Category: Operation Empty Chair

Springtime For Erdogan

Operation Empty Chair 8 Comments

In addition to the 62 children being held in prison;

More than 50,000 civil servants — including some 3,000 judges and prosecutors — who are suspected of supporting Fethullah Gülen, the US-based cleric accused of masterminding the plot, have been arrested or suspended in the past week. Tens of thousands of teachers have seen their licenses revoked, while academics have been barred from leaving the country.
On Saturday morning, Turkey issued its first decree under emergency law, extending the maximum length of pre-charge detention from four to 30 days. More than 1,000 private schools and some 1,200 associations and foundations will be shut down.
Turkish ministers have repeatedly denied that the state of emergency would have any impact on people’s rights and freedoms.

Also: Allegations of torture.
h/t Colonialista

Those Moderate NATO Members!

Operation Empty Chair Religion Of Submission 26 Comments

Turkish Spring:

The failed coup is serving as an excuse for a massive round-up of members of the judiciary and army officers, far greater than anything seen in Turkey for years, and is presumably a bid to secure Erdogan’s grip on the Turkish state. So numerous are those detained that a sports stadium is being used to hold some of them, a development that has ominous similarities with mass arrests in South American coups in the last century. Some 140 out of 387 judges in the Court of Appeal have been detained along with 48 out of 156 from the Council of State.

Update – In an address to the nation late Wednesday, Erdogan announced a Cabinet decision to seek the additional powers, saying the state of emergency would give the government the tools to rid the military of the “virus” of subversion. He didn’t specify exactly what the state of emergency would entail. […] Before the vote, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said that once emergency measures are invoked, the country would suspend its participation in the European Convention of Human Rights…
More – Dark days ahead.

Operation Empty Chair

Operation Empty Chair Religion Of Submission 17 Comments

Meet the new boss:

The air base at Incirlik, Turkey, used by the U.S.-led coalition to launch airstrikes and other missions against the Islamic State group, remains without power four days after a failed coup. Officials say there has been no move yet to turn it back on.
The U.S. has been relying on back-up generators to run base facilities and continue flight operations out of Incirlik.

Reuters;

Around 50,000 soldiers, police, judges, civil servants and teachers have been suspended or detained since the coup attempt, stirring tensions across the country of 80 million which borders Syria’s chaos and is a Western ally against Islamic State.

“Ally”.

Operation Empty Chair

Operation Empty Chair 27 Comments

Richard Fernandez;

There can be but little doubt that Turkey will be in upheaval for some time, no matter how things shake out in Ankara. There is even less doubt that ISIS and al-Qaeda are putting out an all-points bulletin to jihadis to converge on Turkey to exploit the situation there. This is but the first detonation, following on Nice. More alas is likely to come.
The last 48 hours have blown the hinges off NATO’s southern door. The European Union was relying on Turkey to stand between it and the chaos of Syria. Now the wall is threatening to collapse on Frau Merkel. The chaos she sought to keep at bay may have moved one country closer to the heart of Europa, a Europa which the French security failure suggests is defenseless against the fire which it, itself, has started within its borders.

Related!

[Too Bad] President Obama may never know his real motive

Baiting The Left Operation Empty Chair Religion Of Submission 48 Comments

National Review writer Mark Krikorian was in Nice with his family when the mass slaughter happened. Please read every word he wrote.
One can only wonder whether Air Force One is making preparations to fly to France and Obama and his speechwriters are already preparing a speech in which:

  1. The first half will mourn the loss of all the innocent lives taken in a matter of minutes.
  2. Then a pivot will occur and he’ll spend the rest of his time condemning the French populous for causing this massacre.

Operation Empty Chair

I Miss W. Operation Empty Chair 12 Comments

He’s not anti-war.

U.S. spy drones had no trouble spotting the Taliban fighters. There were more than 20 figures snaking through sparsely wooded hills, trying to outflank the Afghan government commandos in the village below.
In the starry darkness overhead, American helicopters loitered armed with precision-guided missiles, along with a flying gunship capable of drenching the area with cannon-fire. It would have been a hard shot to miss.
But before they could fire, the Americans knew they would have to get past the lawyers.
In the amorphous twilight of the Afghan war, it isn’t enough to draw a bead on the enemy. Before they shoot, U.S. troops have to navigate a tricky legal and political question: When is it OK for them to kill Taliban?
The operation late last month in Elbak, a flyspeck village in Kandahar province, exposed the complexity of implementing President Barack Obama’s Afghan strategy in the mud-brick villages, steep mountains and vast poppy fields where the combat takes place. With their Afghan allies walking into a possible ambush that night, U.S. commanders, monitoring video feeds and radio traffic miles from the front, had to judge whether enemy fighters who weren’t actually fighting constituted an imminent threat.
Mr. Obama, who campaigned on a promise to extract the U.S. from its long wars, has declared an end to the American combat mission in Afghanistan and set guidelines for when the remaining 9,800 U.S. troops, many of them in elite special-operations units, may use lethal force.

He’s on the other side.

Operation Empty Chair

Operation Empty Chair 8 Comments

Free Beacon;

The classified details behind Iran’s treatment of several U.S. sailors who were captured by the Islamic Republic during a tense standoff earlier this year are likely to shock the nation, according to one member of the House Armed Services Committee, who disclosed to the Washington Free Beacon that these details are currently being withheld by the Obama administration.
Rep. Randy Forbes (R., Va.) told the Free Beacon in an interview that the Obama administration is still keeping details of the maritime incident under wraps. It could be a year or longer before the American public receives a full accounting of the incident, in which several U.S. sailors were abducted at gunpoint by the Iranian military.

Related: Why Hasn’t Obama Fired Ben Rhodes?

h/t Colonista

A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran

Media Operation Empty Chair Radioactive 19 Comments

Michael Totten;

I spent more than a decade interviewing people all over the world, sometimes on the phone and via email, but most of the time in person on the other side of the world. I’ve interviewed every type of person imaginable, from military commanders and heads of state to war refugees and homeless people who sleep outside in slums.
Trust me on this: government officials are almost always the worst sources and interview subjects. That’s true everywhere in the world. They live in rarefied bubbles. They lie. They leave things out, sometimes because they want to and sometimes because they have to. They’re often incompetent and even more often shockingly ignorant. Everyone has opinions, and lots of people have agendas, but nobody has an agenda the way government officials have agendas.
It has never even occurred to me to an interview a government official in one country about what’s happening in another country.
There are exceptions. Occasionally I’ve been delighted by government officials in the most unlikely places, including in Cairo. In general, though, they’re the least interesting and the least reliable.
The last person you should be talking to, in other words, is Ben Rhodes.

“On Friday, the authorities stripped security badges from several workers “

Operation Empty Chair Radioactive Terrorism 21 Comments

New York Times;

The investigation into this week’s deadly attacks in Brussels has prompted worries that the Islamic State is seeking to attack, infiltrate or sabotage nuclear installations or obtain nuclear or radioactive material. This is especially worrying in a country with a history of security lapses at its nuclear facilities, a weak intelligence apparatus and a deeply rooted terrorist network.

Related.

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