Is there anyone more pretentious than a leftist NPR viewer/listener ? (Is the tote bag for your head when it isn't up your ass ?) A couple of questions to ponder while we examine an article NPR ran today that actually doesn't involve racehustling as the major theme. That of course is a different kind of smear Trump article. First the tweet from The Donald that has their panties in a bunch
Looks like a major setback for Iran. But that surely won't do. How can NPR turn this into an attack on President Trump using existing talking points ?
Oh dear, the President is sharing 'sensitive surveillance images' of Iran on Twitter. Not only is the President 'crazy' he is comromising US intel on social media. Better invoke the 25th amendent or impeach him for this too because he is 'crazy'
President Trump tweeted an image of an Iranian space facility.
Experts say it was likely taken by a classified satellite or drone.
"We don't even share a lot of this kind of imagery with our closest allies," says one satellite imagery expert.https://t.co/VVThT2wVFN
Surely he must be crazy or Putin's puppet for doing this. OMG!!!
Of course, we could just check the last few paragraphs of the article to see if it is more than just clickbait treats for the progressive parrots. Low and behold, in the third to the last paragraph, what do we find ?
Oh no, a redacted image cleared for release by the president . Doesn't that conflict with the misleading headline ? Does any thinking person actually think this is the best resolution of an image we have access to ? Forget it, I said thinking person so that elimates your NPR audience by default.
Maybe NPR should just stick to racehustling like the New York Times. Think 1691 project.
Missing State Department tape on Iran nuclear deal reappears excerpt from The Washington Examiner
The State Department has restored a video of a 2013 press briefing in which a spokeswoman seems to admit that the government may have lied about when the Iran nuclear talks began.
Monday night, the video was missing several minutes of an exchange between Fox News reporter James Rosen, and former State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
In that exchange, Rosen asked if it's ever the policy of the department to lie in order to preserve secrecy, and she seemed to agree.
That section of the video was suddenly discovered to be missing just days after Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told the New York Times that the talks started in 2011, not in 2013 as the Obama administration first said.
The State Department may have restored the December 2, 2013 video on their website but their youtube video posted on December 4th shows the edit most likely happened long ago. Closed captioning of the Rosen exchange still remains around the 27 minute mark.....
Obama's State Department Caught Covering their LIES by using the DELETE button ...
The State Department youtube video now includes a link to the transcript and restored video near the point of edit.
There was limited coverage of the almost gleeful admission of Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama's National Security Adviser about the administration pushing lies to the American public to sell a terrible Iran nuclear deal to the American people aided by an incompetent if not complicit press corp.
The laughably unqualified Ben Rhodes and Barack Obama, the AMATEUR in Chief resorted to telling lies via press puppets to the American people to sell an Iran deal that is bad for America and Israel. Those just happen to be the 2 countries that Barack Obama blames for most past and current ills of the world. Now back to Ben Rhodes and Barack Obama.
President Obama—with the help of an equally arrogant 38-year-old national security fabulist, Ben Rhodes—remade the Middle East to empower America’s most hated enemy.
Excerpt.....
However, even as the American people remained rightly skeptical of Iran in the last year of President Obama’s first term, the Obama White House had begun secret talkswith the Ahmadinejad regime, which would result in the world’s acquiescence to Iran’s nuclear program.
Create an ‘Echo Chamber,’ Then Cast off Allies
How would the American people react to knowing that an administration, then still stinging from Republican critiques of its anti-Americanism and weakness on the world stage, was holding secret negotiations in Oman with the most powerful still-standing member of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”?
Under these conditions, Obama—with the help of an equally arrogant 38-year-old national security fabulist, Ben Rhodes (with whom he’s said to “mind-meld”)—succeeded in remaking the Middle East to empower America’s most hated enemy, the only United Nations member state committed to the annihilation of another state: the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran.
Rhodes and Obama knew that, for anyone but the hard-left to accept a deal with America’s bitter enemy in Tehran, a new narrative needed to emerge, even if it was relatively transparent nonsense. As Rhodesexplained to his bemused interviewer, David Samuels, in a New York Times Magazineprofile this weekend, it was first necessary to lie to a corrupted and inexperienced American media about all sorts of things, beginning with the nature and intentions of the enemy Iranian regime. Subsequent lies were caked on, as the White House took advantage of a dangerous mix of journalists’ ignorance, their ideological and partisan commitment to the administration, and, finally, their career aspirations.
Rhodes said, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns… They literally know nothing.” Thus they will believe what he tells them. He also tells friendly non-governmental organizations and think tanks what he is telling the journalists. Those outlets produce “experts” whose expert opinion is just what Rhodes wants it to be. These ignorant young journalists thus have quotes that look like independent confirmation of the White House’s lies. Here’s how Samuels describes the scene:
In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. ‘We created an echo chamber,’ [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.’ (emphasis added)
Of course, spinning reporters and promoting experts isn’t exactly new; it’s been standard practice in political warfare since the birth of the first press corps. What’s both new and frightening is what Rhodes’ and Obama’s effort furthers. As Lee Smithsums up in the Weekly Standard,
For the last seven years the American public has been living through a postmodern narrative crafted by an extremely gifted and unspeakably cynical political operative whose job is to wage digital information campaigns designed to dismantle a several-decade old security architecture while lying about the nature of the Iranian regime. No wonder Americans feel less safe—they are.
First, the lies and the denials about the negotiations. It took months before a few dogged journalists started to ask questions about the talks Obama officials were engaged in with Ahmadinejad’s regime. In February 2013, then-State Department Spokesperson Victoria Nuland flatly denied “direct, secret bilateral talks with Iran.” Republicans on Capitol Hill were nervous about the rumors, but the media was willing to accept the State Department’s denial. The secret negotiations with Iran also alarmed America’s allies in Jerusalem, who had also been kept in the dark about their closest ally’s clandestine meetings with their most potent adversary.
Nuland’s successor, Jen Psaki, would later admit that, as Fox’s James Rosen reported, “the meetings stretched back to 2011.” By that time, as New York Times Magazine makes clear, Rhodes had fashioned a new origin story for the administration’s negotiations: that a “thaw” in American-Iranian relations was made possible by the election of Iranian “moderates” in the summer of 2013 ......
The lies concerning the Iran deal were covered up in lawyerly style. If you wanted to go back and watch an old State Department daily briefing on Iran you will be hard pressed to find some things......
If you watch the video (above) with close captioning around the 27 minute point, you can see the words but the matching video is 'missing'
QUESTION: Is it the policy of the State Department, where the preservation or the secrecy of secret negotiations is concerned, to lie in order to achieve that goal?
MS. PSAKI: James, I think there are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress.
Caught red-handed so the administration deletes the video evidence. SOP for Obama and the Democrats.
This administration has never acted in the best interest of this country. In fact, the campaigning never truly stopped and Obama's agenda and legacy are the only thing that truly matters to the press, this administration and their 'coalition'.
Barack Obama, the divider in chief, was never concerned about leading and representing all of America's citizens or the countries best interests.. His only concern was pandering to HIS coalition, pushing HIS agenda and pretending to have a foreign policy success for the sake of HIS legacy. The Iran nuclear 'deal' is just another example of the lies and mindless attacks this amateur president is willing to resort to for the sake of any perceived success.
Just a few days ago, any opponents of his Iran deal were 'crazies'.
Just a few days later, the community activist in chief now ups the ante with more lies and attacks. These two articles from TheHill.com are from the same day.....
The White House on Friday blasted Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz for planning a protest against the Iran deal on Capitol Hill, labeling it a “pro-war rally.”
“Senator Cruz and Donald Trump have announced they are going to hold a big pro-war rally on the steps of the United States Capitol,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.
The phrase is a familiar one for Earnest, who also used it to dismiss an anti-Iran deal event organized by Cruz in July.
President Obama on Friday defended the rhetoric he has used to sell the Iran nuclear deal, which has troubled some prominent American Jewish leaders.
Obama and his allies have repeatedly claimed critics of the accord prefer war with Iran, a charge that some leaders say has triggered a backlash against Jewish lawmakers who oppose the deal.
“At no point have I ever suggested, for example, that somebody is a war monger meaning they want war,” Obama said during a webcast sponsored by major American Jewish groups
Obama has ALWAYS lied about the terms and goals of the Iran nuclear "deal" and he won't be held accountable by the press, as usual. In fact, the liberal press with cheerlead for him as usual. The secret nuclear side deals with Iran and the fact that Obama Signed Off on Iran’s Right to Nuclear Program in Secret 2011 Talks are just two of the problems are just a few of the examples of how Obama intentionally misled the American and Israeli people.
Just listen to Barack Obama's own words from December of 2013
Barack Obama's nuclear "deal" with Iran is based on deceiving the American people.His party is no exception and will give as much support as necessary to see this bad "deal" through. Obama's legacy is one of lies, deception and contempt for Israel and the other 49 percent of the American people that didn't vote for him.
The United States Senate was open for a rare Sunday session in which Senator Ted Cruz continued his battle against the Republican establishment and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The Friday session revealed that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell lied to GOP Senators about legislation and blocked GOP Senator's input into legislation by filling the amendment tree, among other things. The Friday session was covered in a previous blog. Ted Cruz Accuses Mitch McConnell of Telling a 'Flat-out Lie'
Republican leaders delivered a smackdown of Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee on the Senate floor Sunday — the latest in an increasingly testy rivalry marked by accusations of deceit and grandstanding.
The showdown was triggered by an attempt by Cruz (R-Texas) and Lee (R-Utah) to employ arcane Senate procedures to take a tougher stand on Iran and to defund Planned Parenthood. Republican leaders led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) viewed the move as an affront to Senate rules and squelched the effort in dramatic fashion — an embarrassing setback for two of the chamber’s most conservative members.
First Cruz tried unsuccessfully to force the Senate to consider an amendment to a transportation bill stating that sanctions on Iran could not be lifted until the country recognizes Israel’s right to exist and frees four American hostages. But he was unable to rally enough senators to back his effort to get a roll call vote on the matter.
Then Lee tried to push through a vote on defunding Planned Parenthood. That, too, failed to muster enough support for a vote. On Monday, Lee is expected to try to repeal Obamacare with a simple majority vote of 51 senators, effectively circumventing the 60-vote requirement to break a filibuster after Democrats defeated an attempt to repeal the health care law on Sunday.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) doubled-down Sunday in his attacks on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Cruz on Friday accused McConnell of lying to him about whether he had agreed to allow Democrats a vote on extending the Export-Import Bank during negotiations earlier this summer on trade legislation.
On Sunday, he repeated the charge — which McConnell and his allies have criticized.
“On Friday I gave an unusual speech, a speech unlike any I have given in this chamber. It was not a speech I was happy to give,” said Cruz, a Republican presidential candidate. “I described an explicit promise the majority leader had made to me and to all 53 Republican senators.”
He said that McConnell made a promise “in front of every Republican senator” while “looking me in the eyes [that] there was no deal on the Export-Import Bank.”
“We saw on Friday that promise was false," Cruz said. "That promise was made and that promise was broken.”
Cruz said that McConnell took steps to “force a vote to reauthorize the Export-Import bank and they were directly contrary to the promises the majority leader made to all 53 Republicans.”
“My saying so [on Friday] may be uncomfortable but it is a simple fact,” Cruz said.
He also responded to critics.
Ted Cruz on the Senate Floor, Sunday July 26, 2015
“I would note that it is entirely consistent with decorum and with the nature of this body traditionally as the world's greatest deliberative body, to speak the truth,” Cruz said. “Speaking the truth about actions is entirely consistent with civility.”
Asked if he went to far during his Friday speech, Cruz instead blasted the press for not writing about whether or not McConnell lied about a deal.
"I would note that on the discussion of my speech on Friday, there have been no stories written about whether in fact of Mitch McConnell told the truth," he said. "None of you have written the story about whether as to whether he told the truth or lied, the substantive story."
Senate Rs teamed up w/Senate Ds to revive an FDR New Deal corporate welfare program. And they expect conservative voters to trust our party?
IRONY: 'You are well aware that some of the six states participating in negotiations are not trustworthy at all,' Khamenei wrote in a stunning rhetorical act of jiu-jitsu. posted online just 8 minutes after Obama's press conference concluded
Barack Obama's press conference
Video of the Iranian President's address after the deal was signed on July 14, 2015
The United States and three Western Countries, plus Russia and China, say they’ve reached a historic agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear program.
The deal’s general outline has been described as putting tough restrictions on Iran’s nuclear plans and setting up an inspections regime to verify that Iran is meeting its obligations. In exchange, the sanctions on Iran will be dropped, allowing Iran to sell more oil and become part of the international financial system.
But the most scant examination of the Iranian version of the deal reveals disturbing differences between it and the Western version.
Some of the differences:
Obama insisted the deal cuts off “every pathway” Iran has to acquire a nuclear weapon. It removes two-thirds of Iran’s centrifuges; Iran commits to avoid using its advance centrifuges for 10 years; Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium will remain limited for 15 years.
But Iran’s version of the deal, according to IRNA, says “All nuclear installations and sites are to continue their work contrary to the early demands of the other party, none of them will be dismantled.
More:
Secretary of State John Kerry also went into more details about the deal in Vienna, saying that it does Allow Iran to enrich uranium, but only up to 3.67 percent, which is needed for civilian—medicinal—purposes, but a whole lot lower than what is required to build a weapon.
IRNA says: “Iran’s nuclear infrastructure will remain intact, no centrifuges will be dismantled and research and development on key and advanced centrifuges such as IR-4, IR-5, IR-6, IR-8 will continue.”
And:
Kerry said Iran has agreed to turn its Fordow facility, an underground bunker, into a research facility that will invite world scientists to work there.
As to the heavy-water reactor in Arak, which was capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium—it will be rebuilt using a design approved by the international community, according to Kerry. And that design, Kerry said, would make the production of weapons-grade plutonium there impossible.
IRNA says: “Arak Heavy Water Reactor will continue its work and remain intact, to be modernized, and equipped with latest technology, new laboratories and new installations and through cooperation with the owners of most sophisticated and most secure technologies in the world, early demands for dismantling or changing it to a light water reactor is void.”
Days after the March 31 deadline for negotiations passed, this headline, and many similar across the United States announced an 'historic deal', until the article was examined. The reader then discovers that the deal is really just a 'framework' or an outline for future negotiations with another future deadline. Even more important, are the caveats and fine print of this 'historic' deal as explained by the President, Barack Obama.
“It is a good deal, a deal that meets our core objectives,” Obama said during an 18-minute speech in the Rose Garden. “If this framework leads to a final comprehensive deal, it will make our country, our allies and our world safer.”
The headline and all the hype surrounding these negotiations show the willingness of the media in the United States to push the false narratives of this administration. Read the quote again and focus on the phrasing of 'if this framework leads to a final comprehensive deal '. Okay, so there is really not a deal and the candidate of hope and change thinks hope is a foreign policy strategy. Not only is the narrative false of historic deals, the truth gets stretched and actually breaks after Secretary of State John Kerry's press conference touting the 'agreement' Iran calls out the Obama administration for not telling the truth about the 'framework'
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif accused the Obama administration of misleading the American people and Congress in afact sheet it released following the culmination of negotiations with the Islamic Republic.
Zarif bragged in an earlier press conference with reporters that the United States had tentatively agreed to let it continue the enrichment of uranium, the key component in a nuclear bomb, as well as key nuclear research.
Zarif additionally said Iran would have all nuclear-related sanctions lifted once a final deal is signed and that the country would not be forced to shut down any of its currently operating nuclear installations.
Following a subsequent press conference by Secretary of State John Kerry—and release of a administration fact sheet on Iranian concessions—Zarif lashed out on Twitter over what he dubbed lies.
“The solutions are good for all, as they stand,” he tweeted. “There is no need to spin using ‘fact sheets’ so early on.”
Zarif went on to push back against claims by Kerry that the sanctions relief would be implemented in a phased fashion—and only after Iran verifies that it is not conducting any work on the nuclear weapons front.
Zarif, echoing previous comments, said the United States has promised an immediate termination of sanctions.
Not only did Iran call out the Obama administration for not being truthful, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released the following statement about the 'framework'.
The Obama's administration's deal at any cost approach should concern Israel, especially since this administration helped negotiate on the side of IRAN
In his television interview, Mr Mottaghi also gave succour to western critics of the proposed nuclear deal, which has seen the White House pursue a more conciliatory line with Tehran than some of America’s European allies in the negotiating team, comprising the five permanent members of the UN security council and Germany.
“The US negotiating team are mainly there to speak on Iran’s behalf with other members of the 5+1 countries and convince them of a deal,” he said.
Should Israel really be concerned? Without an actual signed agreement in place, what are some of the realities? The NYTIMES reports the most important aspect of the deal. Iran still gets a nuclear bomb.
The agreement calls for Tehran to slash its stockpile of nuclear materials and severely limit its enrichment activities, theoretically bringing the time it would take to produce a nuclear weapon to a year — a significant rollback from the current estimate of two to three months.
The details of the negotiations leaked indicate that Iran gets the sanctions lifted, gets to develop nuclear weapons and will dictate the terms of verification and inspections. Inspections that are only as rigorous as the U.N Security Council requires. This leaves Russia and China, Iran's allies, in control of the process as reported in Politico.
We don’t yet know all the details of the nuclear agreement that Iran, the United States and five other world powers announced Thursday they are aiming to complete by June 30. What we do know is that any acceptable final deal will depend on a strong weapons inspection element. In his remarks in the Rose Garden, President Obama declared Tehran had agreed to precisely that. “If Iran cheats, the world will know,” he said.
Yet weapons inspectors can be no tougher than the body that empowers them—in this instance the UN Security Council. And herein lies the agreement’s fundamental weakness—and perhaps its fatal flaw. Do we really want to depend on Vladimir Putin? Because Russia will be able to decide what to enforce in any deal—and what not to.
The U.N as an organization has failed in all its missions and mandates, by design. Yet this administration is so desperate for any kind of foreign policy victory, it is willing to throw any, if not all of its allies under the bus, namely Israel. This administration and the left loathes Israel and has long worked to sabotage and destroy it. From supporting the BDS movement, to direct interference in Israel's elections. the Obama administration and the left have appeased Iran to aid in their attacks on Israel. From Occupy Wall Street to the current Commander in Chief, Barack Obama, capitulations to and the appeasing of Iran, along with the open hostilities toward Israel and its leader have left many Americans puzzled and concerned. This administration has allowed Iran and ISIS to divide and devour the middle east and it looks like Israel may be next.
This is the same administration that touted Iraq and Yemen as foreign policy successes.
The former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency on Sunday described President Obama's Middle East policy as one of "willful ignorance," saying the administration needs a clearer strategy for dealing with conflicts emerging across the region.
Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said during an interview on "Fox News Sunday" that recent developments in the Middle East are moving in a bad direction for the United States, with Iran "clearly on the march" to influence events in a "regional sectarian war."
Critics of the administration have pointed out that the United States appears to be siding with Iranian-backed rebels against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria but opposing such fighters in Yemen.
“At the end of the day, we have just this incredible policy confusion — never mind what our strategy is to execute that policy," Flynn said. "We have to stop what we’re doing and take a hard look at everything going on the Middle East because it’s not going in the right direction."
ISTANBUL — The much ballyhooed Iraqi government operation to capture the central city of Tikrit from the Islamic State has stalled three weeks after it began, amid widespread reports that Shiite Muslim militias and the government are badly divided over tactics and roiled by claims that the militias have engaged in war crimes against the local Sunni Muslim population.
A two-day pause supposedly intended to give the Iraqi government time to bring up reinforcements has stretched into a week, as reports circulate that Iraqi government troops and the militias took heavier than anticipated casualties in their first efforts to dislodge Islamic State fighters. At least 1,000 militiamen died in the early days of fighting, according to some reports, roughly 5 percent of the 20,000 men the militias have committed to the operation.
Iraqi security forces and allied Shiite militiamen clash with Islamic State fighters at the frontline in the Qadisiyah neighborhood in Tikrit, 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq, March 15, 2015
KHALID MOHAMMED — AP
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/03/20/260513/operation-to-retake-tikrit-from.html#storylink=cpy
Even during the pause, pro-government casualties remain high. A witness in the main government hospital at the nearby city of Samarra said that at least 100 dead or wounded fighters had been brought in over the last four days and that “bodies are everywhere” at the facility. The witness asked to remain anonymous for security reasons.
Difficulties with the Tikrit operation underscore how unlikely it is that the Iraqi military will be in any position soon to launch an assault to recapture Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, which fell to the Islamic State last June. A U.S. military officer in February created a stir when he told reporters at the Pentagon that such an assault might come as soon as April. Pentagon officials later acknowledged that Iraqi troops might not be in such a position before the fall.
President Obama on Friday signed legislation aimed at stopping Hamid Aboutalebi, Iran's would-be U.N. ambassador, from entering the United States.
The bill, offered by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and passed unanimously in both chambers of Congress, blocks admittance to the U.S. by representatives to the United Nations determined to have "engaged in terrorist activity" against the U.S. or its allies.
Aboutalebi has admitted that he worked as a translator and negotiator for the student group that held Americans hostage in 1979 at the U.S. Embassy in Iran for 444 days. His nomination drew cries of outrage from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who accused Tehran of using the nomination as a deliberately provocative act.
Obama, in a signed statement attached to the measure, warned the legislation curtailed his "constitutional discretion" and that he planned to treat the law as "advisory."
Strange, Obama promised NOT to use signing statements. If it was wrong for Bush to do that...... (Video)
Barack Obama on Vetoes and NOT Using Signing Statements
The White House announced earlier this month that the administration would not issue a visa to Aboutalebi, but stopped short of saying whether the president would sign the bill.
"Acts of espionage and terrorism against the United States and our allies are unquestionably problems of the utmost gravity, and I share the Congress's concern that individuals who have engaged in such activity may use the cover of diplomacy to gain access to our nation," Obama said.
But the president nevertheless warned the legislation could "interfere" with his discretion to receive or reject ambassadors, a duty explicitly outlined in Article II of the Constitution.
The President is also to be authorized to receive ambassadors and other public ministers. This, though it has been a rich theme of declamation, is more a matter of dignity than of authority. Federalist Papers #69
Obama noted that former President George H.W. Bush attached a similar signing statement in 1990 to legislation that barred entry of any U.N. representatives who had engaged in espionage against the United States. In that statement, Bush said "curtailing by statute my constitutional discretion to receive or reject ambassadors is neither a permissible nor a practical solution."
There was only one item is this Bill passed UNANIMOUSLY by Congress that Obama signed. More hypocrisy from Obama, signing the bill to avoid an embarrassingoverride of his veto by two-thirds of Congress
Earlier this week, Iran sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asking the international body to review the denial of Aboutalebi's visa.
"This decision of the U.S. government has indeed negative implications for multilateral diplomacy and will create a dangerous precedence and affect adversely the work of intergovernmental organizations and activities of their member states," Deputy U.N. Ambassador Hossein Dehghani wrote, according to Fox News.
But aside from possibly condemning the move by the U.S., the United Nations has little recourse in the matter.
The move from the White House could, however, spark other widespread diplomatic ramifications.
Aboutalebi is a top adviser to Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, and his rejection could scuttle negotiations over the country's weapons programs. Hard-liners within Iran are likely to cite the U.S. rejection of Aboutalebi's visa as evidence that Washington does not abide by the terms of international agreements.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power said last weekend that the visa issue had not yet disrupted the nuclear talks.
Federalist 69 is rather clear on the dignity versus 'authority' of the President to receive an ambassador, but in this case it is an ambassador to the U.N., not the United States of America. Just another hypocritical and politically expedient maneuver by Barack Obama that will be conveniently overlooked by the Main Stream Media.
The chemical weapons that were used on civilians in Syria and Barack Obama's red linealmost forced the west into another war in the Mideast. Arming the Syrian Rebels is the Obama Administration's version of 'Iran Contra' mixed with the worst elements of the second Iraq war. This story, however, will be not be covered by the main stream media, just like the other Obama scandals like Fast and Furious. Seymour Hersh's new book provides behind the scenes details that connects the attack on the U.S. special mission in Benghazi, Libya to Turkey as an arms conduit for the Syrian rebels. The same Syrian rebels who are responsible for the sarin chemical attack that the Obama Administration falsely blamed on Assad and the Syrian Government.
In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.＊ Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.
Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.
For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’
The joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s public claims that only the Syrian army had access to sarin were wrong. The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has long known that al-Qaida experimented with chemical weapons, and has a video of one of its gas experiments with dogs.) The DIA paper went on: ‘Previous IC [intelligence community] focus had been almost entirely on Syrian CW [chemical weapons] stockpiles; now we see ANF attempting to make its own CW … Al-Nusrah Front’s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads us to assess the group’s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the future.’ The paper drew on classified intelligence from numerous agencies: ‘Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators,’ it said, ‘were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.’ (Asked about the DIA paper, a spokesperson for the director of national intelligence said: ‘No such paper was ever requested or produced by intelligence community analysts.’)
Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction of mortars, and chemical precursors for sarin. Five of those arrested were freed after a brief detention. The others, including the ringleader, Haytham Qassab, for whom the prosecutor requested a prison sentence of 25 years, were released pending trial. In the meantime the Turkish press has been rife with speculation that the Erdoğan administration has been covering up the extent of its involvement with the rebels. In a news conference last summer, Aydin Sezgin, Turkey’s ambassador to Moscow, dismissed the arrests and claimed to reporters that the recovered ‘sarin’ was merely ‘anti-freeze’.
The DIA paper took the arrests as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding its access to chemical weapons. It said Qassab had ‘self-identified’ as a member of al-Nusra, and that he was directly connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the ‘ANF emir for military manufacturing’. Qassab and his associate Khalid Ousta worked with Halit Unalkaya, an employee of a Turkish firm called Zirve Export, who provided ‘price quotes for bulk quantities of sarin precursors’. Abd-al-Ghani’s plan was for two associates to ‘perfect a process for making sarin, then go to Syria to train others to begin large scale production at an unidentified lab in Syria’. The DIA paper said that one of his operatives had purchased a precursor on the ‘Baghdad chemical market’, which ‘has supported at least seven CW efforts since 2004’.
A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’
In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons.
The former intelligence official said that many in the US national security establishment had long been troubled by the president’s red line: ‘The joint chiefs asked the White House, “What does red line mean? How does that translate into military orders? Troops on the ground? Massive strike? Limited strike?” They tasked military intelligence to study how we could carry out the threat. They learned nothing more about the president’s reasoning.’
In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.
Britain and France were both to play a part. On 29 August, the day Parliament voted against Cameron’s bid to join the intervention, the Guardian reported that he had already ordered six RAF Typhoon fighter jets to be deployed to Cyprus, and had volunteered a submarine capable of launching Tomahawk missiles. The French air force – a crucial player in the 2011 strikes on Libya – was deeply committed, according to an account in Le Nouvel Observateur; François Hollande had ordered several Rafale fighter-bombers to join the American assault. Their targets were reported to be in western Syria.
By the last days of August the president had given the Joint Chiefs a fixed deadline for the launch. ‘H hour was to begin no later than Monday morning [2 September], a massive assault to neutralise Assad,’ the former intelligence official said. So it was a surprise to many when during a speech in the White House Rose Garden on 31 August Obama said that the attack would be put on hold, and he would turn to Congress and put it to a vote.
At this stage, Obama’s premise – that only the Syrian army was capable of deploying sarin – was unravelling. Within a few days of the 21 August attack, the former intelligence official told me, Russian military intelligence operatives had recovered samples of the chemical agent from Ghouta. They analysed it and passed it on to British military intelligence; this was the material sent to Porton Down. (A spokesperson for Porton Down said: ‘Many of the samples analysed in the UK tested positive for the nerve agent sarin.’ MI6 said that it doesn’t comment on intelligence matters.)
The former intelligence official said the Russian who delivered the sample to the UK was ‘a good source – someone with access, knowledge and a record of being trustworthy’. After the first reported uses of chemical weapons in Syria last year, American and allied intelligence agencies ‘made an effort to find the answer as to what if anything, was used – and its source’, the former intelligence official said. ‘We use data exchanged as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The DIA’s baseline consisted of knowing the composition of each batch of Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons. But we didn’t know which batches the Assad government currently had in its arsenal. Within days of the Damascus incident we asked a source in the Syrian government to give us a list of the batches the government currently had. This is why we could confirm the difference so quickly.’
The process hadn’t worked as smoothly in the spring, the former intelligence official said, because the studies done by Western intelligence ‘were inconclusive as to the type of gas it was. The word “sarin” didn’t come up. There was a great deal of discussion about this, but since no one could conclude what gas it was, you could not say that Assad had crossed the president’s red line.’ By 21 August, the former intelligence official went on, ‘the Syrian opposition clearly had learned from this and announced that “sarin” from the Syrian army had been used, before any analysis could be made, and the press and White House jumped at it. Since it now was sarin, “It had to be Assad.”’
The UK defence staff who relayed the Porton Down findings to the joint chiefs were sending the Americans a message, the former intelligence official said: ‘We’re being set up here.’ (This account made sense of a terse message a senior official in the CIA sent in late August: ‘It was not the result of the current regime. UK & US know this.’) By then the attack was a few days away and American, British and French planes, ships and submarines were at the ready.
The officer ultimately responsible for the planning and execution of the attack was General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs. From the beginning of the crisis, the former intelligence official said, the joint chiefs had been sceptical of the administration’s argument that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad’s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the war,’ the former intelligence official said. Dempsey had irritated many in the Obama administration by repeatedly warning Congress over the summer of the danger of American military involvement in Syria. Last April, after an optimistic assessment of rebel progress by the secretary of state, John Kerry, in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘there’s a risk that this conflict has become stalemated.’
Dempsey’s initial view after 21 August was that a US strike on Syria – under the assumption that the Assad government was responsible for the sarin attack – would be a military blunder, the former intelligence official said. The Porton Down report caused the joint chiefs to go to the president with a more serious worry: that the attack sought by the White House would be an unjustified act of aggression. It was the joint chiefs who led Obama to change course. The official White House explanation for the turnabout – the story the press corps told – was that the president, during a walk in the Rose Garden with Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, suddenly decided to seek approval for the strike from a bitterly divided Congress with which he’d been in conflict for years. The former Defense Department official told me that the White House provided a different explanation to members of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon: the bombing had been called off because there was intelligence ‘that the Middle East would go up in smoke’ if it was carried out.
The president’s decision to go to Congress was initially seen by senior aides in the White House, the former intelligence official said, as a replay of George W. Bush’s gambit in the autumn of 2002 before the invasion of Iraq: ‘When it became clear that there were no WMD in Iraq, Congress, which had endorsed the Iraqi war, and the White House both shared the blame and repeatedly cited faulty intelligence. If the current Congress were to vote to endorse the strike, the White House could again have it both ways – wallop Syria with a massive attack and validate the president’s red line commitment, while also being able to share the blame with Congress if it came out that the Syrian military wasn’t behind the attack.’ The turnabout came as a surprise even to the Democratic leadership in Congress. In September the Wall Street Journal reported that three days before his Rose Garden speech Obama had telephoned Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, ‘to talk through the options’. She later told colleagues, according to the Journal, that she hadn’t asked the president to put the bombing to a congressional vote.
Obama’s move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end. ‘Congress was not going to let this go by,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Congress made it known that, unlike the authorisation for the Iraq war, there would be substantive hearings.’ At this point, there was a sense of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence official said. ‘And so out comes Plan B. Call off the bombing strike and Assad would agree to unilaterally sign the chemical warfare treaty and agree to the destruction of all of chemical weapons under UN supervision.’ At a press conference in London on 9 September, Kerry was still talking about intervention: ‘The risk of not acting is greater than the risk of acting.’ But when a reporter asked if there was anything Assad could do to stop the bombing, Kerry said: ‘Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week … But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.’ As the New York Times reported the next day, the Russian-brokered deal that emerged shortly afterwards had first been discussed by Obama and Putin in the summer of 2012. Although the strike plans were shelved, the administration didn’t change its public assessment of the justification for going to war. ‘There is zero tolerance at that level for the existence of error,’ the former intelligence official said of the senior officials in the White House. ‘They could not afford to say: “We were wrong.”’ (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The Assad regime, and only the Assad regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attack that took place on 21 August.’)
*
The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida. (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The idea that the United States was providing weapons from Libya to anyone is false.’)
In January, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the assault by a local militia in September 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others. The report’s criticism of the State Department for not providing adequate security at the consulate, and of the intelligence community for not alerting the US military to the presence of a CIA outpost in the area, received front-page coverage and revived animosities in Washington, with Republicans accusing Obama and Hillary Clinton of a cover-up. A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer. (A spokesperson for Petraeus denied the operation ever took place.)
The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation. The former intelligence official explained that for years there has been a recognised exception in the law that permits the CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would otherwise be owed a finding. (All proposed CIA covert operations must be described in a written document, known as a ‘finding’, submitted to the senior leadership of Congress for approval.) Distribution of the annex was limited to the staff aides who wrote the report and to the eight ranking members of Congress – the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, and the Democratic and Republicans leaders on the House and Senate intelligence committees. This hardly constituted a genuine attempt at oversight: the eight leaders are not known to gather together to raise questions or discuss the secret information they receive.
The annex didn’t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi before the attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was attacked. ‘The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,’ the former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’
Washington abruptly ended the CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack on the consulate, but the rat line kept going. ‘The United States was no longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists,’ the former intelligence official said. Within weeks, as many as forty portable surface-to-air missile launchers, commonly known as manpads, were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter. ‘The Obama administration,’ Warrick wrote, ‘has steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such missiles, warning that the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and be used to shoot down commercial aircraft.’ Two Middle Eastern intelligence officials fingered Qatar as the source, and a former US intelligence analyst speculated that the manpads could have been obtained from Syrian military outposts overrun by the rebels. There was no indication that the rebels’ possession of manpads was likely the unintended consequence of a covert US programme that was no longer under US control.
By the end of 2012, it was believed throughout the American intelligence community that the rebels were losing the war. ‘Erdoğan was pissed,’ the former intelligence official said, ‘and felt he was left hanging on the vine. It was his money and the cut-off was seen as a betrayal.’ In spring 2013 US intelligence learned that the Turkish government – through elements of the MIT, its national intelligence agency, and the Gendarmerie, a militarised law-enforcement organisation – was working directly with al-Nusra and its allies to develop a chemical warfare capability. ‘The MIT was running the political liaison with the rebels, and the Gendarmerie handled military logistics, on-the-scene advice and training – including training in chemical warfare,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Stepping up Turkey’s role in spring 2013 was seen as the key to its problems there. Erdoğan knew that if he stopped his support of the jihadists it would be all over. The Saudis could not support the war because of logistics – the distances involved and the difficulty of moving weapons and supplies. Erdoğan’s hope was to instigate an event that would force the US to cross the red line. But Obama didn’t respond in March and April.’
Iran
has illegally laundered billions of dollars through the Venezuelan
financial sector and is currently stashing “hundreds of millions” of
dollars in “virtually every Venezuelan bank today,” according to a
former senior State Department official.
“It’s a huge blind spot in those trying to implement sanctions” on
Iran, Roger Noriega, a former United States ambassador and assistant
secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, told the Washington Free Beacon.
Venezuela served as Iran’s closest Western ally under the late
President Hugo Chavez, who allowed the rogue regime to establish a
military and financial presence at the highest levels of the Venezuelan
government.
Iran’s foothold in the country is expected to grow exponentially
under the rule of Chavez’s likely successor, Vice President Nicolas
Maduro.
Noriega and other experts warned House lawmakers at a Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday that Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah is gaining power in Venezuela. Keep Reading at The Washingon Free Beacon
' Hezbollah as a Global Threat ' House Committee Foreign Affairs | Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade March 20 2013 Full Clip at CSPAN
The Leftist run Main Stream Media can continue to pretend that Occupy Wall Street is patriotic and grassroots. The overwhelming evidence points in the exact opposite direction. Global leftists are masters of doublespeak making their control of the flow of information through regular media and attempts to dominate social media concerning. Friends of the left and crony capitalists spread their message for profit and control. However, superior tactics by leaders in the new conservative awakening, like Andrew Breitbart among others, have used the LEFT's tools of propaganda to expose the progressives as FRAUDs and a danger to the country. Occupy is anti-Israel and has ecomarxist foundations, making a coalition with the Islami-facscists a natural fit in their effort to dewesternize the globe.
Occupy Wall Street Embraces Iran and "democracy", Rejects Israel and The USA
The video explains the American Political Spectrum and some misconceptions
The allegiance and alliance of the Leftist can be best explained in THEIR own words.
Howard Zinn talks about Anarchy mixed with Marxism, the new left
Francis Fox Piven - Stephen Lerner (SEIU) talk Occupy Wall Street on Democracy NOW
US Professors supporting Occupy Wall Street go to Tehran, Iran to talk OWS
More from Occupy Wall Street in Tehran, Iran
Iranian scholars talk Occupy Wall Street and end of the Western Culture
I have written in previous blogs about the propaganda and techniques used by Occupy Wall Street to further their agenda, this was just another peek at some more of the international players meddling in our internal affairs as part of their coalition. OWS is aiding and abetting the enemy.
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