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Senate passes North American trade deal, now on Trump's desk

Jacob Pramuk
CNBC
Thu, 16 Jan 2020 11:47 UTC
MMcConnell
© Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
The Senate passed a new North American trade deal Thursday, sending one of President Donald Trump's top priorities to his desk for ratification.

The GOP-held chamber approved the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement in an overwhelming 89-10 vote. After Trump signs the three-nation pact, it needs only Canada's approval to take effect.

The Senate rushed to pass the agreement before the expected start of the president's impeachment trial next week. The House delivered articles of impeachment to the upper chamber on Wednesday, and the Senate could take weeks to decide whether to convict Trump and remove him from office.

USMCA will head to the president more than 14 months after the North American nations agreed to the deal. The Trump administration worked with Democrats to resolve concerns about enforcement of labor and environmental standards — changes that led most but not all of the party's lawmakers to support the agreement.

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US Supreme court rejects seizure of $1.7B in Iranian assets


Press TV
Tue, 14 Jan 2020 01:36 UTC
SupremeCourt
© File photoUS Supreme Court, Washington, D.C.
A US court's ruling to seize Iranian assets worth about $1.7 billion outside the United States has been thrown out for now.

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had ruled that the families of US troops killed in 1983 bombing of the US Marine Corp barracks in Lebanon get access to Iranian funds in Luxembourg.

But the US Supreme Court on Monday rejected the ruling and sent the case back to the lower court so that it could issue a new decision based on a law signed by President Donald Trump which allows families to access Iranian assets.

In 2016, the US Supreme Court allowed the families to claim "compensation" from Iran's assets, but the Central Bank of Iran contented that the funds were held in Luxembourg and thus could not be seized.

Last March, a Luxembourg court refused to reinforce a US ruling that would have helped families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks claim Iranian assets held by a clearing house in the tiny European country. The court ruled that there were no grounds in international law to uphold in Luxembourg a 2012 US court decision to strip Iran of sovereign immunity.
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X

US, Iraqi military resume joint operations, ignore parliament's call to expel US troops

Nick Givas
Fox News
Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
Pentagon
© US ArmyThe Pentagon
The United States military has resumed operations with coalition forces in Iraq, despite the nation's parliament voting to expel American soldiers from the region just 10 days ago, a senior U.S. defense official told Fox News.

Tensions flared between Iraq and the U.S. after President Trump ordered a deadly drone strike against Iranian Gen. Qassam Soleiman earlier this month, while he was at Baghdad International Airport. Iraq claimed its sovereignty had been violated and took swift action in calling for all U.S. armed forces to leave the country,

Two American military officials spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity and confirmed that joint operations had been restarted, in an effort to stifle any momentum gained by the Islamic state during the recent upheaval.

It has yet to be confirmed if the Iraqi government was privy to the U.S. decision to resume operations or if it was done unilaterally.
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Satellite

Roscosmos engineers to develop a jamming mechanism to blind foreign spy satellites over Russia


RT
Thu, 16 Jan 2020 09:29 UTC
Russian array
© Global Look Press/Haef/CHROMORANGE
Engineers at the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos have developed a plan to block foreign orbital spy satellites from operating in the skies above Russian territory, in what could mark a new era of counterintelligence.

The engineers at the Russian Space Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Roscosmos, propose establishing a database of all known foreign orbital spy satellites to best configure an array of ground-based jamming devices.

Once this database is compiled, the agency could then decide the best location and composition for a proposed array of ground-based radio-electronic stations which suppress and prevent data transmission from optical, infrared and radar satellites.

This method reportedly only works when spy satellites are above foreign territory, and not within line-of-sight of their respective home nations. The non-invasive jamming would effectively render foreign spy satellites useless when flying above Russian territory.
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Star of David

Flashback Best of the Web: Wikileaks Stratfor email: Israel behind blast that killed 36 IRGC troops at Iranian missile base in 2011

Raphael Ahre
The Times of Israel
Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:31 UTC

Comment: This interests us today because it's the same location from which missiles were fired at Ukraine Airlines Flight 752 last week - Shahid Moddares missile base, near the village of Bidkaneh, west of Tehran.

Then too, the Iranians insisted the incident was 'an accident'...


IRGC base Bidganeh Iran
© APIn this image taken from amateur video, smokes rises from an explosion at a Revolutionary Guard ammunition depot outside Bidganeh village, west of Tehran, last November
Israeli agents were responsible for a devastating blast last November that damaged an important Iranian military facility, according to an email written by the head of a leading private American intelligence company that was revealed Wednesday on Wikileaks.

Claiming to have spoken to multiple "good" Israeli sources, the CEO and founder of Texas-based intelligence company Stratfor, George Friedman, told his colleagues that he believes Israeli operatives were behind the explosion at a base of Revolutionary Guards on November 12. The blast killed more than 15 soldiers, among them at least one general.


Comment: In subsequent days, that death toll more than doubled to 36. And among the dead was General Hasan Moghaddam, described by the IRGC as "a key figure in Iran's missile programme."
moqaddam
General Hasan Moghaddam

"Everything I'm hearing from Israel is that they did it," Friedman wrote in an e-mail on November 15. While it isn't clear whether the explosion, which took place about 40 kilometers from Tehran, was caused by a special military operation or submarine-launched cruise missile, his Israeli contacts claim they were responsible for it, Friedman wrote.

Comment: WhatEVER it takes...

Was Iranian Missile Operator Tricked Into Shooting Down The Ukrainian Airlines Plane Over Tehran?

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Die

SOTT Focus: Russia's Big Gamble in Libya

Steve Brown
Sott.net
Fri, 17 Jan 2020 20:09 UTC
putin erdogan turkstream
First, the background. When the United States abandoned the Iran agreement, that left Turkey's oil imports adrift due to newly imposed US Treasury sanctions on Iranian oil exports. By December 2018, Turkey was forced to look elsewhere for its oil imports, with Libya being the most logical choice by price and proximity, despite the violence there. Misrata rebels allied with Libya Dawn in charge of Libya's largest free trade port, arranged oil exports from Zawiya and Sirte to Italy* and Turkey, at favorable prices.

Recall that Tripolitania (west) and Cyrenaica (east) are at war, and Cyrenaica has its own oil production and storage terminals in the east while most proceeds (for both belligerents) in the Libyan conflict are settled by Libya's National Oil Company (NOC). But little of that mattered to Turkey's oil import market and Turkey signed an energy corridor agreement with Libya. Then in April of 2019, the Libyan National Army's offensive versus Tripolitania's Government of National Accord (GNA) began, resulting in the fall of Sirte early this year.

Turkey's foray into Libyan oil ran into trouble by June of 2018. Turkey objected to LNA rogue oil deals free of NOC oversight, where the NOC's mandate was to enforce the UN arms embargo by disbursing funds only for civilian government use. Then the LNA's April offensive resulted in air strikes on Misrata and the west, impacting Turkey's oil imports. The fall of Sirte and LNA strikes on NOC offices and the Zawiya oil terminal late in 2019 dealt serious blows to Turkeys' oil ambitions in Libya.
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Attention

Democratic Party divide: Anti-war progressive candidates face off against mainstream war-hawks

Philip Weiss
Mondweiss
Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders
A clear divide in the Democratic Party presidential debate last night was between mainstream candidates who see American troops performing a vital role in the Middle East and the two progressive candidates who don't. The talking point for the mainstream candidates was fighting "terrorism." Amy Klobuchar went so far as to call Iran a "terrorist regime."

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did not use that word, while offering eloquent statements about the failures of U.S. foreign policy.

All the leading candidates said they would restore the Iran deal that Trump has sought to destroy. But they differed over withdrawing troops from the region.

Comment: CNN, Warren's sexism jibe against Sanders backfires as #CNNisTrash trends on Twitter

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MIB

Flashback Iranian military source: Russia gave Israel codes to Syrian air defense systems, enabling airstrikes

Yasser Okbi & Maariv Hashavua
The Jerusalem Post
Tue, 21 Mar 2017 17:04 UTC
Kuwaiti daily quotes Iran Defense Ministry source as saying Iran was able to change the codes without Russia's knowledge, enabling Friday's missile launch against Israeli aircraft
syria air defense system missile
Iran has accused Russia of giving the codes for Syria's anti-aircraft missiles to Israel, a senior official in the engineering department of Iran's Defense Department told the Kuwaiti daily Al-Jarida on Monday.

According to the report, much remains unknown about Israel's attack on a Hezbollah weapons convoy and the Syrian response to the Israeli fighter jets early Friday morning. Israel has reportedly attacked dozens of times in Syrian territory since Hezbollah joined the Syrian civil war in 2012, but Friday marked the first time that an anti-aircraft missile had been fired at an IAF jet.

Al-Jarida's Tehran correspondent, Farzad Qassemi, cited a source in the Iranian Defense Ministry as saying that Iranian experts had changed the operation codes for the Syrian air defense system, which is what enabled the anti-aircraft missiles to be used against the Israeli Air Force on Friday morning.

Comment: Now we have - in addition to a third-hand claim made in 2009 that Russia had, in 2008, given Israel codes for accessing the Tor-M1 air-defense systems it sold to Iran - another, more recent, example of the 'exchanging of codes' by Russia to Israel.

This report goes some way towards explaining why Syria has been bombarded with sporadic but successful Israeli airstrikes all these years. It also shows that Iran has found a workaround, so having access codes isn't by itself sufficient.

Since the above 'trade', Syria successfully shot down an Israeli jet (or two), in February 2018, and it has been able to repel many if not most Israeli missiles fired from jets.

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Books

Modern Poland rewrites its WWII past: Patriotism, negligence or something else?

Nebojsa Malic
RT
Fri, 17 Jan 2020 17:41 UTC
people flares
© RIA Novosti / Alexei Vitvitsky
Ignoring the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Warsaw is just the latest questionable decision by Polish authorities, eager to rewrite WWII history to better fit modern political imperatives. However, patriotism it is not.

Units of the Red Army and the First Polish Army entered Warsaw on January 17, 1945, ending more than five years of German occupation. Seventy-five years after the fact, however, Warsaw is choosing not to honor its liberators.

Quite the opposite, in fact: modern Polish authorities insist that their country was a purely innocent victim of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, asserting their moral equivalence.

This kind of historical revisionism is clearly politically motivated. While the Polish People's Republic (1947-1989) was a client of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the Third Polish Republic hastened to become a vassal of the US upon its conclusion, joining NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004.
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Play

Searching for Steele: Investigative documentary exposes how US military fomented sectarian hate in Iraq that will last for generations


21st Century Wire
Sun, 12 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
Searching for James Steele

Our weekly documentary film curated by the editorial team at 21WIRE.

Following the defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, we can now look back at the US occupation of Iraq which began in 2003, and which directly led to emergence of terrorist group. One of the key factors in motivating extremists in Iraq was a chain of US-funded torture centres in the country which helped drive one of the deadliest sectarian wars ever in the region. One of the key actors in the clandestine violence and terrorism sponsored by the US is a man named James Steele. In this 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic, investigators revealed how the retired US colonel - who reported directly to General David Petraeus, both veterans of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua - played a key role in training and overseeing commandos who tortured Iraqis, and foment sectarian hate for a generation. Through their efforts, these men unleashed hell on Earth.


Comment: More on the clandestine activities of Mr. Steele:

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