© Shealah Craighead/White HouseUS President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks to troops at Yokota Air Base on November 5, 2017, in Tokyo, Japan.
U.S. President Donald Trump has approved plans to deploy around 1,500 U.S. forces to the Middle East, along with Patriot missile batteries and other assets in a bid to counter Iran in the Persian Gulf region.
Trump confirmed the move on Friday, May 24, telling reporters at the White House that
he would send 1,500 troops to the region in a "mostly protective" role. Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said in a Friday statement:
"I approved the combatant commander's request for the deployment of additional resources and capabilities to the Middle East to improve our force protection and safeguard U.S. forces given the ongoing threat posed by Iranian forces, including the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and its proxies.
"The deployment will include approximately 1,500 U.S. military personnel and consist of a Patriot battalion to defend against missile threats; additional intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft; an engineer element to provide force protection improvements throughout the region; and a fighter aircraft squadron to provide additional deterrence and depth to our aviation response options."
There was no word on the location of additional forces or a timeline for the deployment, which was first
reported by
The Wall Street Journal.Shanahan and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford and White House officials agreed to the deployment on Thursday, according to the report.
Comment: To which Iran
responded:
Iran is prepared to deploy 'secret weapons' against American warships, a military official in Tehran said, after the Pentagon sent three destroyers to the Persian Gulf amid a wave of increased tensions between the two states.
Without mincing words, General Morteza Qorbani, an adviser to Iran's military command, cautioned that should Washington "commit the slightest stupidity, we will send these ships to the bottom of the sea along with their crew and planes."
Iran, he promised, would do so "using two missiles or two new secret weapons." He did not specify what type of "secret weapons" he was referring to. [...]
In February, Tehran unveiled and successfully tested its new Hoveizeh long-range cruise missile, which is said to have a range of over 1,350 kilometers.
In the same month, Tehran launched the massive Velayat 97 naval drill, with maneuvers spanning from the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman to the northern Indian Ocean. During the drill, a midget Ghadir-class submarine fired an anti-ship cruise missile for the first time.
Meanwhile, Iran is confident this is all
bluster on the US' part:
Cooler heads among the US population and the army will not allow hardliners to steer the country into an open war with Iran, a senior military official in Tehran said amid growing tensions in the Persian Gulf.
"We believe rational Americans and their experienced commanders will not let their radical elements lead them into a situation from which it would be very difficult to get out, and that is why they will not enter a war," Brigadier General Hassan Seifi, an assistant to the nation's army chief, told Mehr News Agency on Saturday.
They may be
right:
An open letter signed by 76 retired generals, admirals, and ambassadors calls on US President Donald Trump to stop stoking fears of war with Iran and ditch "ineffective" sanctions and threats in favor of "aggressive diplomacy."
In a letter published on Friday by 'War on the Rocks', which specializes in reports on national security and defense issues, former US military top brass made an urgent plea to Trump to avoid further escalation with Iran and turn to diplomacy, rather than setting the stage for confrontation with military reinforcements.
RTFri, 24 May 2019 17:02 UTC
© Reuters / Ints KalninsUS army soldiers take part in NATO training exercises in Lithuania
The US could use a variety of economic, military and ideological strategies to "overextend and unbalance" Russia, a new report sponsored by the US Army glaringly suggests, offering blueprints to divide and destabilize the country.
The study examines "nonviolent, cost-imposing options" that the US and its allies could employ to weaken Russia's economy, military and government structures - and was conducted by the RAND Arroyo Center - the US Army's federally funded research arm.While US officials and mainstream media fret constantly about vague and unverified claims of Russian "meddling," "interference" and efforts to "sow discord" in US society, the RAND report openly details a shameless plot to drum up social discontent and societal divisions - in Russia.The report says Russia suffers from "deep seated" but "exaggerated" anxieties about the possibility of "Western-inspired regime change."
Evidently the authors didn't recognize the irony of calling those concerns "exaggerated" in a document dedicated to describing specific ways to do just that.
Comment: The CIA is already doing all these things, and more, inside Russia (and elsewhere).
Theresa May has confirmed that
she will resign as leader of the Conservative Party on 7 June in order for a leadership election to take place this summer.
Following a widespread revolt over her 'new Brexit deal', the Prime Minister has finally caved to growing calls from her MPs to step down. Her decision follows a meeting with Sir Graham Brady, the leader of backbench Tories, in Downing Street this morning.
Mrs May said that the process of electing her successor would begin the week after she finally stepped down as Conservative leader. She said she had informed the Queen that she would continue to serve as Prime Minister until that process was complete.
In an emotional statement on the steps of Downing Street, she said she had "done my best" to get her Withdrawal Agreement Bill through Parliament but acknowledged she had failed to do so.
Comment: Here's her full statement:
Despite the tears, few in the UK feel sorry for her.
She may feel contrition for 'failing to deliver Brexit', but the real mission since she took over from Cameron three years ago has been - first and foremost - to reinstate parliament as the arbiter of whether or not the UK leaves the EU. In that respect, she has been successful. The 'dictatorship of the parliamentariat' has been preserved, and for now the entrenched political class remains relevant...
Meanwhile, real issues that urgently require government intervention are piling up in the UK:
Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn has, of course, seized the opportunity to again call for a general election:
After three years of fecklessness by the entire political class over Brexit, Corbyn's chances of returning the Labour Party to power have likely also taken a hit. Why would people - a substantial majority of whom seem to support Brexit - vote Labour when that party offers no real alternative to the Conservative strategy of keeping the UK in the EU?
Nigel Farage has weighed in:
You'll never believe who the UK media is proposing as May's successor...
And where is BoJo at this crucial time? In Switzerland,
promising bankers that:
"We will leave the EU on October 31, deal or no deal. The way to get a good deal is to prepare for a no deal."
...which is EXACTLY what the Tories were saying about the March 31st deadline.
European leaders
suspect, correctly, that May's resignation forms part of the UK permanent govt's strategy for managing Brexit while holding onto power. All the Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov had to say about it was:
"Regrettably, I cannot recall offhand any landmarks that might somehow illustrate a contribution to the development of bilateral relations between Russia and Britain. It is rather the other way round."
Indeed, apart from 'not-Brexit', what else will May be recorded in history for... the 'not-nerve agent' Skripal Saga?
© Marco Garcia/AP/REX/ShutterstockU.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) speaks during a campaign rally announcing her candidacy for president in Waikiki.
Last week, the Daily Beast
ran this headline: "
Tulsi Gabbard's Campaign Is Being Boosted by Putin Apologists"
That was followed by the sub-headline: "The Hawaii congresswoman is quickly becoming the top candidate for
Democrats who think the Russian leader is misunderstood."
The Gabbard campaign
has received 75,000 individual donations. This crazy Beast article is
based on (maybe) three of them.The three names are professor Stephen Cohen, activist Sharon Tennison and someone using the name "Goofy Grapes," who may or may not have once worked for comedian Lee Camp, currently employed by Russia Today.
This vicious little article might have died a quiet death, except ABC's George Stephanopoulos
regurgitated it in an interview with Gabbard days later. The
This Week host put up the Beast headline in a question about whether or not Gabbard was "softer" on Putin than other candidates.
Gabbard responded: "It's unfortunate that you're citing that article, George, because
it's a whole lot of fake news."
Comment: The Democrats are desperate to make sure the 'right' candidate (of their choosing) gets elected this time - and desperate people are dangerous. We can expect much worse from their media vassals in the coming months.
David Brunnstrom & Idrees Ali
ReutersWed, 22 May 2019 10:22 UTC
© Yousef Albostany/Local Committee of Arbeen/Associated PressOPCW inspectors
, the State Department said on Tuesday, warning that Washington and
its allies would respond "quickly and appropriately" if this were proven.
"Unfortunately, we continue to see signs that the Assad regime may be renewing its use of chemical weapons, including an alleged chlorine attack in northwest Syria on the morning of May 19," State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in a statement.
"We are still gathering information on this incident, but we repeat our warning that if the Assad regime uses chemical weapons, the United States and our allies will respond quickly and appropriately," she said.
Comment: This comes less than 36 hours after a leaked OPCW report confirmed that the Douma 'chemical weapons attack' that 'justified' F.UK.US. airstrikes against Syrian military and state targets fighting ISIS/Al-Qaeda last year was STAGED.
The reason, as always, why they're launching another chemical attack propaganda blitz now is because the Syrian government forces are
moving in on the concentrated pocket of terrorists remaining in Idlib province...
Ross Clark
SpectatorThu, 16 May 2019 01:08 UTC
© YouTubePresident Donald Trump
The election of Donald Trump has, of course, unleashed the latent racist which lurks within millions of Americans.
We know this because enlightened opinion keeps telling us so. The New Yorker, for example, ran a
piece in November 2016 declaring
'Hate on rise since Trump's election', and quoting a list of incidents collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center - including the experience of a girl in Colorado who was allegedly told by a white man: 'Now that Trump is president I am going to shoot you and all the blacks I can find'.
TIME magazine, too, ran a
story in the same month announcing 'Racist incidents are up since Donald Trump's election'. In March 2017 the
Nation asserted 'Donald Trump's rise has coincided with an explosion in hate groups', claiming that 100 racist organizations had been founded since Trump began his presidential campaign.
And so it goes on. Just as with Britain's vote for Brexit,
Trump's strident language and his concentration on issues such as migration is supposed to have coarsened political discourse - legitimizing racist and xenophobic opinions in people who might otherwise have been shamed into silence. By this narrative, even slightly immoderate speeches, posters and campaigns by politicians become magnified through the lens of public opinion into something much more sinister. A speech on migration, goes the theory, can all too easily erupt into bar room arguments and end with a Muslim or a black man having his head kicked in.
It sounds vaguely plausible, but is it true?
Comment: Or maybe Obama was just a sh*t president who was a vacuous yes-man for the deep state, whereas Trump has integrity and is popular.
See also:
Nebojsa Malic
RTSat, 18 May 2019 20:20 UTC
© Reuters/Alessandro Garofalo
With European Parliament elections looming, the establishment parties and mainstream media are reaching for the playbook of US Democrats and hyping the specter of 'Russia' to drive voters away from the rising tide of populism.
One of the most outspoken liberals in the European Parliament, former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt, openly accused five populist politicians of being "paid by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin" and plotting to destroy the EU. Challenging Italian Deputy PM Matteo Salvini to a debate on Monday, Verhofstadt also name-checked Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, French opposition politician Marine Le Pen, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage and freshly resigned Austrian Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache.
In another tweet, Verhofstadt framed the coming election in terms of voting for "pro-European"parties or "letting our continent become a playground for Trump & Putin's puppets," citing an EuroNews report about former Trump campaign chief Steve Bannon praising Le Pen's campaign in france.
Actually reading past the clickbait headline, however, quickly makes it apparent that Verhofstadt didn't bother: namely, the article clearly spells out that Bannon is in no way involved with Le Pen's campaign, and was commenting as a private person. It even quotes Le Pen's remarks to the French media complaining about the press "dragging" Bannon into the election.
Europe is finally coming to its senses five years after the coup in Kiev started what is now the new Cold War between Russia and the West.
The first part of Russia's win comes from Italian leader Matteo Salvini. Speaking for the under-represented in European politics,
Salvini declared this week, "
I continue to believe that we don't need sanctions. The issue of their removal unites all decent people."
Salvini is tackling, head-on, the European political establishment in this week's European parliamentary elections. And his raising the issue of lifting sanctions on Russia imposed over the reunification with Crimea is a massive attack on them.
It means that Salvini is looking at using the extension of sanctions as a bargaining chip this summer. He is threatening to veto any extension with words this strong on the eve of an election.
The second victory for Russia, however, is far more significant.
The Council of Europe has finally agreed to restore Russia's voting rights after suspending them over the unification with Crimea.
Julian Assange
In Sweden, prosecutors have applied to the Swedish courts to issue a warrant for Julian's arrest. There is a tremendous back story to that simple statement.
The European Arrest Warrant must be issued from one country to another by
a judicial authority.
The original Swedish request for Assange's extradition was not issued by any court, but simply by the prosecutor. This was particularly strange, as the Chief Prosecutor of Stockholm had initially closed the case after deciding there was no case to answer, and then another, highly politically motivated, prosecutor had reopened the case and issued a European Arrest Warrant,
without going to any judge for confirmation.Assange's initial appeal up to the UK Supreme Court was in large part based on the fact that the warrant did not come from a judge but from a prosecutor, and that was not a judicial authority. I have no doubt that, if any other person in the UK had been the accused, the British courts would not have accepted the warrant from a prosecutor. The incredible and open bias of the courts against Assange has been evident since day 1. My contention is borne out by the fact that,
immediately after Assange lost his case against the warrant in the Supreme Court, the British government changed the law to specify that future warrants must be from a judge and not a prosecutor. That is just one of the incredible facts about the Assange case that the mainstream media has hidden from the general public.
Igor Ogorodnev
RTWed, 01 May 2019 15:42 UTC
© REUTERSBrenton Tarrant, whose face cannot be shown due to a court order, and whose words likely won't be cited either.
Opposing New Zealand's press restrictions on the coverage of Brenton Tarrant's trial is not some abstract free speech argument,
it's about reining in a media that thinks it knows what's best for the public.The country's five major media corporations responsible for the coverage of the proceedings against the man accused of killing 50 people during the March 15 shootings at two Christchurch mosques,
have signed a voluntary "indefinite" protocol "to limit any coverage of statements that actively champion white supremacist or terrorist ideology."The outlets will not cite excerpts from the gunman's manifesto, 'The Great Replacement',
they will not quote anything he says in support of his actions, and if he does a raised-arm salute or perhaps even the OK sign (the neo-Nazi gesture du jour)
these can only be shown in pixelated form.This has been widely received as an unequivocally virtuous gesture -
"not giving the extremist a platform" is being treated as a win for ethics over typical media salaciousness.
Instead, the audiences of these media outlets should feel alarmed and insulted. The New Zealand media evidently holds the public in such dubious regard that
it believes that we could not be trusted to make up our own minds on the merits of an ideology propagated by a mentally unbalanced fitness trainer who committed one of the least-justifiable acts of violence against innocents in recent memory.
Comment: To which Iran responded: Meanwhile, Iran is confident this is all bluster on the US' part: They may be right: