They cannot make Turkey back down with sanctions," he told Turkish media. "We will not step back."Last week, President Trump asked Erdogan directly for Brunson's release and threatened new sanctions if the Turkish government does not comply.
"The US should not forget that unless it changes its attitude, it will lose a strong and sincere partner like Turkey," he continued.
Brunson is facing a possible 35-year prison sentence on charges that he helped a group that tried to overthrow the government in 2016. His attorneys and the Trump administration say he's innocent and a political hostage of Erdogan.
Puppet Masters
Sometimes people ask me why I do this sort of work and why this area of research (government in Hollywood) is so important to me. One of the reasons is that the Pentagon, CIA, FBI and the rest would prefer it if no one knew about their role in censoring and rewriting movie and TV scripts for political propaganda purposes. They would prefer that no one knew they were being manipulated and lied to through innocent-seeming entertainment, because otherwise that manipulation would be much harder and less effective.
The Navy's response illustrates this perfectly. After nearly a year they got back to me to say that they had asked CHINFO West (Chief of Navy Information Office West, the official name for the Navy's entertainment liaison office) and said that they don't keep copies of script notes for the TV and movie projects they support. I appealed this finding, pointing out that they had previously released the script notes for Lone Survivor, which can still be found on the US Navy's website, therefore they do keep script notes and do, on occasion, release them.
HMS Enterprise plucked Salman Abedi, then 19, from the Libyan coast and took him to Malta for a flight home to Britain in August 2014.
Comment: 'Home' to Britain? He was a refugee (of Libyan birth/nationality) at that point, surely?
Last May he set off a bomb in Manchester Arena that killed 22, including seven children.
Abedi's younger brother, Hashem, who is in jail in Tripoli facing trial over the attack, was also rescued by HMS Enterprise.
The pair had been caught up in fighting in Libya and were among more than 100 British citizens taken to safety.
Comment: Whoa! So they were British 'subjects' who went to Libya to 'free' it with NATO, then got lucky on the return trip.
Photographs released by Ministry of Defence officials at the time showed the group being brought on board the Navy vessel.
Comment: Not that it comes as much of a surprise. The UK establishment never met a jihadist it didn't like.
See also: British-Libyan terrorists: "MI5 gave us free passage to fight Gaddafi"
The phone call on July 30 was their first since Khan's Tehrik-e Insaf (PTI) party emerged victorious from a July 25 vote that was marred by charges of preelection rigging and other irregularities.
Relations between the nuclear-armed rivals have been frayed, with direct talks stalled amid diplomatic disputes and occasional skirmishes along the frontier that divides the disputed region of Kashmir.
Khan, widely seen as Pakistan's prime minister-in-waiting, declared in his victory speech that he wanted to resolve the long-standing territorial dispute over Kashmir, saying, "If India comes and takes one step towards us, we will take two."
Khan is now courting independent candidates and minor parties to form a coalition government in a nation that has fought three wars with India.

UN peacekeeping troops look over the border line between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
"The Iranians are playing a very, very important role in our common efforts to eliminate the terrorists in Syria," Anatoly Viktorov said in English on Israel's Channel 10 broadcaster on July 30.
"That's why, for this period of time, we see as nonrealistic demands to expel any foreign troops from the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic," he said.
Viktorov said the presence of Iran's military advisers and allied fighters in Syria is "fully legitimate, according to UN principles," and Russia "cannot force them" to leave the country.
Syria, with help from Russia, Iran, and Tehran's ally, the Lebanese militia Hizballah, has swiftly regained control over large swathes of territory this year after seven years of a civil war that has killed more than 400,000 people.

A mock road sign for Damascus, the capital of Syria, and a cutout of a soldier, are displayed in an old outpost in the Israeli controlled Golan Heights near the border with Syria, Thursday, May 10, 2018
Syrian envoy to the UN Bashar Jaafari has said during Astana-format reconciliation talks that Israel helped to transfer militants, who had previously been evacuated from the Golan Heights to other countries, including the US.
Comment: Let it be noted that Turkey is a NATO member, jockeying to increase its influence in that organization.
Nunes said, "I had no idea what shadow banning even was. For several months, people have been contacting me saying that, 'Hey I tried to find you on Twitter, I couldn't find your account. Why is that?'"
He added, "They don't call it shadow banning but, effectively, we were getting caught up in some type of trap to where people couldn't see our Twitter feed. I don't know what Twitter is up to. It sure looks to me like they are censoring people and they ought to stop it. And we're looking at any legal remedies that we can go through."
Comment:
"Collusion is not a crime," he tweeted Tuesday. "But that doesn't matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!"
Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is set to appear before a Virginia court on Tuesday. While Special Counsel Robert Mueller is tasked with uncovering alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the runup to the 2016 election, Manafort is being tried on unrelated tax and bank fraud charges dating back over a decade.
Mueller will likely draw attention to Manafort's lavish lifestyle, funded by his political consulting work for Ukraine's pro-Russian former leader Viktor Yanukovych.
"Respecting the Iranian nation's rights, reducing hostilities and returning to the nuclear deal are steps that can be taken to pave the bumpy road of talks between Iran and America," tweeted Hamid Aboutalebi, an advisor to Rouhani.
Trump said on Monday he would be willing to meet Iran's leader without preconditions to discuss how to improve ties after he pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, saying, "If they want to meet, we'll meet."
Comment: Trump a week ago:
But fear not - a war with Iran remains unlikely at this point. Such a move would be too costly and risky for the US and the global economy, and surely even the warhawks in the Deep State understand this.
Notice that Trump sweetened his tone after that tweet, so it appears he was both distracting the attention from the unfairly bad press he received for meeting Putin, and was once again applying his 'shock-and-awe' negotiating style.
Now that the all-consuming, head-exploding media meltdown over Donald Trump's performance in Helsinki has subsided somewhat, it is worth attempting to examine what, exactly, inspired the frenzy. Virtually the entire elite press corps and large swaths of the political class united in denouncing the sitting president not just as incompetent, but as an active, knowing traitor. Given the interminable quality of the Trump/Russia saga, such furor is likely to bubble up again in the near future. So what's at the root of it?
In the popular telling, Trump's subservience to Vladimir Putin - coupled with his rejection of his own Intelligence Community's conclusions on purported Russian "meddling" in the 2016 election - caused the apoplexy. This is true, as far as it goes. But there is a more fundamental level on which Trump stokes such angst: he departs from the traditional American exceptionalism script. The one which holds that America's motives are always democracy-loving and pure, its spy agencies are infallible, and its moral superiority goes without saying. Trump evidently believes none of these things, and, as such, is not so much a duly-elected head of state, but a saboteur whom the political and media class can never countenance.
Comment:
- How 'American exceptionalism' has justified war and exploitation
- American exceptionalism defined
- The United States of Gaslighting and Abusive Narcissism
- Mike Pompeo on American exceptionalism: 'Americans must believe in the "essential rightness" of the USA'
- 'Exceptionalism' in America
- Killary's speech on "American Exceptionalism" : A pledge to further US global domination
- Ecuador's president: Obama's exceptionalism talk reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric before WWII













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