Category Archives: News

Trump campaign CEO wanted to destroy Speaker Ryan

The Hill reports: Steve Bannon, the chairman of the right-wing news outlet Breitbart who became CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, gave explicit orders to his staff to destroy Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).

On editorial conference calls, the Breitbart chairman would often say “Paul Ryan is the enemy,” according to a source who worked with Bannon at the news organization.

A former Breitbart staffer said Bannon used to rage against Ryan all the time.

Bannon views Ryan as a leader of an elite globalist cabal determined to sell out America by opening its borders on immigration and trade.

“Bannon has Alex Jones-level paranoia about Paul Ryan,” the source said, referring to the right-wing radio host and conspiracy theorist who runs the pro-Trump website Infowars.

“He goes on these amazing rants,” the source added of Bannon. “He thinks Paul Ryan is part of a conspiracy with George Soros and Paul Singer, in which elitists want to bring one world government.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. military operations are biggest motivation for homegrown terrorism, FBI study finds

The Intercept reports: A secret FBI study found that anger over U.S. military operations abroad was the most commonly cited motivation for individuals involved in cases of “homegrown” terrorism. The report also identified no coherent pattern to “radicalization,” concluding that it remained near impossible to predict future violent acts.

The study, reviewed by The Intercept, was conducted in 2012 by a unit in the FBI’s counterterrorism division and surveyed intelligence analysts and FBI special agents across the United States who were responsible for nearly 200 cases, both open and closed, involving “homegrown violent extremists.” The survey responses reinforced the FBI’s conclusion that such individuals “frequently believe the U.S. military is committing atrocities in Muslim countries, thereby justifying their violent aspirations.”

Online relationships and exposure to English-language militant propaganda and “ideologues” like Anwar al-Awlaki are also cited as “key factors” driving extremism. But grievances over U.S. military action ranked far above any other factor, turning up in 18 percent of all cases, with additional cases citing a “perceived war against Islam,” “perceived discrimination,” or other more specific incidents. The report notes that between 2009 and 2012, 10 out of 16 attempted or successful terrorist attacks in the United States targeted military facilities or personnel. [Continue reading…]

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Case accusing Bush officials of 9/11 abuses heads to Supreme Court

The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to decide whether high-ranking George W. Bush administration officials — including John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director — may be held liable for policies adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The case began as a class action in 2002 filed by immigrants, most of them Muslim, over policies and practices that swept hundreds of people into the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn on immigration violations in the weeks after the attacks. The plaintiffs said they had been subjected to beatings, humiliating searches and other abuses.

The roundups drew criticism from the inspector general of the Justice Department, who in 2003 issued reports saying that the government had made little or no effort to distinguish between genuine suspects and Muslim immigrants with minor visa violations.

A divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, let the case proceed last year.

“The suffering endured by those who were imprisoned merely because they were caught up in the hysteria of the days immediately following 9/11 is not without a remedy,” Judges Rosemary S. Pooler and Richard C. Wesley wrote in a joint opinion. [Continue reading…]

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White House says U.S. will retaliate against Russia for hacking

Politico reports: White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest promised on Tuesday that the U.S. would deliver a “proportional” response to Russia’s alleged hacking of American computer systems.

In addition to pledging that the U.S. “will ensure that our response is proportional,” Earnest told reporters flying on Air Force One that “it is unlikely that our response would be announced in advance.”

“The president has talked before about the significant capabilities that the U.S. government has to both defend our systems in the United States but also carry out offensive operations in other countries,” he said as the press corps traveled with the president to a Hillary Clinton campaign event in North Carolina. “So there are a range of responses that are available to the president and he will consider a response that is proportional.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkey purges NATO military envoys after failed coup

Reuters reports: Turkey has fired hundreds of senior military staff serving at NATO in Europe and the United States following July’s coup attempt, documents show, broadening a purge to include some of the armed forces’ best-trained officials.

In a classified military dispatch seen by Reuters, 149 military envoys posted to the alliance’s headquarters and command centres in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain were ordered on Sept. 27 to return to Turkey within three days.

Most were dismissed from service on their arrival, arrested and imprisoned, according to a Turkish military official at NATO and two farewell letters sent by departing Turkish officials emailed to colleagues at NATO and seen by Reuters. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi PM rejects Turkish claim on Mosul campaign

The Associated Press reports: Tensions between Turkey and Iraq continued to escalate Wednesday as Iraq’s prime minister rejected Turkish claims that their forces must be included in an operation to retake the militant-held city of Mosul.

“We will liberate our land through the determination of our men and not by video calls,” Haider al-Abadi said late Tuesday night on his Twitter account, mocking the Turkish president’s nationally broadcast video call to a TV journalist amid a failed coup attempt in July.

Earlier Tuesday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkish forces cannot be excluded from the long-awaited operation to retake Mosul, telling Iraq’s al-Abadi to “know his place.” [Continue reading…]

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Gorbachev says tensions between U.S., Russia at ‘dangerous point’

RFE/RL reports: Former Soviet leader and Nobel laureate Mikhail Gorbachev has warned that the world has reached a “dangerous point” as tensions between Russia and the United States have soared over the Syria conflict.

Relations between Moscow and Washington — already at a post-Cold War low over the Ukraine conflict — have deteriorated sharply since the United States abandoned attempts with Russia to negotiate a cease-fire in Syria on October 3 and formally accused Russia of hacking U.S. political targets during the elections.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, has suspended a series of nuclear cooperation pacts and built up its military forces in Syria and near the border with Europe, most recently by stationing nuclear-capable missiles in Kaliningrad, on NATO’s doorstep.

“I think the world has reached a dangerous point,” Gorbachev, 85, told state news agency RIA Novosti on October 10. “I don’t want to give any concrete prescriptions, but I do want to say that this needs to stop. We need to renew dialogue. Stopping it was the biggest mistake.” [Continue reading…]

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How Donald Trump is promoting Russian disinformation to American voters

Kurt Eichenwald writes: I am Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Vladimir Putin — and, somehow, Donald Trump — seem to believe. And that should raise concerns about not only Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this election but also how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters.

An email from Blumenthal — a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros, at the center of conservative conspiracy theories — turned up in the recent document dump by WikiLeaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to WikiLeaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblower group has become a tool of Putin’s government. But now that I have been brought into the whole mess — and transformed into Blumenthal — there is even more proof that the Russians are not only orchestrating this act of cyberwar but also really, really dumb.

The evidence emerged thanks to the incompetence of Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government-controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya.

The documents that WikiLeaks has unloaded recently have been emails out of the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign. Almost as soon as the pilfered documents emerged, Sputnik was all over them and rapidly found (or probably already knew about before the WikiLeaks dump) a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal.

The email was amazing — it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fever dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign. [Continue reading…]

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Trump: ‘It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me’

Politico reports: Donald Trump celebrated his freedom from the Republican establishment Tuesday, boasting that it’s “so nice” to be unchained.

Trump’s tweet was a tacit attack on House Speaker Paul Ryan, whom the Republican nominee has continued to lash out at since the top elected Republican on Monday told his conference he would no longer defend Trump.

“It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” Trump tweeted.

The real estate mogul also highlighted the chasm in the Republican Party, conceding that Democrats are “far more loyal” than the GOP. More than two dozen Republicans have either said they will no longer support their nominee or called on him to step aside from the top of the ticket since a tape emerged Friday showing Trump speaking in incredibly lewd terms about sexually assaulting women. [Continue reading…]

While Trump is angered by the lack of support he is receiving from much of the Republican establishment, his campaign seems to be signalling that it has no problem with his supporters not bothering to vote for other Republican candidates.

Katrina Pierson, Trump’s national campaign spokeswoman, tweeted yesterday:

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West must confront Russia over Aleppo, British MPs to be told

The Guardian reports: Western air forces must be willing to confront Russian military jets over the skies of Syria to enforce a no-fly zone and protect the citizens of eastern Aleppo from a bombardment akin to the attack on Guernica during the Spanish civil war, UK MPs will be told by a former cabinet minister in an emergency three-hour Commons debate on Tuesday.

The intervention by Andrew Mitchell, the former international development secretary, and the granting of the debate itself, will force the UK’s Foreign Office to set out how it intends to respond after Russia’s veto of a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in eastern Aleppo. The west has been criticised for lacking any leverage over Russia in Syria.

Britain has criticised Russia but set out no clear plan on how to respond to the growing threat posed by Moscow not just in the Middle East, but across eastern Europe. Mitchell argues the whole post-cold war international diplomatic architecture is being torn down by Russian actions. [Continue reading…]

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Warming relations between Russia and Turkey as Putin and Erdogan revive pipeline deal

The New York Times reports: Amid increasingly tense relations with the United States over Syria, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia took advantage of a routine meeting in Istanbul on Monday to advance the Kremlin’s reconciliation with Turkey, including an agreement to revive a suspended natural-gas pipeline project.

The new pipeline, known as the Turkish Stream, would run under the Black Sea to Turkey and then the Greek border, allowing Russian gas to reach Western markets without using Russia’s existing export pipelines through Eastern Europe.

The pipeline would make it much easier for Russia to cut off gas supplies to neighboring countries like Ukraine without disrupting sales to countries farther west like Italy or Austria. Russia has been trying for years to establish such an export route.

Mr. Putin’s appearance at an international energy conference was his first visit to Turkey since a crisis in relations between the countries after Turkey’s downing of a Russian fighter jet along the border with Syria in November 2015, in which a Russian pilot was killed. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, nominally an ally of the United States in Syria, patched things up with a letter of apology and a trip to St. Petersburg in August.

The two have sought to use their warming relationship both at home and abroad to indicate that they are not politically isolated and remain central players in any Syria solution. They sat next to each other in the front row of the World Energy Congress in Istanbul, laughing together, and later met for bilateral talks. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS media output drops as military pressure rises

The New York Times reports: The vaunted propaganda operations of the Islamic State, which helped lure more than 30,000 foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq, have dropped off drastically as the extremist group has come under military pressure, according to a study by terrorism researchers at West Point.

In addition, the researchers found, there has been a striking shift away from publications and social media portraying a functioning state with competent bureaucrats, thriving businesses and happy citizens. The Islamic State, also called ISIS and ISIL, claims that it is building a new caliphate — or unified Muslim land — a claim that has become increasingly threadbare.

“It’s not just the numeric decline,” said Daniel Milton, director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and the author of the new report. “The caliphate was their big selling point. Now there’s an inability to say we’re doing the things that make us a state. And that was behind their broad appeal.”

At the peak of the Islamic State’s media output, in August 2015, the group released more than 700 items from official outlets in Syria and several other countries. During the month of August 2016, after a year of airstrikes and other assaults, that number had declined to under 200, according to the study.

Over the same period, the share of items devoted to military reports doubled to 70 percent, eclipsing attention to governance, commerce and other topics portraying civilian life. [Continue reading…]

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‘Hard Brexit’ could cost 66 billion pounds a year

Reuters reports: The United Kingdom could lose up to 66 billion pounds a year under a “hard Brexit”, The Times reported citing leaked government papers.

GDP could fall by as much 9.5 percent if Britain leaves the European Union compared with if it stays within the union, The Times reported.

The 66-billion-pound figure was in a draft cabinet committee paper which was seen by The Times. [Continue reading…]

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Russia to build permanent Syrian naval base, eyes other outposts

Reuters reports: Russia will create a permanent naval base in Syria to expand its military footprint in its closest Middle East ally, a government official said on Monday, a week after Moscow said it was considering reopening Soviet-era bases in Vietnam and Cuba.

The move, announced by Russian Deputy Defence Minister Nikolai Pankov, is further evidence Russia is building up its capabilities in Syria despite a partial drawdown in March and another sign it is digging in for the long haul to help prop up President Bashar al-Assad.

“By doing this Russia is not only increasing its military potential in Syria but in the entire Middle East,” Senator Igor Morozov, a member of the upper house of parliament’s International Affairs Committee, told the RIA news agency. [Continue reading…]

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Russian parliament authorizes air force to remain in Syria forever

RT reports: The lower house of the Russian parliament (the State Duma) has ratified an agreement allowing the country’s Air Force to stay in Syria on an unlimited basis. Combatting terrorism is cited as one of the key goals.

The ballot took place on Friday with all 446 legislators voting in favor of the agreement, which will be applied “for an unlimited period and is timely applied from the date of its signing.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. ‘could be implicated in war crimes’ in Yemen

Reuters reports: The Obama administration went ahead with a $1.3 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia last year despite warnings from some officials that the United States could be implicated in war crimes for supporting a Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians, according to government documents and the accounts of current and former officials.

State Department officials also were privately skeptical of the Saudi military’s ability to target Houthi militants without killing civilians and destroying “critical infrastructure” needed for Yemen to recover, according to the emails and other records obtained by Reuters and interviews with nearly a dozen officials with knowledge of those discussions.

U.S. government lawyers ultimately did not reach a conclusion on whether U.S. support for the campaign would make the United States a “co-belligerent” in the war under international law, four current and former officials said. That finding would have obligated Washington to investigate allegations of war crimes in Yemen and would have raised a legal risk that U.S. military personnel could be subject to prosecution, at least in theory.

For instance, one of the emails made a specific reference to a 2013 ruling from the war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor that significantly widened the international legal definition of aiding and abetting such crimes.

The ruling found that “practical assistance, encouragement or moral support” is sufficient to determine liability for war crimes. Prosecutors do not have to prove a defendant participated in a specific crime, the U.N.-backed court found.

Ironically, the U.S. government already had submitted the Taylor ruling to a military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to bolster its case that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda detainees were complicit in the Sept 11, 2001 attacks. [Continue reading…]

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Amid Syrian chaos, Iran’s game plan emerges: A path to the Mediterranean

Martin Chulov reports: Not far from Mosul, a large military force is finalising plans for an advance that has been more than three decades in the making. The troops are Shia militiamen who have fought against the Islamic State, but they have not been given a direct role in the coming attack to free Iraq’s second city from its clutches.

Instead, while the Iraqi army attacks Mosul from the south, the militias will take up a blocking position to the west, stopping Isis forces from fleeing towards their last redoubt of Raqqa in Syria. Their absence is aimed at reassuring the Sunni Muslims of Mosul that the imminent recapture of the city is not a sectarian push against them. However, among Iraq’s Shia-dominated army the militia’s decision to remain aloof from the battle of Mosul is being seen as a rebuff.

Yet among the militias’ backers in Iran there is little concern. Since their inception, the Shia irregulars have made their name on the battlefields of Iraq, but they have always been central to Tehran’s ambitions elsewhere. By not helping to retake Mosul, the militias are free to drive one of its most coveted projects – securing an arc of influence across Iraq and Syria that would end at the Mediterranean Sea.

The strip of land to the west of Mosul in which the militias will operate is essential to that goal. After 12 years of conflict in Iraq and an even more savage conflict in Syria, Iran is now closer than ever to securing a land corridor that will anchor it in the region – and potentially transform the Islamic Republic’s presence on Arab lands. “They have been working extremely hard on this,” said a European official who has monitored Iran’s role in both wars for the past five years. “This is a matter of pride for them on one hand and pragmatism on the other. They will be able to move people and supplies between the Mediterranean and Tehran whenever they want, and they will do so along safe routes that are secured by their people, or their proxies.”

Interviews during the past four months with regional officials, influential Iraqis and residents of northern Syria have established that the land corridor has slowly taken shape since 2014. It is a complex route that weaves across Arab Iraq, through the Kurdish north, into Kurdish north-eastern Syria and through the battlefields north of Aleppo, where Iran and its allies are prevailing on the ground. It has been assembled under the noses of friend and foe, the latter of which has begun to sound the alarm in recent weeks. Turkey has been especially opposed, fearful of what such a development means for Iran’s relationship with the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ party), the restive Kurds in its midst, on whom much of the plan hinges. [Continue reading…]

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Russia vetoes UN demand for end to bombing of Syria’s Aleppo

Reuters reports: Russia vetoed a French-drafted U.N. Security Council resolution on Saturday that would have demanded an end to air strikes and military flights over Syria’s city of Aleppo, while a rival Russian draft text failed to get a minimum nine votes in favor.

Moscow’s text was effectively the French draft with Russian amendments. It removed the demand for an end to air strikes on Aleppo and put the focus back on a failed Sept. 9 U.S./Russia ceasefire deal, which was annexed to the draft.

British U.N. Ambassador Matthew Rycroft told Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin: “Thanks to your actions today, Syrians will continue to lose their lives in Aleppo and beyond to Russian and Syrian bombing. Please stop now.”

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, backed by Russian war planes and Iranian support, have been battling to capture eastern Aleppo, the rebel-held half of Syria’s largest city, where more than 250,000 civilians are trapped.

“Russia has become one of the chief purveyors of terror in Aleppo, using tactics more commonly associated with thugs than governments,” U.S. Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations David Pressman told the council. [Continue reading…]

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