quote:According to Newsweek, the Turkish government’s bombings against Kurdish allies are now striking against American soldiers.
Citing both Iraqi Kurdish intelligence officials and Pentagon officials, the report said that special forces in the Mashtenour hill in the city of Kobani fell under artillery fire from Turkey, which is conducting their so-called Operation Peace Spring against the Kurdish people.
President Donald Trump gave the go-ahead to Turkey after he wanted to get off the phone with an angry Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan. He had threatened he would storm the border to create his so-called safe zone.
According to a senior Pentagon official, the Turkish forces should have been aware of where the U.S. was positioned down to the grid. So, it’s unclear why they would begin firing on the American soldiers. There were somewhere between 15 and 100 troops in the area, the official said, describing it as a small number below company level".
Yeah, this is working out great. Another Trump fumble.
quote:So, perhaps it's not surprising that a significant story with serious political ramifications got overlooked. It wasn't sexy or exciting and it didn't contain a lot of new facts, but it stands out because it reflects a rare bipartisan congressional effort at executive oversight. I'm speaking of the second report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 Election.
Unfortunately for all the conspiracy theorists, like every single investigation that came before, this one found that Russia's infamous troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, "sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin." This must have come as no surprise to Robert Mueller's prosecutors, who found exactly the same thing and even indicted 12 Russian operatives for these crimes.
After two years of investigation, hundreds of interviews and a massive search of documents, this is the second piece of what is expected to be a five-part report about the full implications of the Russian effort in 2016. The first report found that the Russian government had launched a sophisticated disinformation campaign and a plan to attack the elections systems in various states. It too concluded that these efforts were designed to hurt Clinton's campaign and help Trump's. This report was about the Russian project to sow chaos and discord through social media.
There were no dissenters from the report's conclusions, even among the Trump supporters on the committee like Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who has vociferously defended the president against those who say he abused his power in his call for the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden. Another Republican on the panel, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, has said that Trump was joking when he called for China to do the same but he signed the report as well.
The committee offered a number of recommendations that will obviously be ignored by Republicans, who seem to believe that foreign interference will accrue to their benefit, which is probably true. First of all, the report says the Trump administration should "reinforce with the public the danger of attempted foreign interference in the 2020 election," which literally made me laugh out loud. The most serious purveyor of disinformation, propaganda and the sowing of division is the president himself. The Russians surely take their lead from him.
As Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., put it, It’s time for Trump to stop using Twitter to play into our adversaries’ hands. With every deranged tweet, he advances foreign interests by dividing Americans. That would be a feature, not a bug, for this administration.
The Senate report also calls for campaigns to be on the alert for propaganda and be cautious about what they share on social media. It recommends that the administration create an interagency task force to deter and monitor any online interference from foreign actors. Unsurprisingly, they did not endorse Russian President Vladimir Putin's repeated offer to form a joint U.S.-Russia cybersecurity partnership, a prospect that seemed to make Trump very excited.
This report couldn't come at a worse time for Trump and his top consigliere, Attorney General William Barr, who has been traveling the globe seeking to prove that the "Deep State" spied on the Trump campaign without a "proper predicate." This stems from several right-wing theories claiming that the CIA and allied agencies engaged in a series of elaborate traps to frame Trump and the Russian government for the 2016 election interference
A video released by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) reportedly shows prisoners escaping in the aftermath of an attack near Qamishli, Syria on Friday. Reports of the prison break or whether the prisoners were affiliated with ISIS have not been independently verified.
ISIS has indicated that it plans to stage prison breaks across Syria and Iraq in order to regroup and build their forces.
The video of the alleged ISIS jailbreak emerged on the same day that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that "the president wants to make very clear it is imperative that Turkey not allow even a single ISIS fighter to escape."
Both experts and US officials have indicated that the US's withdrawal of troops from this region of Syria could jeopardize the SDF's ability to guard the thousands of ISIS prisoners detained there
Several of the years you mention are before social media and electronic voting machines. There wasn't much Interference then. But they have been trying for a few election cycles,
And they are getting better all the time. Exponentially better. While we've done almost nothing. Moscow Mitch ensures that no serious election security bills are even considered. They (and probably others) are likely to have a significant effect in 2020.
I see you consider yourself an expert on batteries. Could you show us some more detail on the problems? With some reference to today's actual technology and research projects.
BTW pretty soon there won't be any coal plants to generate electricity. Even with Trump’s pro-pollution stance coal just doesn't make economic sense.
quote:In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Wallace pointed out that Syrian fighters had committed apparent war crimes after Trump's decision to withdraw.
"What are you going to do about it?" Wallace asked Esper. "What are you going to do to stop this?"
"This is part of the terrible situation that Turkey has put us in," Esper replied. "Despite our protestations, the Turks now intend to go further south than expected and to go both west and east."
Trump definitely is destroying our environment and social safety net. I don't kn if he cares. But pretty much all of his Cabinet and immediate underlings are implacably opposed to the mission of their organizations.
And of course robbing the poor and giving to the rich.
Quote word for word where Trump did what you said.... Give paper, page and paragraph where Trump openly solicited a foreign government to interfere with our elections.
I take it you've never seen a gangster movie or read a book about gangsters.
Trump did not explicitly and clearly state what the quid pro quo was. Just like gangsters and diplomats. But his meaning was clear by his juxtaposition of the request for more than weapons and his request for a favor. He was explicit about what the favor was.
What he meant was glaringly obvious to many of the people listening to the call and anyone who reads the "transcript" with an open mind. A group which does not include you.
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