RTSun, 23 Jun 2019 18:25 UTC
© REUTERS/CARLOS BARRIA
John Bolton sits behind Donald Trump during a White House event earlier this year.
Donald Trump has confirmed that his top foreign policy adviser wants to embroil the US in multiple international conflicts. But the US president insists he retains final say on whether American missiles are to fly into Iran.
In a sit-down Meet the Press interview broadcast Sunday, host Chuck Todd asked Trump if he was "being pushed into military action against Iran" by his advisers - presumably pointing to the aggressive pronouncements from National Security Advisor John Bolton.
"I have two groups of people. I have doves and I have hawks," replied Trump.
"John Bolton is absolutely a hawk. If it was up to him he'd take on the whole world at one time, okay?"
Trump then brushed away concerns about the influence of Bolton, who also served in the White House during the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.
"That doesn't matter because I want both sides," said Trump.
Comment: Here's what Bolton had to say, while in Israel:
Tehran should not "mistake US prudence and discretion for weakness," Bolton cautioned.
"Our military is rebuilt, new and ready to go," he added, days after Trump called off a planned attack on Iran, a chosen response to Tehran downing a US drone on Thursday.
Citing a planned strike against Iranian targets which US President Donald Trump called off, Bolton emphasized that Trump had only stopped the attack from "going forward at this time" - an indication that the decision may only be temporary.
RTSat, 22 Jun 2019 18:23 UTC
© Reuters / Aaron P. Bernstein
FILE PHOTO: Rep. Ilhan Omar addresses a rally in Washington DC
Rep. Ilhan Omar has argued that US immigrant detention centers fit the definition of concentration camps, eliciting both applause and eye-rolling on social media as debate over immigration continues to polarize the country.
Omar (D-MN) made the remarks after being asked by a reporter if she agreed with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D-NY) assertion that the White House is operating "concentration camps" on the border with Mexico.
"There are camps and people are being concentrated," Omar replied. "This is very simple. I don't even know why this is a controversial thing for her to say."
ormer chief of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, Shabtai Shavit
The former chief of Israel's intelligence agency Mossad, Shabtai Shavit, has said that Israel does not want peace and that, if it had, it would have made peace with the Palestinian Authority (PA) long ago.
Shavit gave his remarks to Israeli daily
Maariv, reiterating that if Israel wanted peace it would have discussed it in economic and infrastructure terms that serve the interests of both parties,
Arab 48 reported yesterday.
Comment: Israel is not even bothering with its mask any more.
RTSun, 23 Jun 2019 18:06 UTC
© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
Weeks after a local politician died in what authorities described as an "execution," the German interior minister said far-right extremists were spreading across the country, and warned that they as dangerous as Islamist groups.
Ultra-right extremists are on equal footing with Islamist radicals and other violent groups, Horst Seehofer told German media. The far-right "have become a real threat for our society," which means that the government should hit back and "do everything to ramp up security."
Seehofer, a longtime ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, was speaking roughly three weeks
after Walter Luebcke, a mid-level government official, died of a gunshot wound at his home in the eastern city of Kassel.
Shortly afterwards, police had arrested a 45-year-old suspect
who had committed numerous offences in past decades, including an assault on a hostel for asylum seekers back in 1993.
Comment: Looks like the 'War on Terror' is well into its second stage where the focus is on splitting apart Western countries through the stoking of the extremes of both the left and right.
© Alex Wong/Getty
On Friday, US President Donald Trump said that he had halted a "retaliatory" military strike against three sites in Iran just 10 minutes before it was set to be carried out, after deliberating that an estimated 150 Iranians would die in the attack.
US President Donald Trump tweeted that reports regarding his decision not to conduct a military strike against Iran were misleading, claiming that he never said he had "called the strike against Iran BACK," but rather "just stopped it from going forward at this time."
The statement comes following the president's
announcement of new "major additional Sanctions on Iran," slated to take effect on Monday.
On Thursday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) downed a US RQ-4 spy drone that Tehran claimed was operating in Iran airspace, a statement dismissed by the US.
Following Thursday's downing of the surveillance drone, a US military strike against a series of Iranian targets, including radar and missile batteries, was reportedly ordered.
Comment: That sure clarifies things! Maybe we should start calling him President Rorschach. Is he saying he didn't give an initial authorization and only stopped the plan from proceeding when he was told about it (i.e., he didn't "change his mind")? Or is he trying to keep up the Bolton-esque pressure by implying that the U.S. can still launch such an attack at any time in the future? Both? Neither?
On Friday, Trump told NBC's Chuck Todd that he
doesn't want war, but if it comes, there will be obliteration:
President Donald Trump said Friday that he doesn't want war with Iran, but if it comes there will be "obliteration like you've never seen before."
"But I'm not looking to do that," the president added in an exclusive interview with NBC's Chuck Todd for "Meet the Press."
Trump said there were no pre-conditions for U.S. talks with Tehran.
"You can't have nuclear weapons," Trump said. "And if you want to talk about it, good. Otherwise, you can live in a shattered economy for a long time to come."
He also did a slightly better job of clarifying the White House version of events for the aborted strike:
Asked if planes were in the air, the president responded, "No, but they would have been pretty soon, and things would have happened to a point where you would not turn back, you could not turn back."
"Nothing was green lighted until the very end because things change," Trump said during the interview with Todd.
...
He told NBC on Friday that a plan was "ready to go, subject my approval."
That would seem to imply that he did NOT initially approve the plan, and it was only when it was brought to him that he decided against it. Whether any of that is true or not is of course another story. For example, see:
Elijah Magnier: Trump and Iran on edge of the abyss
Apparently Trump "
agonized" over the decision:
In an interview with CNN's The Situation Room, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman James Risch has disclosed that Donald Trump is a president who "doesn't want to go to war" and revealed the commander-in-chief's hesitations on strikes against Iran.
"I really watched him agonise over this. It comes down to one man", Risch told reporters.
Risch was not the only person to have observed how hard it was for Trump to make a decision; House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith also said that the president was "really wrestling with it".
While the head of state struggled with his own dilemma, this uncertainty was fuelled by his own national security team, who unanimously believed that Washington should retaliate for the downed US drone by hitting Iranian targets, CNN reported.
"There was complete unanimity amongst the President's advisers and DOD leadership on an appropriate response to Iran's activities. The President made the final decision", an unnamed senior administration official was quoted as saying.
Here's Bernie Sanders's take on the whole situation:
Sanders argued that it was Trump's fault that the situation has flared up to the point that he had to hit the brakes.
"It's like somebody setting fire to a basket full of paper and then putting it out. He helped create the crisis, and then he stopped the attacks."
On this, he is not wrong!
As for obliteration, Iranian armed forces general staff spokesman Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi told Tasnim News Agency
yesterday that "Firing one bullet towards Iran will set fire to the interests of America and its allies" in the Middle East:
"The Islamic Republic has never and will never start any wars," Shekarchi added, stressing that "if the enemy commits the smallest of mistakes, it will face the biggest revolutionary reaction from Iran in Central and West Asia, and it will certainly not survive the battle. If the enemy fires one shot in our direction, we will fire ten back."
And regarding the downing of the drone that started this latest news cycle, there's this to consider:
Brigadier General Amirali Hajizadeh, who heads the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Aerospace Force,
added: "If such aggression is repeated, we will add other US [military] products to complete this collection."
See also:
© Nasser Shiyoukhi/Associated Press
This Oct. 28, 2016, photo shows the Israeli settlement of Bait Hagay through a barbed wire fence that secures the perimeter, south of the West Bank city of Hebron.
A state of de facto annexation already exists on the ground in most of the occupied West Bank.
Almost two-thirds of the Palestinian territory, including most of its most fertile and resource-rich land, is under full Israeli control. About 400,000 Jewish settlers living there enjoy the full rights and privileges of Israeli citizens.
At least 60 pieces of legislation were drafted by right-wing members of the Knesset during the last parliament to move Israel from a state of de facto to de jure annexation, according to a
database by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group.
Yesh Din points out that the very fact that some of these bills have passed as laws constitutes a form of annexation:
"The Israel Knesset [now] regards itself as the legislative authority in the West Bank and the sovereign there."
Caroline Kelly
CNNSat, 22 Jun 2019 17:44 UTC
President Donald Trump says the United States is putting additional sanctions on Iran and that he would support a course of action to "make Iran great again" should Tehran agree to a nuclear weapons ban.
"We're putting additional sanctions on, they're going on slowly and, in some cases, pretty rapidly, but additional sanctions are being put on Iran," the President told reporters on the South Lawn Saturday before departing to Camp David.
"Some of them are already in place," he added, though he didn't elaborate further on the details of the sanctions.
In a
tweet later Saturday, Trump specified, "We are putting major additional Sanctions on Iran on Monday."
Matthew Ehret
The DuranWed, 19 Jun 2019 15:50 UTC
© Associated Press/Cliff Owen
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pitches her Road to the Green New Deal Tour in the final event at Howard University in Washington, Monday, May 13, 2019.
The world is being told to consume a poison pill known as the Green New Deal and President Trump has taken a stand against it.
During a
May 14 speech, President Trump won even more animosity from the left for having attacked the Green New Deal by comparing it to the fraud of Russia-Gate. Speaking to a crowd of energy workers in Hackberry Louisiana, the President said:
"The green New Deal is a hoax like the one I just went through. I'm not sure, it might be an even bigger one, and mine was pretty big". If the green New Deal were made law, Trump warned that every blue collar worker in attendance would be destroyed: "everybody in this room gets fired if the plan is ever implemented."
Was Trump embodying the "pollution-loving capitalist who hates nature" which the left has painted him or is there something more insidious which underlies the Green New Deal which the President hit upon? To answer that we will have to first quickly review what the Green New Deal IS, then where it came from and then finally what its architects have stated they wish to accomplish with its implementation. From there, we can assess if the president's words were hyperbole or truth.
Sarah Zimmerman and Gillian Flaccus
Denver PostThu, 20 Jun 2019 00:00 UTC
© Gillian Flaccus, The Associated Press
A TV reporter interviews self-employed logger Bridger Hasbrouck, of Dallas, Ore., outside the Oregon State House in Salem, Ore., on Thursday, June 20, 2019, the day the Senate was scheduled to take up a bill that would create the nation’s second cap-and-trade program to curb carbon emissions.
Minority Republicans want the cap-and-trade proposal, which is aimed at dramatically lowering the state's greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, to be sent to voters instead of being instituted by lawmakers - but negotiations with Democrats collapsed, leading to the walkout, Kate Gillem, a spokeswoman for Senate Republicans said Thursday.
Brown had warned a day earlier that she was in "close communication with Oregon State Police" and "prepared to use all resources and tools available."
Nebojsa Malic
RTSun, 23 Jun 2019 16:48 UTC
© REUTERS/Yuri Gripas; Mike Blake
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY); Immigrant detention center in Tornillo, Texas
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez keeps insisting that detention centers for illegal immigrants are somehow 'concentration camps.' Arguably, the only thing worse than wanting open borders is comparing everything to Hitler.
The freshman Democrat from the Bronx has always had a penchant for hyperbole - remember the world "ending in 12 years"? - but she chose to take it to the next level this week, arguing that the US has established "concentration camps" for immigrants where they are "being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying."
"This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis," she said.
Comment: Here's what Bolton had to say, while in Israel: