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Russian Deputy FM: New sanctions only push Moscow-Washington relations to dead end - all attempts to force Russia to change policies doomed to fail


RT
Wed, 01 Nov 2017 19:04 UTC
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov
© Sergey Fadeichev/TASSDeputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov
Russia's deputy foreign minister says the new US sanctions were no surprise for Moscow. Sergey Ryabkov emphasized that any attempts to force Russia into changing its policies were doomed to failure and only complicate international relations.

"Even though this has not come as a surprise for us, the very fact of increasing sanctions pressure and new attempts to force us into changing our political course through sanctions cause deep concern," Ryabkov was quoted as saying by TASS on Wednesday.

"The latest anti-Russian actions undertaken by the United States are only moving the relations between our two nations further into a dead end," he said, adding that Moscow would continue to follow the investigation of alleged Russian meddling with the US presidential polls "with great skepticism."

The diplomat also noted that in his view the latest American moves resemble a mania, because Washington had already introduced sanctions against 70 nations. He added that in some cases, like with Iran, the sanctions looked very much like a pre-planned provocation seeking to further aggravate international relations.
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Attention

Kurdish-ISIS collusion: Iraqi officers say Peshmerga helped ISIS terrorists flee Hawija


Middle East Eye
Mon, 30 Oct 2017 18:44 UTC
kurds hawija isis
© AFPKurdish forces are seen in front of an IS sign during the battle for Hawija
Iraqi commanders in the battle for Hawija have claimed Kurdish Peshmerga forces helped hundreds of Islamic State (IS) group militants to escape the group's final stronghold in northern Iraq.

"IS fighters have escaped Hawija via Peshmerga positions and [before the Hawija battle began] the Peshmerga received 160 IS leaders," said Mahdi Taki, commander of the Hashd al-Shaabi's 52 Brigade.

"We are getting this information directly from our Peshmerga contacts. There are some bad Peshmerga who love money more than patriotism, and they are taking bribes from IS."

Hawija was deserted on 5 October after a two-day battle to liberate the town.

Beyond extensively mined roads and premises rigged with IEDs, ground forces had found resistance stripped to a bare minimum of snipers and militants left to man mortar positions or carry out suicide attacks against advancing soldiers.

Before the military reached the town, many hundreds of IS militants and commanders had reportedly fled Hawija, and effectively vanished.

Comment: Some video evidence of this long-established relationship from 2014: Peshmerga having a nice chat with their ISIS brother in Kirkuk Province:



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Dominoes

Trump and secessionism, how that plays out

Thierry Meyssan
Voltaire Network
Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC
presDT
© unknown
Over the last few years, the CIA has supported secessionist movements in favour of the Luo people in Kenya, the Kurds in Iraq and the Catalans in Spain. These groups, which still believed only recently that they could create new artificial independent States, have been abandoned by the United States since Donald Trump's arrival at the White House, and are now on the brink of collapse.

United States - secession, entirely at the service of organised pillage

The United States have always maintained a variable concept of the right of peoples to self-determination.

In 1861, Washington would not accept the will of the Southern States to continue living as a Confederation, while the Northern States intended to impose a Federation with customs duties and a single central Bank. As soon as he was elected to the White House, President Abraham Lincoln put down the secession. It was only during the civil war that followed that the moral question of slavery progressively identified the two sides. It is very easy today to forget the million people who died in this war and condemn the Confederates as racists, while at the beginning of the conflict the question of slavery had nothing to do with it, and the Federation also included several 'slave' states.

Comment: The Donald throws out a persona but keeps his pragmatic side less obvious.

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Question

Confused: US commander unsure if it's 4k or 500 troops in Syria


RT
Wed, 01 Nov 2017 19:44 UTC
US troops
© Delil Souleiman / AFPUS troops sit atop an armoured vehicle on a road near the northern Syrian village of Ain Issa
A senior US military commander in the operation against the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS, ISIL) in Iraq and Syria, James Jarrard, got into a muddle when asked about the exact number of US troops in Syria.

During his press briefing on Tuesday, the US Army major general got confused by a simple question from a journalist regarding the scale of the US presence in Syria, and needed a colleague from the Pentagon to intervene.

At first, Jarrard said that there are 5,000 US troops in the region, but immediately corrected himself, lowering the figure to 4,000.
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Briefcase

Obama, Clinton weaponized the 'dossier'

George Szamuely
The Duran
Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:48 UTC
HilObama
© Infowars
The disclosure that the Clinton campaign, using white-shoe law firm Perkins Coie as a cutout, financed the so-called Steele dossier confirms what we have known all along.

The Trump-Russia collusion story was a joint invention of the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign. It enabled the Obama administration to make use of the nation's security and intelligence services to spy on Trump and his associates and to use whatever information they thereby gleaned to try to get Hillary into the White House. The failure of the scheme didn't stop either Obama or the Clintons.

Following the election debacle, an enraged Obama administration sought vengeance by disseminating the dossier as widely as possible with a view to undermining the incoming Trump administration and to ensuring that no rapprochement with Russia would be possible. In doing so, Obama and Clinton have thrown American politics into turmoil and have perhaps pushed the United States and Russia toward armed confrontation.

Comment: In this full, but concise overview of the Democrats play-by-play, it was only Killary's campaign that worked with 'the Russians'. They bought a scandal. They embellished it and set it loose on the public to reap the benefits.

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Rocket

Revolutionary guard claims Iranian missiles able to strike US targets


RT
Tue, 31 Oct 2017 22:40 UTC
Iran missile
© Damir Sagolj / ReutersShahab-3 medium range missile
Iran has limited its ballistic missile range to 2,000 kilometers, which it says is enough to strike the US and its interests, should they need to retaliate for an attack.

"Based on the policies specified by the Leader [Ayatollah Khamenei], the range of our missiles is limited to 2,000 kilometers," Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari said Tuesday, according to the Fars news agency, adding that this range is "sufficient" to respond to any attacks from the US.

"Americans, their forces and their interests are situated within a 2,000-kilometer radius around us and we are able to respond to any possible desperate attack by them," he added, as quoted by AP.

Jafari's comments come as the US Treasury expanded sanctions against Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps on Tuesday for allegedly "supporting terrorism." The sanctions apply to the IRGC Air Force, the Al-Ghadir Missile Command, the Aerospace Force Self Sufficiency Jihad Organization and the Research and Self-Sufficiency Jihad Organization, along with Jafari himself and four senior officers.

"The Americans fear the consequences of war with Iran and know that if such a war starts, they will lose and therefore, they are [trying to land] a blow [on] the Islamic Republic through soft war and economic pressure," Jafari told reporters at the World Without Terror conference in Tehran.

Comment: False flag within this radius in the not too distant future?

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Snakes in Suits

Neocons have hijacked Trump's Syria policy

Ron Paul
Ron Paul Institute
Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC
D. Trump
© The Dodo's Lament/KJN
Does anyone in the Trump Administration have a clue about our Syria policy? In March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared to be finally pulling back from President Obama's disastrous "Assad must go" position that has done nothing but prolong the misery in Syria. At the time, Tillerson said, the "longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people."

Those of us who believe in national sovereignty would say that is pointing out the obvious. Nevertheless it was a good sign that US involvement in Syria - illegal as it is - would no longer seek regime change but would stick to fighting ISIS.

Then out of the blue this past week, Tillerson did another 180 degree policy turn, telling a UN audience in Geneva that, "[t]he reign of the Assad family is coming to an end. The only issue is how that should that be brought about."

Comment: Paul simply tells it like it is, always from the heart with the voice of reason.

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Attention

Lewandowski: Why didn't the FBI warn Trump campaign about Paul Manafort?

Kara Zupkis
Washington Examiner
Mon, 30 Oct 2017 01:18 UTC
Lewandowski
© Modern LiberalsCorey Lewandowski
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Monday the FBI should have warned the campaign about Paul Manafort early on.

"If the public reports are true, and there was a time where Paul Manafort was under a [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant before coming to the Trump campaign, why is it the FBI never reached out to me as the campaign manager, never reached out to Donald Trump, and said: 'Look, you might want to pause for a second and take a look before you bring this guy on board as a volunteer to hunt delegates to you,'" Lewandowski said on Fox Business Network. "This is a problem with the FBI if you ask me."

Documents unsealed Monday morning said Manafort and his former business associate Rick Gates were indicted on 12 counts, including charges for money laundering, violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and conspiring against the United States.

"If Paul Manafort did something in 2006, a decade before he was brought on as volunteer to the Trump campaign, then he should be accountable for that," Lewandowski said, before insisting that the counts against Manafort and Gates "have absolutely nothing to do with the campaign, have nothing to do with the Russia investigation and have nothing to do with the president."

Comment: Manafort working for Trump was a bonus for Obama/Clinton purposes - one the FBI was all too willing to let take place. If the shoe was on other foot, would they have warned the Clinton campaign?

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Windsock

John Kelly under fire over Civil War historical context comments, foreign relations ignored


RT
Tue, 31 Oct 2017 17:49 UTC
Kelly
© Global Look PressWhite House Chief of Staff John Kelly
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is facing an online backlash over comments about the Civil War and monuments he gave in a wide-ranging interview with Fox News' Laura Ingraham.

"I think we make a mistake though as a society and certainly as individuals when we take what is today accepted as right and wrong and go back 100, 200, 300 years or more and say what Christopher Columbus did is wrong, you know, 500 years later," Kelly said on the Monday evening show.

"I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now, it's different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War," the retired Marine general said, commenting on the initiatives to tear down monuments to the Confederate general.

The remarks prompted an angry reaction from prominent liberal commentators and political figures, who compared them to President Donald Trump's comments following the death of a protester in Charlottesville, Virginia in August.

Pressed about Kelly's comments by reporters, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it was "absurd and disgraceful" to take these comments out of context and claim they were racist or offensive. "Just because you don't like history doesn't mean you can erase it," Sanders said, noting that Kelly was talking about general terms discussed by American historians from both the North and the South and the political left and right.

Comment: The US mindset...down a cul-de-sac of nonsense, distracted from what is important to see and know.

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Question

Where is Mueller's oversight?

Andy Schiafly
Townhall
Wed, 01 Nov 2017 12:01 UTC
ManafortMueller
© Vanity FairMr. Manafort • Mr. Mueller
After spending millions of dollars on his 15-lawyer dream team, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Paul Manafort primarily for failing to file paperwork that many Democrats also failed to file. Indeed, a group co-founded by Hillary Clinton's top adviser John Podesta failed to timely file the same paperwork that Manafort allegedly overlooked.

Yet Mueller did not indict anyone in Podesta's group, or anyone opposed to Trump. The American people elected Donald Trump as president after he promised to prosecute Hillary for her apparent corruption, and now the exact opposite is transpiring as it is Hillary's side that is bilking the American taxpayers to lock up Trump supporters.

Many innocent people are being forced to spend enormous legal fees to defend against the out-of-control Mueller, who is acting like an independent federal prosecutor even though that law was terminated in 1999. There was nearly unanimous consensus after abuses by independent federal prosecutors in the 1980s and 90s that such spectacles should not recur, yet Mueller apparently has carte blanche to pursue President Trump and his supporters.

Mueller was installed under the pretext of being merely a "special counsel" for the purpose of looking into possible interference by Russia in the 2016 presidential election. Instead, Mueller has acted without accountability or real oversight in going far beyond the outer limits of his charter.

Comment: Manafort was a person of interest/suspicion prior to the Trump campaign. Is this indictment legit or 'off the rails?' Too soon to tell. The author doesn't state his legal background nor qualify his statements.

See also: Lewandowski: Why didn't the FBI warn Trump campaign about Paul Manafort?

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