Trump Doubles Down on Threat to Attack Iran Cultural Sites
January 5th, 2020Via: AFP:
US President Donald Trump doubled down Sunday on a threat to attack Iranian cultural sites despite accusations that any such strike would amount to a war crime.
After his top diplomat, Mike Pompeo, had insisted that any military action would conform to international law, Trump said he would regard cultural sites as fair game if Iran resorted to deadly force against US targets.
“They’re allowed to kill our people, they’re allowed to torture and maim our people, they’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people and we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way,” Trump told reporters.
“If they do anything there will be major retaliation.”
His comments on his return from a break in Florida followed a welter of criticism over a Tweet on Saturday night in which he said sites which were “important to… Iranian culture” were on a list of 52 potential US targets.
Tehran’s foreign minister had reacted to those initial comments by drawing parallels with the Islamic State group’s destruction of the Middle East’s cultural heritage.
Are Mysterious Drone Sightings Related to Air Force Counterdrone Program?
January 5th, 2020Via: Gazette:
The mysterious drone swarms spotted over Colorado that have vexed the governor, law enforcement and residents might not be so mysterious after all.
While no one has taken responsibility, and even the Federal Aviation Administration has claimed ignorance, the answer could be a secretive Air Force program intended to keep prying eyes away from nuclear missile silos.
Air Force Global Strike Command, which is based in Louisana, has confirmed that it conducts counterdrone exercises out of F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, where it is based.
The command oversees underground Minuteman silos spread across northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming and western Nebraska, the area where the drones have been spotted nightly the past two weeks.
The Air Force isn’t claiming ownership of the drones, but neither is it denying it.
F.E. Warren didn’t respond to an emailed question Friday on whether its counterdrone effort had anything to do with the recent sightings.
How the Pentagon Was Duped by Contractors Using Shell Companies
January 5th, 2020Duped. *wink*
Missing $21 trillion? Yep, still missing.
Via: Bloomberg:
Shell companies have come under attack for obscuring illicit money flowing into real estate. But it turns out they’re also a problem for the Pentagon.
Some Defense Department suppliers have used such front companies to fraudulently win manufacturing bids, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office study of Defense Department contractors.
In some cases, the shell companies helped contractors obscure that they were making U.S. military equipment abroad, the GAO said, posing a risk to national security and quality control. More often, they were used to win contracts meant for companies owned by disabled veterans or minorities, it said.
U.S. Contractors Accused of Funding Taliban Attacks Against American Troops
January 5th, 2020Via: Courthouse News:
Nearly 400 people who were either wounded while serving in the U.S. military in Afghanistan or are family members of service members who died in the conflict sued a group of companies on Friday they say helped fund attacks against Americans by making protection payments to the Taliban.
“Defendants supported the Taliban for a simple reason: Defendants were all large Western companies with lucrative businesses in post-9/11 Afghanistan, and they all paid the Taliban to refrain from attacking their business interests,” the 288-page complaint filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. on Friday states. “Those protection payments aided and abetted terrorism by directly funding an al-Qaeda-backed Taliban insurgency that killed and injured thousands of Americans.”
Relying on confidential witnesses, internal documents and publicly available information from journalists, government watchdogs and congressional hearings, the complaint alleges companies that worked in war-torn Afghanistan commonly acceded to the Taliban’s mob-style demands for payment in exchange for the guarantee that their businesses interests would not be attacked.
One unnamed American executive who worked in Afghanistan is quoted in the complaint as saying “We don’t need any security if the payments are made. Nobody f—s with us.”
The payments allegedly climbed as high as 40% of the value of the company’s project and were often facilitated through subcontractors. The subcontractors, such as private security firms that were known to pay off the Taliban, would sometimes send money through Afghanistan’s traditional money transfer network, which can be hard to trace. Other times, the companies would simply hire Taliban operatives to work as guards.
Research Credit: RP
How Long Will It Take For The U.S. To Collapse?
January 5th, 2020Via: Alt Market:
There are a number factors that cause mass blindness to economic and social reality. First and foremost, establishment elites deliberately create the illusion of prosperity by rigging economic data to the upside. In almost every case of economic crisis or geopolitical disaster, the public is conditioned to believe they are in the midst of a financial “boom” or era of “peace”. They are encouraged to ignore fundamental warning signs in favor of foolish faith in the system. Those people that try to break the apathy and expose the truth are called “chicken little” and “doom monger”.
In the minds of the cheerful lemmings a “collapse” is something very obvious; they think they would know it when they saw it. It’s like trying to teach a blind person about colors; it’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult to get all these Helen Kellers to understand that what they perceive is not the whole reality. There’s a vast world hidden from them and they have no concept of how to observe it.
“Shit-Life Syndrome,” Trump Voters, and Clueless Dems
January 5th, 2020Via: Counterpunch:
For most of these low-wage workers, Hutton notes: “Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.”
Shit-life syndrome is not another fictitious illness conjured up by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex to sell psychotropic drugs. It is a reality created by corporatist rulers and their lackey politicians—pretending to care about their minimum-wage-slave constituents, who are trying to survive on 99¢ boxed macaroni and cheese prepared in carcinogenic water, courtesy of DuPont or some other such low-life leviathan.
And Now… “New York Mayor Says City Bracing for Iranian Retaliation After Soleimani Killed”
January 4th, 2020Via: Reuters:
New York City security officials went on heightened alert for possible Iranian retaliation in response to a U.S. air strike in Baghdad on Friday that killed Qassem Soleimani, Tehran’s most prominent military commander, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
The city is constantly vigilant against possible terrorist attacks given its history but the mayor said the threat has changed significantly given the resources that a state such as Iran has compared to non-state organizations like al Qaeda or ISIS.
“It’s just a world of difference,” de Blasio told a news conference.
“We have to assume this action puts us in a de facto state of war,” the mayor said.
U.S. Government Limits Exports of Artificial Intelligence Software
January 4th, 2020Via: Reuters:
The Trump administration took measures on Friday to crimp exports of artificial intelligence software as part of a bid to keep sensitive technologies out of the hands of rival powers like China.
Under a new rule which goes into effect on Monday, companies that export certain types of geospatial imagery software from the United States must apply for a license to send it overseas except when it is being shipped to Canada.
“They want to keep American companies from helping the Chinese make better AI products that can help their military,” said James Lewis, a technology expert with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
‘How Robot Priests Will Change Human Spirituality’
January 3rd, 2020Via: OneZero:
The company SoftBank Robotics created Pepper the robot to chant at Buddhist funerals in Japan, and a church in Germany programmed a machine to pronounce traditional blessings. Very recently in Dubai, the government’s cultural and Islamic affairs agency IACAD launched the first-ever “Virtual Ifta” that uses A.I. to issue fatwas. Other groups have experimented with machines that can hear confessions, offer prayers, or even offer sacraments.
U.S. Kills Top Iranian General in Baghdad
January 2nd, 2020Update: U.S. State Department: All U.S. Citizens Should Depart Iraq Immediately
Via: U.S. Embassy Baghdad:
Due to heightened tensions in Iraq and the region, the U.S. Embassy urges American citizens to heed the January 2020 Travel Advisory and depart Iraq immediately. U.S. citizens should depart via airline while possible, and failing that, to other countries via land. Due to Iranian-backed militia attacks at the U.S. Embassy compound, all public consular operations are suspended until further notice. U.S. citizens should not approach the Embassy. The U.S. Consulate General in Erbil is open for visa and American Citizen Services appointments, including passport issuance.
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Update: Al Jazeera English Livefeed
Via: Al Jazeera:
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Update: Pentagon Statement on Soleimani Assassination
Via: U.S. Department of Defense:
At the direction of the President, the U.S. military has taken decisive defensive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad by killing Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.
General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region. General Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more. He had orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months – including the attack on December 27th – culminating in the death and wounding of additional American and Iraqi personnel. General Soleimani also approved the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that took place this week.
This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans. The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.
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Update: Sane Analysis from… Fox News?
Via: Fox News:
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Update: Trump Tweets American Flag
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2020
Flashback: Old Trump Tweets About Obama Starting a War with Iran for Political Purposes
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Update: “Potential Turning Point in the Middle East”
Via: Daily Mail:
Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani, the powerful head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, was killed in an airstrike at Baghdad International Airport, Iraqi TV and three Iraqi officials officials said Friday.
The officials said the strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, which were responsible for the recent attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
An official with the PMF blamed the U.S. military for the rocket strike, but American officials have made no comments on the incident yet. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to an inquiry from DailyMail.com.
The audacious airport strike is a potential turning point in the Middle East as U.S.-Iran relations teeter on the brink, and is expected to draw severe retaliation from Iran and and its Shiite allies against Israel and American interests.
Experts say that the killing of Soleimani will be viewed by Iran as a massive military provocation.
‘The pressure to retaliate will be immense,’ tweeted Middle East scholar and John Hopkins professor Vali Nasr.
‘Soleimani had cult hero status within IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) and among Shia militias in the region, and was personally the most popular regime figure in Iran,’ said Nasr.
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Via: Reuters:
Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force, and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis were killed early on Friday in an air strike on their convoy at Baghdad airport, an Iraqi militia spokesman told Reuters.
“The American and Israeli enemy is responsible for killing the mujahideen Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qassem Soleimani,” said Ahmed al-Assadi, a spokesman for Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces umbrella grouping of Iran-backed militias.
U.S. officials told Reuters that strikes had been carried out against two targets linked to Iran in Baghdad.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to give any further details.
