Operation Empty Chair
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
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.
“ISIS Is Not An Existential Threat”
Romulus Augustus couldn’t have said it better himself.
Operation Empty Chair
Always back the winning side: CIA-armed militias are shooting at Pentagon-armed ones in Syria
“On Friday, the authorities stripped security badges from several workers “
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.
Operation Empty Chair
White House officials were left scrambling…
“We have seen reports that President Putin has announced a planned withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria. We expect to learn more about this in the coming hours,” said one senior administration official on Monday afternoon.
A speedy Russian exit from Syria would confound President Obama’s talking point that Putin had walked into a “quagmire” in that country’s civil war that he would come to regret. Obama made the case most recently in an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, in which Obama said Russia was “overextended” and “bleeding” in Syria.
It’s telling that Obama thinks that the only thing that matters is the agenda at international gab-fests. That’s because the president, like most European heads of state, lives in a 21st century, post-power world where international law is more meaningful than brute force. Putin, by contrast, inhabits a 19th century, Realpolitik world where strongmen act to advance their own interests with scant regard for the feelings of other states, much less of multilateral institutions such as the G20 or the United Nations. In the clash between these two incompatible visions of the world, there is no doubt which one is winning: From Crimea to Syria, Putin is rewriting the rules of the international game in his favor.
Operation Empty Chair
An elite American Special Operations force has captured a significant Islamic State operative in Iraq and is expected to apprehend and interrogate a number of others in coming months, ushering in a new and potentially fraught phase in the fight against the extremist Sunni militant group.
American defense officials described the capture as a crucial development in battling the Islamic State but said it also raised questions about handling what is likely to be a growing group of detainees.
[…]
Defense Department officials said that the United States had no plans to hold the detainee or others indefinitely, and that they would be handed over to Iraqi or Kurdish authorities after they have been interviewed. The officials said they did not intend to establish a long-term American facility to hold Islamic State detainees, and Obama administration officials ruled out sending any to the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Operation Empty Chair
I’m old enough to remember when a few pieces of broken pottery was all George Bush’s fault.
Good times.
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
If the Iranian government had released innocent people because they’re innocent like it’s supposed to–then we could say we had a good day. But that’s not what happened. That’s not even close to what happened.
This Is Awkward
"Today, President Park and I are reaffirming that our nations will never accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state." —@POTUS
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 16, 2015
OOPS! A large tremor near North Korea’s nuclear test facilities is suspected to be an explosion, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency has reported.
Operation Empty Chair
It was Aug. 30, 2013, and the U.S. military was poised for war. Obama had publicly warned Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad that his regime would face consequences if it crossed a “red line” by employing chemical weapons against its own people. Assad did it anyway, and Hagel had spent the day approving final plans for a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missile strikes against Damascus. U.S. naval destroyers were in the Mediterranean, awaiting orders to fire.
Operation Empty Chair
When asked whether or not the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is operating in the United States, Homeland Security Secretary (DHS) Jeh Johnson did not directly answer the question.
Related.
h/t Frank
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
Reuters: Iran will not accept any restrictions on its missile program, the defense minister was quoted as saying by state media on Wednesday, after sanctions monitors said Tehran had violated a U.N. Security Council resolution by test-firing a missile.
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
Don’t attribute to political correctness, that which can be explained by malice.
But after more than six months of research and tracking; over 1,200 law enforcement actions and more than 300 terrorists identified; and a commendation for our efforts; DHS shut down the investigation at the request of the Department of State and DHS’ own Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Division. They claimed that since the Islamist groups in question were not Specially Designated Terrorist Organizations (SDTOs) tracking individuals related to these groups was a violation of the travelers’ civil liberties. These were almost exclusively foreign nationals: When were they granted the civil rights and liberties of American citizens?
Worse still, the administration then went back and erased the dots we were diligently connecting. Even as DHS closed my investigation, I knew that data I was looking at could prove significant to future counterterror efforts and tried to prevent the information from being lost to law enforcement. In 2013, I met with the DHS Inspector General in coordination with several members of Congress to attempt to warn the American people’s elected representatives about the threat.
In retaliation, DHS and the Department of Justice subjected me to a series of investigations and adverse actions, including one by that same Inspector General. None of them showed any wrongdoing; they seemed aimed at stopping me from blowing the whistle on this problem. Earlier this year, I was finally able to honorably retire from government and I’m now taking my story to the American people as a warning.
The World Is In The Very Best Of Hands
Operation Empty Chair
Ex-Guantanamo detainee now an al Qaeda leader in Yemen.
In July 2010, Qosi plead guilty to charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism before a military commission. His plea was part of a deal in which he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors during his remaining time in US custody. Qosi was transferred to his home country of Sudan two years later, in July 2012.
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
Iran has once again tested a mid-range ballistic missile in an apparent breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions forbidding them from doing so, according to Fox News.
“Iran has carried out a new medium-ranged ballistic missile test, and that missile they say, is capable of carrying a nuclear weapon,” Shepherd Smith announced Monday afternoon. “This is a breach of not one but two U.N. Security Council resolutions.”
U.S. officials told the news organization on Sunday the test was held Nov. 21 in the port city of Chabahar near the country’s southern border with Pakistan. The missile test occurred at a well-known site by the Gulf of Oman.
The missile, called the Ghadr-110, has a range up to 1,200 miles and is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
Operation Empty Chair
A former CIA director says concerns about environmental impact have prevented the White House from bombing oil wells that finance the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Operation Empty Chair
Who is funding ISIS?
…just last week in the aftermath of the French terror attack but long before the Turkish downing of the Russian jet, we wrote about “The Most Important Question About ISIS That Nobody Is Asking” in which we asked who is the one “breaching every known law of funding terrorism when buying ISIS crude, almost certainly with the tacit approval by various “western alliance” governments, and why is it that these governments have allowed said middleman to continue funding ISIS for as long as it has?”
Hint: It isn’t Halliburton.