen, who is widely blamed in the country for orchestrating last July’s abortive coup. (He lives in the Poconos of Pennsylvania and Turkey is seeking his extradition from the United States.) [Continue reading…]

Turkey and Iran on collision course

Ali Vaez writes: Today’s competition between Turkey and Iran is the latest iteration of an old power game: a struggle their progenitors, the Byzantine and Persian empires, started over the control of Mesopotamia — today’s Iraq and Syria. While the rivalry outlived their transformation from empires to nation-states, they have managed to keep the peace between themselves for nearly 200 years.

Yet Turkey and Iran are now on a collision course, mostly because of their involvement as the region’s major Sunni and Shiite powers in the deepening sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Their inability to accommodate each other has the potential to undermine or even undo the strong ties they have developed over the past two decades, as their economies became increasingly intertwined.

How the two countries choose to deploy their power and whether they can overcome their differences are vitally important to determining the future of the Middle East. Left unchecked, the present dynamics point toward greater bloodshed, growing instability and greater risks of direct — even if inadvertent — military confrontation. [Continue reading…]

Iraqi Kurdistan slides toward autocracy

Akbar Shahid Ahmed reports: Most mornings this August, Wedad Hussein Ali, a 28-year-old Kurdish journalist with a trim beard and a penchant for spiking his hair, would get up early to drive his big brother, Sardar, to work. The trip from Kora, their leafy, ancient village in Iraqi Kurdistan’s mountains, to Dohuk, the nearest big town, took 30 minutes.

On Aug. 13, they reached Sardar’s construction site at 9:15 a.m. He got out of the car as usual. Ali drove on.

Minutes later, two unmarked cars cut off Ali. Three men got out. One pointed a gun to the journalist’s head. The others tied his wrists and placed a hood over his head. As witnesses watched, the men loudly announced that they had official business with Ali. They placed him in one of their cars and drove away.

A few hours later, a police officer called Ali’s family to say his body was at a local morgue. It had been transferred there after police in a neighboring village found it dumped by the side of a road, the police contact said. Ali had been cut, beaten and bruised, showing signs, one doctor said, of having been hit by a long object like a bat or a baton. To the family, it looked like he had suffered third-degree burns and beatings with electric cables. His eyes appeared to have been torn out with knives.

There were plenty of groups that could have killed Ali. The vicious Islamic State group maintains sleeper cells across Iraq, including in Kurdistan; Dohuk is just an hour’s drive from Mosul, the chief ISIS hub in the country. Iran-backed Shiite militias have tortured and terrorized thousands of their fellow Iraqis over the past decade, focusing their attention on people who follow the rival Sunni branch of Islam — which most Kurds do. And Iraqi Kurdistan has long hosted an internationally condemned Kurdish movement called the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has issued harsh punishments, including executions, to Kurds who refuse to collaborate with it.

But Ali’s family doesn’t blame ISIS, Shiite militias or the PKK for his murder. They believe Iraqi Kurdistan’s U.S.-friendly leaders were responsible for his death.

Nine weeks after Ali’s murder, Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, held a triumphant press conference. The day before, 4,000 Iraqi Kurdish fighters had begun moving toward Mosul. Scores of American advisers boosted their ranks, and American B-1 and F-15 jets provided air support.

The Kurds’ advance was sold as a key sign that the U.S. had rallied its partners in Iraq and prepared them to push ISIS out of the country for good. Brett McGurk, the top American managing the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, wished the Kurds and others “Godspeed” on Twitter. “We are proud to stand with you,” he added.

Since the U.S. and Kurdistan first began major cooperation against ISIS in August 2014, Barzani, an iconic former militia man who has been close to winning Time’s Person of the Year award, has pushed the region ever closer to autocracy.

But the Obama administration and President-elect Donald Trump have largely ignored warning signs — including Ali’s death — that point to a dark future for Kurdistan.

Parliament has not functioned since last October, because Barzani banned its speaker, an opposition politician, from entering the capital. Thousands of refugees who have sought sanctuary in the region have seen their freedoms restricted. Kurdish authorities have meted out particularly harsh treatment to Sunni Arabs, mimicking the Iraqi policies that provoked Sunni dissatisfaction and enabled the initial rise of ISIS. U.S.-backed Kurdish forces have demolished the homes of Sunni Arabs in areas recaptured from ISIS. Kurdistan has subjected many of the Yazidis, the minority group whose genocide prompted U.S. action against ISIS, to painful shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine because of their affinity for the anti-Barzani PKK ― only strengthening the militant Kurdish group’s appeal. [Continue reading…]

The fall of Aleppo is a huge gift to ISIS

Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan write: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the “Caliph Ibrahim” of the so-called Islamic State, had an excellent week last week.

The fall of Aleppo to a consortium of Iranian-built militias backed by Russian airpower and special forces constitutes not only a loud victory for Damascus but also a quieter one for ISIS, or the Islamic State, which mounted a surprise attack that retook the ancient city of Palmyra.

The contrast could not have been starker or a more clear vindication of one of ISIS’s longest-running propaganda tropes: the “infidels” and “apostates” will do nothing to save Sunni Arabs from the pillage, rape, and barrel bombs of the Russians, Alawites, and Shia. But Aleppo’s fall also buttresses one of the lesser-scrutinized claims made by ISIS’s former spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, shortly before his demise.

In May, months before he was taken out by a U.S. airstrike, Adnani issued what would turn out to be a final communiqué refuting a common Sunni criticism of ISIS, namely that the group’s takeover of Sunni towns and cities invariably brought only devastation. See Fallujah and Ramadi. For Adnani, however, such devastation was never the fault of ISIS, as rival jihadist enterprises had discovered at their peril.

“If we knew that any of the righteous predecessors surrendered a span of land to the infidels, using the claim of popular support or to save buildings from being destroyed or to prevent bloodshed, or any other alleged interest,” he said, “we would have done the same as the Qa’idah of the Fool of the so-called Ummah.” Only steadfastness, even in the face of overwhelming odds, would restore Sunni dignity.

Thanks to Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—not to say Barack Obama—Adnani now gets to play the posthumous prophet. Rather than die fighting for Aleppo, the Free Syrian Army (and its Western backers), plus rival Islamist or jihadist groups such the Syrian al Qaeda franchise Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, negotiated the terms of their surrender through a series of failed and humiliating “ceasefires” and evacuations, which are in fact forced population transfers. And Aleppo was still pulverized. [Continue reading…]

Pro-regime forces in Syria are stretched thin – and fighting among themselves

Tom Cooper writes: Five years into Syria’s apocalyptic civil war, there is no more Syrian Arab Army on the country’s battlefields. So who’s fighting for Syrian president Bashar Al Assad?

The answer is a shocking one. Today the forces fighting for the Syrian regime represent a hodgepodge of sectarian local militias, most of which do not fall under the regime’s direct control.

In other words, Al Assad is waging a war with virtually no troops of his own.

The exceptions to this rule are few — only around a dozen of company-sized formations that survived the collapse of the Syrian army’s Republican Guards Division and 4th Armored Division. And those companies were never within the normal army chain of command, instead personally answering to Al Assad.

The majority of the remaining “regime forces” — some 70,000 combatants — belong to the Syrian militias, all of which were established by either the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or Hezbollah, and the majority of which now fall under Iranian control. [Continue reading…]

Aleppo refugees reach safety after being held at government checkpoint

The Guardian reports: Hundreds of people from east Aleppo who spent hours in limbo crammed on to buses at a Syrian government checkpoint have reached safety, becoming the latest group to be evacuated from the embattled city.

Two days after the deal to evacuate tens of thousands of civilians in the shrinking and besieged rebel enclave appeared on the verge of unravelling, it seems to be back on track. But many remain languishing in the winter cold and hundreds are still being held at the Syrian government checkpoint.

A source with knowledge of the evacuation deal said roughly 1,000 civilians in 25 buses had been evacuated overnight into the western Aleppo countryside, which is controlled by the opposition. Another 20 are still stuck at the government crossing in the district of Ramouseh, awaiting the parallel evacuation of residents in two pro-government villages besieged by rebels.

Among those who were rescued was Bana al-Abed, a seven-year-old girl whose tweets about life in east Aleppo under bombardment captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of people on social media, including prominent figures such as author JK Rowling.

Humanitarian workers in the area published images showing a smiling Bana on their shoulders, wearing a winter jacket and woollen head cover. Her tweets had drawn attention to the suffering of east Aleppo’s residents, and there were fears that she might be killed or fall into the hands of government forces. [Continue reading…]

#Syria: @AlabedBana is out! This morning she and her family were evacuated from the besieged city of #Aleppo pic.twitter.com/2LftRced9x

— Thomas van Linge (@arabthomness) December 19, 2016

Donald Trump has no idea how to run a superpower, say Chinese media

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump appears to have not a clue how to lead a superpower.

That was the conclusion of China’s Global Times newspaper on Monday morning as the country’s media weighed in on the president-elect’s latest social media assaults on Beijing.

“Trump is not behaving as a president who will become master of the White House in a month,” the Communist party controlled newspaper wrote in an editorial. “He bears no sense of how to lead a superpower.”

The article came after the US president-elect again used Twitter, which has been blocked in China since 2009, to berate the leaders of the world’s second largest economy.

“China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters – rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented [sic] act,” Trump tweeted early on Saturday morning after it emerged the Chinese navy had seized a US naval drone that had been operating in the South China Sea.

In a second tweet, Trump wrote:

We should tell China that we don't want the drone they stole back.- let them keep it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 18, 2016

Those 221 characters threatened to further alienate China’s rulers, already reeling from Trump’s recent decision to hold a 10-minute phone call with the Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, and threat to upend long-standing US policy on Taiwan.

On Friday, President Obama cautioned Trump against allowing relations with China slip into “full conflict mode”. [Continue reading…]

‘Tragedy’ inside Mosul as food runs out and the battle against ISIS drags on

The Washington Post reports: Hundreds of thousands of people who remain in this northern Iraqi city are struggling to find food and safe drinking water as the protracted offensive against Islamic State militants batters their neighborhoods.

When the battle began seven weeks ago, aid agencies feared that an exodus from the city would overwhelm already crowded camps. Instead, most people heeded government advice to stay in their homes as security forces advanced.

Now many of those residents lack even basic services, with water supplies cut by the fighting, and U.N. and government aid distributions unable to reach all of those in need. Some residents are moving from neighborhood to neighborhood in search of food or to escape the bombardment.

Meanwhile, in areas still controlled by the Islamic State, a siege by security forces is slowly tightening, pushing up food prices and causing shortages while the militants prevent people from leaving.

Iraq is struggling to meet the needs of 3.2 million people displaced over the past three years during fighting against the Islamic State. To limit the displacement from Mosul, the government airdropped leaflets over the city telling civilians to stay put.

But few commanders expect the battle to finish anytime soon, and the misery unfolding in Mosul is expected to worsen as winter sets in. [Continue reading…]

Climate change forced over 1 million Africans from their homes in 2015

ThinkProgress reports: At least 12 million people lived in ongoing displacement caused by conflict, violence, and other disasters across the African continent in 2015. And in the future, climate change may be the lead driver of even greater displacement.

In the Africa Report on Internal Displacement — a new report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre that focused on internal displacement across the entire African continent — researchers found that “disasters triggered by rapid-onset natural hazards” forced 1.1 million people from their homes across 33 African countries last year. What’s more, disaster-induced displacement makes people more vulnerable from one year to the next and more susceptible to food insecurity since planting and harvesting become disrupted when farmers are absent.

“The figure of 12.4 million internally displaced people (IDPs) is more than double Africa’s 5.4 million refugee population across the continent, and is a reminder of the protracted nature of many conflicts in Africa,” Alexandra Bilak, the director of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), said in a statement. “But it still underestimates the full scale of Africa’s internal displacement crisis because data over time is not available for the millions more who become trapped in displacement as a result of disasters and development projects.” [Continue reading…]

Aleppo exiles face perilous path to an uncertain future

The Guardian reports: The last fighters and civilians who were holding out in Aleppo are finally trickling towards the Turkish border, where a central plank of Ankara’s policy throughout the nearly six-year war is about to be put to the test.

Those collected from the ruins are being taken to a point north of the city, in a deal brokered by Turkey and Russia, which will supposedly provide them refuge away from the ongoing fighting.

The development is meant to lead to the type of safe haven sanctuary Turkey has regularly pushed for as a means of protecting civilians. But Ankara’s idea of what would eventually emerge from the war has changed dramatically over the past eight months. Enthusiastic backing for the anti-Assad rebels has given way to direct moves to help end the war, rather than keep it rumbling on. [Continue reading…]

Russia threatens to veto French draft resolution on UN observers in Aleppo

France 24 reports: Russia is prepared to use its veto to block a French-drafted resolution on sending UN observers to Aleppo to monitor evacuations and help protect civilians, Moscow’s envoy to the UN said Sunday, as evacuations resumed following a new deal.

Speaking to reporters in New York Sunday, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin said Moscow would veto the French draft resolution, “because this is a disaster”. He did however say: “There could be another thing which could be adopted today by the Security Council, which would accomplish the same goals.”

Russia then circulated its own draft resolution calling on the UN to make “arrangements” to “monitor the condition of civilians remaining in Aleppo”. But it did not mention the deployment of observers, according to diplomats.

The UN Security Council was set to meet for closed-door consultations Sunday followed by a vote on the proposals.

France circulated a draft text late Friday stating that the council is “alarmed” by the worsening humanitarian crisis in Aleppo and by the fact that “tens of thousands of besieged Aleppo inhabitants” are in need of aid and evacuation.

Russia has vetoed six resolutions on Syria since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime began in March 2011. [Continue reading…]

McCain calls for committee to investigate Russia hacking: ‘There’s no doubt’ of interference

The Washington Post reports: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Sunday again decried Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential race and called for a select Senate committee to investigate the country’s cyber activities during the election.

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” McCain told host Jake Tapper that there was “no doubt” Russia interfered with the election.

“We need to get to the bottom of this,” he said. “There’s no doubt they were interfering. There’s no doubt. The question is now, how much and what damage? And what should the United States of America do?” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The former CIA director and defense secretary Robert Gates has criticised the Obama administration and congressional leaders of both parties for a “somewhat laid back” response to the discovery of Russian interference in the US presidential election.

Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Gates said a “thinly disguised” operation by Russia had aimed to undermine the credibility of the American election and was to weaken Hillary Clinton.

“Given the unprecedented nature of it and the magnitude of the effort, I think people seem to have been somewhat laid back about it,” he said. [Continue reading…]