ISIS defeated in last major stronghold
Pro-government forces defeated the Islamic State group in its last major stronghold in Syria, state media and a monitoring group reported on Sunday, leaving the militants to defend just strips of desert territory in the country and a besieged pocket outside the capital, Damascus.
Since curtailing Operation Empty Chair, the anti-ISIS forces have done remarkably well. Odd that.
The panned, opposition funded, “dossier” was the basis for the Russian excuse which lead to the Mueller witch-hunt. Was the fiction also the basis for Obama using the agents of the federal gov’t to target Republicans?
I mean, it’s not like there isn’t a history of the D’s weaponizing federal agencies, or anything.
Oh…Clinton still isn’t POTUS.
I guess she’s no longer proud of her country.
Holocaust Museum Pulls Study Absolving Obama Administration For Inaction In Face of Syrian Genocide
The intervention of the Holocaust Museum in a hot-button political dispute–and the apparent excuse of official US government inaction in the face of large-scale mass murder, complete with the gassing of civilians and government-run crematoria–alarmed many Jewish communal figures. “The first thing I have to say is: Shame on the Holocaust Museum,” said Leon Wieseltier, the literary critic and fellow at the Brookings Institution, who slammed the Museum for “releasing an allegedly scientific study that justifies bystanderism.”
The Museum’s exercise in counter-factual history, he suggested, was inherently absurd. “If I had the time I would gin up a parody version of this that will give us the computational-modeling algorithmic counterfactual analysis of John J McCloy’s decision not to bomb the Auschwitz ovens in 1944. I’m sure we could concoct the fucking algorithms for that, too.”
How could such a thing happen?
Some Jewish communal leaders suggested both privately to Tablet, and in conversations with board members and staff at the Holocaust Museum, that the Museum’s moral authority had been hijacked for a partisan re-writing of recent history, and alleged that the museum had absolved the Obama administration of any moral or political error in its response to mass atrocities in Syria. At least one of the architects of the Obama administration policy in Syria, former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, was appointed to the museum’s Memorial Council during the closing days of the Obama administration.
“American leadership in this world really is indispensable. It’s up to us, through action and example, to sustain the international order that’s expanded steadily since the end of the Cold War, and upon which our own wealth and safety depend.”
No, seriously. He wrote that.
To the mother of Heather Heyer from the mother of Sean Smith.
(2) Under Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, the Department of Justice pushed the states to pass new laws.
(3) The goal was to make it impossible to hold repeat offenders in jail before trial. Why?
(4) Because so many repeat offenders are black.
In 1972, some employees of President Nixon’s re-election committee were caught when they broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant a bug. This led to Nixon’s resignation and probably would have led to his felony prosecution had he not been pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.
But if a single bugging of the political opposition is enough to bring down a presidency — and maybe lead to an unprecedented criminal prosecution of a former president — then what are we to make of the recently unveiled Obama administration program of massively spying on political opponents in violation of clearly established law?
Because that’s what was unveiled last week.
He wasn’t anti-nuke. He was on the other side.
When federal prosecutors and agents learned the true extent of the releases, many were shocked and angry. Some had spent years, if not decades, working to penetrate the global proliferation networks that allowed Iranian arms traders both to obtain crucial materials for Tehran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs and, in some cases, to provide dangerous materials to other countries.
“They didn’t just dismiss a bunch of innocent business guys,” said one former federal law enforcement supervisor centrally involved in the hunt for Iranian arms traffickers and nuclear smugglers. “And then they didn’t give a full story of it.”
In its determination to win support for the nuclear deal and prisoner swap from Tehran — and from Congress and the American people — the Obama administration did a lot more than just downplay the threats posed by the men it let off the hook, according to POLITICO’s findings.
Through action in some cases and inaction in others, the White House derailed its own much-touted National Counterproliferation Initiative at a time when it was making unprecedented headway in thwarting Iran’s proliferation networks. In addition, the POLITICO investigation found that Justice and State Department officials denied or delayed requests from prosecutors and agents to lure some key Iranian fugitives to friendly countries so they could be arrested. Similarly, Justice and State, at times in consultation with the White House, slowed down efforts to extradite some suspects already in custody overseas, according to current and former officials and others involved in the counterproliferation effort.
And as far back as the fall of 2014, Obama administration officials began slow-walking some significant investigations and prosecutions of Iranian procurement networks operating in the U.S. These previously undisclosed findings are based on interviews with key participants at all levels of government and an extensive review of court records and other documents.
“Clearly, there was an embargo on any Iranian cases,” according to the former federal supervisor.
“Of course it pissed people off, but it’s more significant that these guys were freed, and that people were killed because of the actions of one of them,” the supervisor added, in reference to Ravan and the IED network.
Unreal. We had a president openly colluding with America's enemies and brazenly lying about it. https://t.co/Pl2areVM46
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) April 24, 2017
Obama Political Spying Scandal:
Was Russia, and specifically the overwrought “Russia hacked the election” narrative, used as camouflage for what was actually a political spying operation? Do you really think the Obama administration, which turned the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department into process cudgels for beating Obama detractors, would be above that sort of thing?
h/t OttRob
It’s what brought us to where we are today.
If this strike was arranged to avoid hitting sarin storage facilities, the question arises: did the Obama Administration know that such depots still existed after its “historic” deal that supposedly removed all Syria’s chemical weapons?
The signs point to yes.
More: first photos of Shayrat military airfield, or what’s left of it.
Those names were leaked by a hateful internet video;
After the revelations these last couple of days about the “incidental” unmaskings, Rice made another television appearance, this time in an interview with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. Asked about allegations that she had been been involved in disseminating the names of people swept up by the intelligence investigations, she insisted that they were “absolutely false.”
Did the Obama Administration’s Abuse of Foreign-Intelligence Collection Start Before Trump?
In a December 31, 2016, Tablet article on the controversy, “Why the White House Wanted Congress to Think It Was Being Spied on By the NSA,” I argued that the Obama administration had merely used the appearance of spying on American lawmakers to corner opponents of the Iran Deal. Spying on U.S. citizens would be a clear abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance system. It would be a felony offense to leak the names of U.S. citizens to the press.
Increasingly, I believe that my conclusion in that piece was wrong. I believe the spying was real and that it was done not in an effort to keep the country safe from threats–but in order to help the White House fight their domestic political opponents.
“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism–activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”
And…“President Obama, of course, got his start in national politics when sealed divorce records became public.”
.@JohnKerry: Today the last 8% of declared chemical weapons were removed from #Syria. Great work done by all involved http://t.co/ccPDVkNISz
— Department of State (@StateDept) June 24, 2014
Columnist Larry Johnson deciphers the spin from Obama’s spokesperson, Kevin Lewis. Johnson discusses the same with John Batchelor in this podcast.
“We came, we saw, he died.
Ever get the feeling the last twenty years was a gigantic waste of time, money and lives?
Barack Obama’s close confidante Valerie Jarrett has moved into his new DC home…
Related. Obama officials spent final days purposely pushing Russia allegations
British Islamic State fighter who carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq this week is a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who was paid £1 million compensation by the government.
Jamal al-Harith, a Muslim convert born Ronald Fiddler who detonated a car bomb at an Iraqi army base near Mosul, was released from the US detention camp in 2004 and successfully claimed compensation after saying British agents knew or were complicit in his mistreatment.
And of course, there’s this.
He was freed following intense lobbying by Tony Blair’s Labour government.
(*Update: Heckuva job, Kate… “2004”.)