Showing posts with label ISIS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ISIS. Show all posts
Saturday, January 18, 2020
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
FOCUS: Juan Cole | Iraqi Parliament Resolves to Kick Out US Troops, and Trump Threatens Mother of All Sanctions
06 January 20
FOCUS: Juan Cole | Iraqi Parliament Resolves to Kick Out US Troops, and Trump Threatens Mother of All Sanctions
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "By a simple majority, the Iraqi parliament in an extraordinary session on Sunday passed a resolution requiring the executive to take steps to preserve Iraqi sovereignty by expelling US troops from the country."
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "By a simple majority, the Iraqi parliament in an extraordinary session on Sunday passed a resolution requiring the executive to take steps to preserve Iraqi sovereignty by expelling US troops from the country."
The Sunni and Kurdish parties made themselves scarce, and there was only just barely a quorum. All the major Shiite parties voted for the resolution. Shiites make up 60 percent of Iraq’s population and they now dominate the upper echelons of the government and military.
Some members of parliament chanted “Death to America” during the session, an unprecedented event. That chant is associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iraq’s parliament is relatively weak, and implementation of the resolution is up to the prime minister and his cabinet. The signs are however, that Abdulmahdi and his successor (a new prime minister is in the course of being installed) will in fact press for the US military to leave the country.
Axios reports that US State Department initially attempted to stop the parliamentary vote from taking place (presumably by pressuring its Iraqi political allies). That press failed miserably, given the angry mood of the country after the US attack on an Iraqi military officer. After the resolution passed, State pleaded with the Iraqi parliament to rethink its decision, but somehow I don’t think that is going to happen.
Trump went ballistic on hearing the news and threatened to impose “sanctions like you’ve never seen” on Iraq if it does kick out US troops. He also demanded repayment for the costs of constructing the al-Balad Air Force Base. The US invaded Iraq illegally in 2003 and essentially stole its oil income for years to pay for its military occupation of the country.
It is highly unlikely that the world would cooperate with Trump sanctions on Iraq over this issue, and unlikely that the 4.6 million barrels a day produced by Iraq could or would be made up, so that any Trump sanctions would send petroleum prices skyrocketing. This development would be good for the health of the planet, since people would likely buy electric cars in that case.
Some Iraqi militia leaders suggested that US military training could be replaced with Russian or Chinese such help.
The Abdulmahdi government submitted a formal complaint to the UN Security Council over the US action. While the US will deploy its veto in the face of any condemnation, it will be an embarrassment to be condemned by the other members, if they take that step.
The US and other coalition forces in Iraq have announced the end of their training activities and of any active fighting of ISIL (ISIS), in favor of just protecting themselves. That is, the 5,200 US troops in Iraq are now not so much troops as hostages.
Caretaker Prime Minister Adil Abdulmahdi addressed the Parliament before the vote. He lashed the Trump administration for its assassination by hellfire missile last Friday morning of Iranian Qods Brigade commander Qasem Soleimani, along with the deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (who reported to Abdulmahdi and was a part of the Iraqi armed forces), and several others.
As Abdulmahdi told the story, Saudi Arabia had contacted him, seeking his mediation to cool down Riyadh’s conflict with Iran. Abdulmahdi said he sent the Saudi message to Tehran, and then invited Soleimani to come give the reply. (Soleimani came openly to Iraq on a commercial airliner and went through passport control with his diplomatic passport. There was nothing covert about the visit). Soleimani was on his way to consultations with his host, Abdulmahdi, when Trump rubbed him out.
Abdulmahdi’s account makes nonsense of everything Trump and Pompeo and Esper are saying about the circumstances of the murder of Soleimani. He wasn’t coming to kill Americans. That entire meme never made any sense. There were hardly any Americans in Iraq save for the 5,200 military personnel, and it is not clear how Soleimani could have killed any of them without starting a war.
Abdulmahdi said that the United States had been authorized by Parliament to send its troops to Iraq for only two purposes, to help in the fight against the terrorist organization ISIL (ISIS), and to help train the Iraqi military. No other activity on Iraqi soil, he said, was authorized, and the United States had violated the terms of this authorization with the assassination.
Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called on parliament to rescind its authorization for the presence of US troops and to close the US embassy. Al-Sadr’s Sairun Party has 54 seats in parliament. He said merely passing a resolution in parliament is far too weak a response to what Washington had done, and urged the formation of an international militia to defend Iraqi sovereignty.
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
Colin Kaepernick's Contested Workout and the Power Plays of the NFL
20 November 19
Why are these people the ones standing up for Reader Supported News? Can someone please explain that to me?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
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PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
19 November 19
Colin Kaepernick's Contested Workout and the Power Plays of the NFL
Louisa Thomas, The New Yorker
Thomas writes: "For the past three years, Colin Kaepernick's absence from the N.F.L. has made him a nearly constant presence in the broader culture. Kaepernick, who, six years ago, led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl, began kneeling during pregame performances of the national anthem in 2016, in protest of racial injustice."
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(photo: Jack Taylor/Getty Images)
Louisa Thomas, The New Yorker
Thomas writes: "For the past three years, Colin Kaepernick's absence from the N.F.L. has made him a nearly constant presence in the broader culture. Kaepernick, who, six years ago, led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl, began kneeling during pregame performances of the national anthem in 2016, in protest of racial injustice."
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(photo: Jack Taylor/Getty Images)
Sweden Drops Julian Assange Rape Investigation
Johan Ahlander and Simon Johnson, Reuters
Excerpt: "A Swedish prosecutor dropped a rape investigation against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, ending the near decade-old case that had sent the anti-secrecy campaigner into hiding in London's Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition."
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Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters at their base on a hill overlooking Makhmour, a town the Kurds recently recaptured from the Islamic State, Nov. 27, 2014. (photo: Moises Saman/Magnum Photos)
Johan Ahlander and Simon Johnson, Reuters
Excerpt: "A Swedish prosecutor dropped a rape investigation against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, ending the near decade-old case that had sent the anti-secrecy campaigner into hiding in London's Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition."
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Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters at their base on a hill overlooking Makhmour, a town the Kurds recently recaptured from the Islamic State, Nov. 27, 2014. (photo: Moises Saman/Magnum Photos)
Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept
Hussain writes: "In the summer of 2014, with a campaign of shocking violence, the Islamic State established itself as the most fearsome terrorist organization in the Middle East."
EXCERPTS:
As the international community groped for a response, ISIS fighters reached the borders of Iraqi Kurdistan, within striking distance of the glass high-rises of the bustling Kurdish capital, Erbil. It was there, from a dusty, remote Kurdish military base nicknamed “Black Tiger” outside the town of Makhmour, that ISIS was finally confronted by Kurdish Peshmerga in a battle that began to turn the tide against the extremists.
“Makhmour was the first place that we took territory from ISIS,” Staff Col. Srud Salih, the Kurdish commander of the Black Tiger base, told The Intercept this summer. “The victories of the Peshmerga began from here.”
The battle of Makhmour represented another important milestone in the war against ISIS: It was the place where two foreign military interventions began. One was directed by the U.S.-led international coalition, which provided air support and later, heavy weaponry. The other, in the form of ammunition, training, and intelligence support, came from Iran. Over the course of a few short days that August, coalition airstrikes hit ISIS positions in the parched desert hills near Makhmour, leveling the playing field between the heavily armed extremists and the Kurdish fighters.
Since the election of Donald Trump, the United States and Iran have grown increasingly fractious, exchanging provocations that have fueled fears of war. But in the early days of the fight against ISIS under President Barack Obama, these longtime rivals were focused on a common goal: halting the Islamic State’s advance and destroying its so-called caliphate.
While the broad outlines of the conventional war against ISIS have long been known, the details of Iran’s covert war against the militants have not. A portrait of this secret war emerges from a trove of Iranian intelligence reports provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source. The reports come from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, the country’s primary intelligence agency.
A Secret Battle
Alongside the U.S.-led military campaign against the Islamic State, Iran’s MOIS was waging a parallel, clandestine campaign, spying on ISIS gatherings, providing covert aid to its enemies, and working to break its alliances with other insurgent factions, according to the leaked documents.
In many ways, the Iranian intelligence campaign against ISIS mirrored the U.S. strategy for dealing with Iraq. In addition to an overt military confrontation with the group and support for Shia militias and the Iraqi Army, the Iranians also worked to cultivate Sunni and Kurdish partners whom they perceived as moderate — or at least willing to work with them. From the outset, the MOIS kept its eyes on the day the war would end, when local partners from all sides would be needed to patch together a functional Iraq.
“The Americans’ insistence on not cooperating with Iran in the war against ISIS and not participating in the meetings of the 10 countries of the region — the Arabs and Turkey — as well as the Western and Arab countries’ extreme positions on the presence and role of Iran in Iraq has had a negative influence,” one secret report noted.
Although the Iranian contribution was ultimately more modest than that of the Americans, Iran was nimbler in backing the Iraqi Kurds. “Iran’s security institutions are often able to make decisions and act more quickly in an emergency than their U.S. counterparts, who have to navigate a web of bureaucracy,” a Kurdish analyst who was present during the battle, and asked for anonymity to discuss issues related to Iran, told The Intercept. “When ISIS attacked Makhmour, the Iranian help came first. It took a day or two after the battle began for the Americans to join in with air support.”
'It is always a bit troubling in the current environment when websites don't really indicate what they're all about,' said Matt Gertz. (photo: Étienne Laurent/EPA)
Adam Gabbatt, Guardian UK
Gabbatt writes: "In March this year, the small Illinois town of Hinsdale, in the western Chicago suburbs, was facing a crisis."
“The depths of what they went to were pretty egregious,” said Joan Brandeis, who was part of the Vote Yes Campaign.
“This was purposely done to mislead people into thinking that was a publication from the district.”
The unusual effort in Hinsdale – which ultimately failed when Hinsdale voted yes to the $140m funding, was one of the more strident examples of what appears to be a sweeping effort to populate the country with local, rightwing-skewed news sites.
Locality Labs operates scores of sites across Illinois, Michigan, Maryland and Wisconsin, often sharing content. In Michigan alone, the Lansing State Journal reported, almost 40 sites opened in one fell swoop this fall.
“It is always a bit troubling in the current environment when websites don’t really indicate what they’re all about, and sort of hide who is behind them, and I think that’s clearly the case here,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the not-for-profit press watchdog Media Matters.
“In the fractured media environment that we’re operating in now, if you’re just scrolling through your Facebook feed or your Twitter feed and you see an article, you click on it and you might take in the information from there without really ever wondering what the source actually is.”
The CEO of Locality Labs is Brian Timpone, an ex-journalist with a track record of operating dubious news organizations. Timpone’s predecessor to Locality Labs was a company called Journatic, which saw a licensing contract with the Chicago Tribune torn up after it published plagiarized articles and made up quotes and fake names for its writers. Locality Labs did not respond to a request for comment.
Locality Labs’ sites are almost identical in layout. The Great Lakes Wire is similar to the Ann Arbor Times, which bears a striking resemblance to the DuPage Policy Journal and the Prairie State Wire.
Each has the look of a local news organization, with information on gas prices and local businesses.
Some of the sites – in a slightly difficult to find “About” section – say they are a product of Local Government Information Services, and state that they are funded by advocacy groups who believe in “limited government”.
But others – the Prairie State Wire, for example – either do not, or they claim to be an “objective” product of a Locality Labs-linked company called Metrics Media, despite retaining their rightwing tone.
What the sites all have in common is praising Republican politicians, and denigrating Democratic ones.
Last week Illinois sites – including the West Cook News, Grundy Reporter, South Central Reporter and Illinois Valley Times – each ran a story about a thinktank criticizing JB Pritzker, the state’s Democratic governor.
The stories were all written by Glenn Minnis – whose byline was also listed in the Hinsdale School News. None of the articles mentioned that the thinktank in question was a rightwing, anti-tax lobbying organization.
Other articles written by Minnis include a slew of stories in support of Jeanne Ives, a Republican candidate for Congress.
Ives’ Federal Election Commission filings show that she paid $2,000 to a company called Franklin Archer this year. The CEO of Franklin Archer is Michael Timpone, who a former Franklin Archer employee confirmed to the Guardian is the brother of Locality Labs’ Timpone.
Franklin Archer says it specializes in public relations and social promotion, and owns 200 local news sites, according to its website, which are operated by Locality Labs.
‘There’s this understanding that local news is in shambles now’
Ives made the $2,000 payment to Franklin Archer in August, around the same time Locality Labs-operated news sites began writing articles praising her and her campaign. Franklin Archer did not respond to a request for comment.
Opinion as news is nothing new. But the appearance of the rightwing-skewed Locality Labs sites, presented as merely local news, has been aided by the demise of the local news industry in America as real local newspapers have shut down in droves, sometimes leading to “news deserts”.
About 1,800 newspapers closed between 2004 and 2018, while a University of North Carolina study last year found that 1,300 US communities have completely lost news coverage.
“There’s this understanding that local news is in shambles right now, that newspapers across the country are failing and that there is a lack of local coverage,” Gertz said. Despite that crisis, Gertz said people still tend to have more faith in local news than in national outlets.
“And so there’s an idea here that you can move in and take advantage of that, of both the lack of local news options and the fact that people are inclined to trust local news by creating these hyperlocal news sites and provide no little bit of conservative propaganda.”
The trend has already been documented in television news. The conservative-friendly media firm Sinclair Media Group has spent the last few years buying up local television stations – it currently owns almost 200 across the country.
A 2018 study into Sinclair, by the Emory University political scientists Gregory Martin and Josh McCrain, found that once Sinclair absorbed a new channel, the station’s output quickly changed tone. The newly acquired stations reduce coverage of local news, Martin and McCrain wrote, “and move the ideological tone of coverage in a conservative direction”.
“Something like Sinclair is more concerning simply because they have the built-in audience. They’re moving into metropolises by buying local stations,” Gertz said.
“There’s a clear model for actually having political influence.”
The model for Locality Labs is less tried and tested. But with the decline of local news unlikely to be reversed anytime soon, it seems the opportunities for further murkiness will only get larger.
The leader of a U.N. study on children's rights says of the U.S. policy of separating migrant children from their families, 'I would call it inhuman treatment for both the parents and the children.' Here, children are seen near a tent at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Homestead, Florida, earlier this year. (photo: Wilfredo Lee/AP)
UN Expert Faults US for 'Inhuman Treatment' and High Incarceration of Children
Bill Chappell, NPR
Chappell writes: "The U.S. has the highest child incarceration rate in the world, according to an expert who authored a new U.N. study on the treatment of children. The expert also says the Trump administration's family separation policy is 'absolutely prohibited' by the Convention on the Rights of the Child."
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Bill Chappell, NPR
Chappell writes: "The U.S. has the highest child incarceration rate in the world, according to an expert who authored a new U.N. study on the treatment of children. The expert also says the Trump administration's family separation policy is 'absolutely prohibited' by the Convention on the Rights of the Child."
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Protesters marching during protests on 9 October. (photo: Todos Noticias/Wikimedia)
The Long Coup in Ecuador
Fabio Resmini, NACLA
Resmini writes: "Ecuador is facing some of its darkest days. The country is trapped with a highly unpopular president who has betrayed his mandate and proved his willingness to shed blood to implement a conservative economic agenda."
Fabio Resmini, NACLA
Resmini writes: "Ecuador is facing some of its darkest days. The country is trapped with a highly unpopular president who has betrayed his mandate and proved his willingness to shed blood to implement a conservative economic agenda."
EXCERPTS:
Repression, Militarization of Politics, and Delegitimization of Protests
For 12 days, Ecuador witnessed extensive repression by state forces. Official numbers of the Ombudsman Office talk about eleven dead, 1,340 wounded, and 1,192 arrested—96 of which were below 15 years of age. Eighty percent of all detentions was said to be arbitrary and illegal. Data on missing persons was not made available.
Brutality from the police and the armed forces was systematic and widespread. Repression targeted hospitals, universities, and shelters, where children and elders were resting at night. Armed forces used live ammo, grenades, and expired tear gas bombs. Citizens have denounced torture, illegal detentions, and trials in military quarters. The night of October 11, explosions around the El Arbolito park, where the vast majority of protesters gathered, were heard all over northern Quito. The next day, the exasperated population took to the streets in all neighborhoods and the government called a curfew at 3 PM. When the protesters defied the measure, the level of state violence increased. Protesters were shot at and some reported the presence of snipers. All of this while the government insisted that it was open to dialogue.
This, however, is a different story. While in the past presidents were removed largely as a result of oligarchic infighting with limited redistributive consequences, this time the oligarchy is united behind Moreno. The restoration of the old economic model benefitting the few, largely dismantled by Correa during his presidency, is now at stake.
In addition, Moreno has found an important ally in the U.S. government. The permission to use the Galapagos Islands as a U.S. military airfield, the finishing blow to UNASUR, the delivery of Julian Assange, and the agreement with the IMF were all appreciated in Washington. Most importantly, the United States knows that the return of Correa would mean losing their influence in the country.
For these reasons, Correa is still considered a threat. He is yet to be defeated at the polls and received a high level of endorsement in the last provincial and municipal elections. That is why the constitutional solution to the crisis—the so-called muerte cruzada with anticipated elections—was always available but never pursued.
Moreno is now doing the dirty work with tax waivers and reckless economic reforms accompanied by extensive repression and annihilation of correista forces. He is unlikely to run again and therefore has no political capital to safeguard. Moreno is disposable, but in the middle of this process of reform and repression, absolutely irreplaceable. His fall would mean going to elections while the extinction of correismo is far from over.
Bison. (photo: Justin A. Morris/Getty Images)
What America Lost When It Lost the Bison
Ed Yong, The Atlantic
Yong writes: "Chris Geremia was surprised. After considerable effort, and substantial risk to life and limb, he and his colleagues finally had the results from their decade-long experiment, and those results were both clear and unexpected: Bison do not surf."
Ed Yong, The Atlantic
Yong writes: "Chris Geremia was surprised. After considerable effort, and substantial risk to life and limb, he and his colleagues finally had the results from their decade-long experiment, and those results were both clear and unexpected: Bison do not surf."
EXCERPT:
Their actions change the landscape. In areas where bison graze, plants contain 50 to 90 percent more nutrients by the end of the summer. This not only provides extra nourishment for other grazers, but prolongs the growing season of the plants themselves. And by trimming back the plant cover in one year, bison allow more sunlight to fall on the next year’s greenery, accelerating its growth. When Geremia’s team looked at parts of Yellowstone where bison numbers have fluctuated, it found that the green wave grew in intensity and crested over a longer period as the herds grew larger. The bison engineer and intensify the spring. And astonishingly, they had a stronger influence on the timing of plant growth than weather and other environmental variables. They’re equivalent to a force of nature.
That force would have been even more powerful in centuries past, when 30 to 60 million bison roamed North America. “They would have been everywhere,” says Matthew Kauffman of the University of Wyoming, who led the new study. “The productivity of those grasslands would have been radically different because there are that many bison, trampling, eating, defecating, and urinating.” These herds must have changed the path of the green wave, and inadvertently governed the fates of other animals that surf it, from deer to elk to bighorn sheep. What happened, then, when European colonizers virtually eliminated the bison? By 1900, fewer than 600 remained.
When we lose animals, we also lose everything those animals do. When insects decline, plants go unpollinated and predators go unfed. When birds disappear, pests go uncontrolled and seeds stay put. When herds of bighorn sheep and moose are shot, their generational knowledge disappears and migration routes go extinct, as Kauffman showed last year. And when bison are exterminated, springtime changes in ways that we still don’t fully understand.
They’ve rebounded somewhat, but still occupy less than 1 percent of their former range. There are probably about 500,000 bison around today, but the majority are part of privately owned herds. Only 20,000 or so live on public lands, and only 8,000 of those can move freely. And of those unfenced bison, about 5,500 live in Yellowstone. “This large population can change how spring happens,” Geremia says, “but there aren’t a lot of other places today where bison have the landscape that they do here.” It’s not enough to preserve bison numbers without also conserving bison behavior. If the animals exist, but aren’t allowed to migrate, there will still be a bison-shaped hole in the world.
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