U.S. troops have been stationed in South Korea for decades not only to deter Pyongyang, but to keep Seoul feeling secure enough to stay reined in.
Those days would seem to be over.
Global Test
Operation Ostrich: “No country is immune from terrorism. It’s easy to terrorize. Government and law enforcement have to be correct 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. But if you decide one day you’re going to be a terrorist and you’re willing to kill yourself, you can go out and kill some people. You can make some noise. Perhaps the media would do us all a service if they didn’t cover it quite as much. People wouldn’t know what’s going on.”
Operation Empty Chair
Not An Iranian Sleeper Agent
In his new book, “The Iran Wars,” Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon uncovers new details on how far Obama went to avoid helping Iran’s green movement. Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal America’s support.
Solomon reports that Obama ordered the CIA to sever contacts it had with the green movement’s supporters. “The Agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms,” Solomon writes. “But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.”
Operation Empty Headline
Surprising no one.
Via Glenardo
Okay. So it was a ransom. Obama must hate Iran, they keep making him look like a jug-eared dweeb.
Operation Empty Chair
Senior officials at U.S. Central Command manipulated intelligence reports, press statements, and congressional testimony to present a more positive outlook on the war against the so-called Islamic State, a House Republican task force concluded in a damning report released Thursday.
The report, written by the members of the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees and the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, confirmed more than a year of reporting by The Daily Beast about problems with CENTCOM analysis of the war against ISIS.
House Democrats, who conducted their own separate investigation, reached a similar conclusion as their Republican colleagues, finding that CENTCOM “insufficiently accommodated dissenting views,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.
The altering of intelligence reports, which included information that made its way into briefings to President Obama, was systematic, lawmakers found.
Springtime For Erdogan
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!
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
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.
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
U.S. counter-terror officials have asked Toyota, the world’s second largest auto maker, to help them determine how ISIS has managed to acquire the large number of Toyota pick-up trucks and SUVs …
Operation Empty Chair
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.
[Too Bad] President Obama may never know his real motive
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:
- The first half will mourn the loss of all the innocent lives taken in a matter of minutes.
- 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
Associated Press: South Korea said that North Korea on Saturday test-fired what appeared to be a submarine-launched ballistic missile off its eastern coast.
Operation Empty Chair
The US is handing out $18,000 XM2010 sniper rifles to Syrian rebels. How long until they are in hands of jihadists? https://t.co/GkJy5BremZ
— Bill Roggio (@billroggio) June 29, 2016
Those Moderate Muslims!
Why the lone wolf terrorist is a myth.
Operation Empty Chair
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
On their heels: The Taliban now hold more ground in Afghanistan than at any point since 2001
Global Test
Secretary of State John Kerry this week acknowledged twice that the Islamic State and the threat of terrorism around the world is bigger threat than climate change, even though he has insisted in past years that climate is the bigger threat.
The world is in the very best of hands.
Operation Empty Chair
Leaders in the Baltic countries and Poland fear the force NATO plans to deploy on their territory is too small and symbolic to deter an attack by Russia, whose 2014 annexation of Crimea is fresh in the memories of the former Soviet-bloc states.
(h/t Colonialista)