CIA Director Mike Pompeo told an interviewer at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) the CIA will "become a much more vicious agency" in conducting covert operations against its roster of enemies, most prominently Iran and North Korea.

Pompeo also told the gathering of neocons Trump decertified the Iran deal not because it is in violation-the Iranians are playing by the rules-but rather because Trump has been told it "would curtail Iranian adventurism."

Trump advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, also addressed the FDD neocons. He said America has suffered from a lack of "strategic competence... in recent years," in other words, the deep state has failed to remove the governments of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and assorted others.

Foreign Policy columnist Jeffrey Lewis compared McMaster's remarks to those of General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Taylor urged President Kennedy to launch an invasion of Cuba.

While the Iraqi government forces sweep Kirkuk clean of the Kurdish occupation, one writer strongly pushed pro-Kurdish/anti-Iranian views. Three pieces by Emma Sky appeared in three prestigious imperial outlets within just four days. They are noticeable for the slander and lies. Obviously they are part of a well prepared lobbying campaign.

The author is not an neutral observer or academic specialist. Emma Sky is the person most responsible for messing up Kirkuk. She is also a 'Mother of ISIS'.

On October 16 Emma Sky published in Foreign Affairs: Mission Still Not Accomplished in Iraq - Why the United States Should Not Leave.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team running the Russia collusion probe are being accused by fellow attorneys of employing aggressive and questionable tactics in past cases, potentially putting a dent in his straight-shooter image.

As the investigation heats up and key players like former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer are interviewed by investigators, several attorneys with experience in federal cases spoke out with their concerns this week.

Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense attorney in Massachusetts, wrote an opinion piece accusing Mueller of once trying to entrap him when Mueller was acting U.S. attorney in Boston. "I have known Mueller during key moments of his career as a federal prosecutor," Silverglate wrote for WGBH News. "My experience has taught me to approach whatever he does in the Trump investigation with a requisite degree of skepticism or, at the very least, extreme caution."

The FBI's new director, who took over the law enforcement agency after President Donald Trump fired its former chief, warned Thursday that officials at the FBI and across the federal government will face pressure to act unethically and need to resist it.

"At some point for everybody in this room and everybody in my organization, our integrity will be tested," Christopher Wray told a Washington audience of investigators who work for federal government inspectors general. "It happens to everybody. It happens to all of us. It could be at a time where we're being asked to make a decision that is inconsistent with what we know is right and what we know is true, where we'll be asked to do something without fully thinking it through."

During his 20-minute speech, Wray offered no specifics on ethical challenges he expects to face or has dealt with in the past, but he implored the internal government watchdogs in the room not to give in to such pressure, even in cases where they think they might get away with it.

"It could be at a time we think no one will notice, no one will know," the FBI chief said. "I would argue that actually those are the times where we need to stay most true to our core integrity and our professionalism. To think critically and thoughtfully and to do what's right, not just for ourselves individually so we can look ourselves in the mirror as leaders, but for our agencies and the government and the public that we all serve."

A shake-up is underway at the Democratic National Committee as several key longtime officials have lost their posts, exposing a still-raw rift in the party and igniting anger among those in its progressive wing who see retaliation for their opposition to DNC Chairman Tom Perez.

The ousters come ahead of the DNC's first meeting, in Las Vegas, Nevada, since Perez took over as chairman with a pledge this year to unite a party that had become badly divided during the brutal Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton 2016 primary race.

Complaints began immediately after party officials saw a list of Perez's appointments to DNC committees and his roster of 75 "at-large" members, who are chosen by the chair.

The removal and demotion of a handful of veteran operatives stood out, as did what critics charge is the over-representation of Clinton-backed members on the Rules and Bylaws Committee, which helps set the terms for the party's presidential primary, though other Sanders and Ellison backers remain represented.

The Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, has blasted the US of "blatant interference" in Palestinian affairs after Washington said the Gaza-based group should disarm under an emerging Palestinian unity government.

US President Donald Trump's special representative for international negotiations, Jason Greenblatt, said on Thursday that any Palestinian government must, among other things, recognize Israel and disarm Hamas, which has defended Gaza against three bloody Israeli wars over the past decade, PressTV reported.

In response to the comments, senior Hamas official Bassem Naim accused the US government of "blatant interference in Palestinian affairs," stressing that "it is the right of our people to choose its government according to their supreme strategic interests."

Naim said Greenblatt was bowing to pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing administration. "This statement comes under pressure from the extreme right-wing Netanyahu government and is in line with the Netanyahu statement from two days ago," he added. Naim was referring to a Tuesday statement by Netanyahu's cabinet, saying Tel Aviv would not engage in negotiations with a future Palestinian unity government that has the backing of Hamas.

The US' admission Al-Nusra linked militants use chemical weapons in Syria could be an attempt to preempt the investigation into the Khan Shaykhun incident by saying "the US government never denied this," says security analyst Charles Shoebridge.

The US State Department has admitted terrorists are using chemical weapons in Syria when referring to the Al-Nusra group, now known as Tahrir al-Sham, in the latest travel alert for the country. Russia's Defense Ministry says it's the first admission of its sort after years of allegations only the Assad government and ISIS carry out chemical attacks in Syria.

RT: How significant is this admission by the US State Department?

Charles Shoebridge: It is significant on one level that it is an admission as is being said. It is obviously a slip-up. It has been let slip not by as you would imagine the usual route. The usual means it would be a State Department announcement or a Pentagon briefing. They have been briefing over the years that the only people that are using chemical weapons, in their view, in Syria is the Assad government. It is on that assertion, rather than an evidenced assertion that only Assad is capable of producing and using these chemical weapons that they have based allegations that, for example, atrocities such as Ghouta in 2013 and Khan Shaykhun this year, that killed many civilians, could only have been carried out by Assad. It is a very weak evidential basis for a claim in any case, but that now is undermined by this. ... And in addition to that in some cases, for example, ISIS have in the past used chemical weapons such as mustard gas. The real significance would be [to say] what kind of chemical weapon they were talking about. Because if it is something like chlorine, this is very easy to produce. If it is something like sarin nerve agent that we saw used recently in Khan Shaykhun, that prompted the American strikes on Assad's air force, allegedly in retaliation for that attack despite any evidence being missing that Assad was responsible for it. That is far more difficult to produce. That may be that they are talking in a generality here.

A senior congressional aide who has been briefed on the deaths of four U.S. servicemen in Niger says the ambush by militants stemmed in part from a "massive intelligence failure."

The Pentagon has said that 40 to 50 militants ambushed a 12-man U.S. force in Niger on Oct. 4, killing four and wounding two. The U.S. patrol was seen as routine and had been carried out nearly 30 times in the six months before the attack, the Pentagon has reported.

The aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly, said the House and Senate armed services committees have questions about the scope of the U.S. mission in Niger, and whether the Pentagon is properly supporting the troops on the ground there.

There was no U.S. overhead surveillance of the mission, he said, and no American quick-reaction force available to rescue the troops if things went wrong. If it weren't for the arrival of French fighter jets, he said, things could have been much worse for the Americans.

Congress also has many unanswered questions about what happened, he said, including about the specifics of the mission that day and the accounts lawmakers have been given about the timeline of the attack and rescue.

Congressional testimony by President Barack Obama's former ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, about the "unmasking" of U.S. citizens' names she requested in hundreds of foreign intelligence intercepts by the National Security Agency, has raised new questions about how the sensitive information was ordered up, and subsequently handled.

Power spoke to the House Intelligence Committee on Oct. 13 behind closed doors, and what she said is still cloaked in secrecy. But on Oct. 17, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, who also sits on the Intelligence Committee, told Fox News: "Her testimony is they [the unmasking requests] may be under my name, but I did not make those requests." Gowdy said little else about the session.

The sheer volume of such requests submitted to U.S. intelligence authorities in her name was already unusual. But if she did not initiate them, then who did, and why? Was the resulting information delivered to Power, as the normal protocols of handling such constitutionally-protected information require? Was she even aware of the gush of highly sensitive and secret information solicited under her name?

So far, Power has not responded to queries on those issues, which were emailed by Fox News to her Harvard University office on Oct. 19.

China's Belt and Road Initiative - the New Silk Road - will spark the country's development and turn the dream into reality

Now that President Xi Jinping has been duly elevated to the Chinese Communist Party pantheon in the rarified company of Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory, the world will have plenty of time to digest the meaning of "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era."

Xi himself, in his 3½-hour speech at the start of the 19th Party Congress, pointed to a rather simplified "socialist democracy" - extolling its virtues as the only counter-model to Western liberal democracy. Economically, the debate remains open on whether this walks and talks more like "neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics".