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A year ago, Sessions resigned as attorney general after months of tension with President Trump who complained that the former Alabama senator was not sufficiently loyal.
November 7, 2019Read More
A night-time earthquake in northwestern Iran on Friday killed five people and injured 120, according to early reports on state television. The 5.9-magnitude quake struck about 120 kilometres (75 miles) southeast of the city of Tabriz, in East Azerbaij…
November 7, 2019Read More
John Hoskins deleted the video, in which he could also be heard saying, “White power.”
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Three Saudi nationals were charged in Southern California with violating federal export laws by buying $100,000 worth of gun parts in the U.S. while on student visas and smuggling them to Saudi Arabia, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. An indictment…
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The attorney general has not jumped in to publicly defend the president against the Democratic inquiry as he did with the Mueller investigation.
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The former attorney general’s decision will most likely put him on a collision course with President Trump, who still harbors resentment toward him.
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George P. Kent testified that he saw President Trump’s demands for Ukraine to “initiate politically motivated prosecutions” as corrupt.
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The testimony seemed to bolster the prosecution’s contention that Roger Stone, an ex-Trump campaign aide, deliberately lied to congressional investigators.
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WASHINGTON — The top American diplomat on the ground in northern Syria has criticized the Trump administration for not trying harder to prevent Turkey’s military offensive there last month — and said Turkish-backed militia fighters committed “war crimes and ethnic cleansing.”In a searing internal memo, the diplomat, William V. Roebuck, raised the question of whether tougher U.S. diplomacy, blunter threats of economic sanctions and increased military patrols could have deterred Turkey from attacking. Similar measures had dissuaded Turkish military action before.”It’s a tough call, and the answer is probably not,” Roebuck wrote in the 3,200-word memo. “But we won’t know because we didn’t try.” He did note several reasons the Turks might not have been deterred: the small U.S. military presence at two border outposts, Turkey’s decadeslong standing as a NATO ally and its formidable army massing at the Syrian frontier.In an unusually blunt critique, Roebuck said the political and military turmoil that upended the administration’s policy in northern Syria — and left Syrian Kurdish allies abandoned and opened the door for a possible Islamic State resurgence — was a “sideshow” to the bloody, yearslong upheaval in Syria overall.But, he said, “it is a catastrophic sideshow and it is to a significant degree of our making.”Roebuck, a respected 27-year diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain, sent the unclassified memo Oct. 31 to his boss, James F. Jeffrey, the State Department’s special envoy on Syria policy, and to about four dozen State Department, White House and Pentagon officials who work on Syria issues. Roebuck is Jeffrey’s deputy.The New York Times obtained a copy of the memo from someone who said it was important to make Roebuck’s assessment public. Jeffrey and Roebuck declined to comment Thursday.Morgan Ortagus, the State Department spokeswoman, also declined to comment on Roebuck’s memo. “That said, we have made clear that we strongly disagreed with President Erdogan’s decision to enter Syria and that we did everything short of a military confrontation to prevent it,” Ortagus said in a statement Thursday.”No one can deny that the situation in Syria is very complicated, and there are no easy solutions and no easy choices,” she said. “There will always be a variety of opinions on how this complex situation should be managed. This administration’s job is to do what is best for U.S. national security and the American people. That is what we have done in Syria and what we will continue to do.”Roebuck’s memo appears to be the first formal expression of dissent on Syria from a Trump administration official to be made public. Pentagon officials voiced alarm by the sudden shift in Syria policy, but top officials never made their views public.Roebuck’s memo also comes as the president already has expressed disdain for some State Department officials because of their testimony in Congress during the impeachment inquiry over Ukraine policy.For nearly two years, Roebuck has worked on the ground in northern Syria with Syrian Kurdish and Arab military and civilian officials who make up what is called the Syrian Democratic Forces. Roebuck has been an important interlocutor with Mazlum Kobani, the Syrian Kurdish military commander whose fighters have worked closely with American Special Operations forces to combat the Islamic State.Roebuck focused his harshest criticism on Turkey’s military offensive and specifically on Turkey’s deployment of Syrian Arab fighters in its vanguard force. Roebuck added his voice to accusations by human rights groups that these fighters have killed Kurdish prisoners, including one of them lying on the ground with his hands bound behind his back, and committed other atrocities as they emptied major Kurdish population centers in northern Syria.”Turkey’s military operation in northern Syria, spearheaded by armed Islamist groups on its payroll, represents an intentioned-laced effort at ethnic cleansing,” Roebuck wrote, calling the abuses “what can only be described as war crimes and ethnic cleansing.””One day when the diplomatic history is written,” he said, “people will wonder what happened here and why officials didn’t do more to stop it or at least speak out more forcefully to blame Turkey for its behavior: an unprovoked military operation that has killed some 200 civilians, left well over 100,000 people (and counting) newly displaced and homeless because of its military operation.”Roebuck continued, “To protect our interests, we need to speak out more forcefully, publicly and privately, to reduce the blame placed on the U.S. and to highlight the Turkish responsibilities for civilian well-being.”By acting now, Roebuck wrote, “we have a chance to minimize the damage for us and hopefully correct some of the impact of Turkey’s current policies, as we seek to implement the president’s guidance for our presence in northeastern Syria.”A senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic matters, told reporters Wednesday that the United States had immediately raised the reports of atrocities with the Turkish government. Kurdish forces in Syria have made allegations of atrocities, which the Turkish government has denied.But the senior official acknowledged that the Turkish-based Syrian force included ill-disciplined Arab fighters — the Arabs and Kurds have a history of sometimes bloody rivalry in the region — and that some embrace radical Islamic ideology.Roebuck’s memo comes at a tumultuous time on the ground in northern Syria and at a delicate moment for the administration’s Syria policy. Jeffrey is scheduled to travel to Ankara and Istanbul for meetings Friday and Saturday with senior Turkish officials and members of the Syrian opposition to the government of President Bashar Assad of Syria.The memo came two weeks after Vice President Mike Pence agreed to a deal with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey that accepted a Turkish military presence in a broad part of northern Syria in exchange for the promise of a five-day cease-fire, completing an abrupt reversal of U.S. policy in the Syrian conflict. Pence hailed the agreement as a diplomatic victory for President Donald Trump, calling it a “solution we believe will save lives.”The memo also came about a week after President Vladimir Putin of Russia met with Erdogan in Sochi, Russia, to discuss how their countries and other regional players would divide control of Syria, devastated by eight years of civil war.The negotiations cemented Putin’s strategic advantage: Russian and Turkish troops have taken joint control over a vast swath of formerly Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria. The change strengthened the rapid expansion of Russian influence in Syria at the expense of the United States and its Kurdish former allies.Under criticism for abandoning the Syrian Kurds and ceding territory they once held to Syria, Turkey and Russia, Trump changed course yet again last month and approved the deployment of several hundred American troops to guard oil fields in eastern Syria against the Islamic State, even as hundreds of other American forces were withdrawing under Trump’s initial order.Roebuck said the president’s decision salvaged an important part of the mission against the Islamic State and preserved some space on the ground for the Syrian Kurds to operate after they were forced to pull back from the border.But the United States will pay a price, he wrote.”The decision to stay is a good one, even if the ‘protection of the oil’ rationale plays into toxic Middle Eastern conspiracy theories that will need to be lanced with careful, sustained messaging reinforcing the truism that Syria’s oil is Syria’s and for the benefit of the Syrian people,” Roebuck wrote.Roebuck is the second senior American official in the past week who has questioned whether the United States pressed hard enough with measures like joint American-Turkish ground and air patrols along the border, to avert a Turkish offensive into northern Syria. In an interview with Defense One, the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy official, Michael P. Mulroy, said, “We would have prevented the need for an incursion.”The White House and senior administration officials have said that Turkey’s offensive was inevitable and that Trump’s decision to pull about two dozen Special Forces off the border prevented them from being caught in the crossfire between Turkish forces and the Kurds.Critics have said that Trump, in an Oct. 6 phone call with Erdogan, paved the way for the Turkish invasion by not pushing back hard enough on the Turkish leader’s threat of military action.As critical as he was about Turkey, Roebuck praised the Syrian Democratic Forces as a stout and reliable partner that had suffered massive casualties. He said the group had helped defeat the Islamic State and lead American commandos to the hideout of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State leader, and had provided reasonably sound local governance as well as a relatively stable security environment.It was not a perfect situation, Roebuck said, but it was working and allowed United States forces to operate there in low numbers and safely at very low cost. “It wasn’t a bad start,” he said.At the end of his memo, Roebuck offered some diplomatic options, including maintaining relations with Turkey and making clear to Turkish leaders they will bear the brunt of the costs for the military operation.He also advocated using what time the United States has left in northeastern Syria to help stabilize the situation for the Kurdish population. Kobani, the Syrian Kurdish commander, said in a Twitter message Wednesday that the Syrian Democratic Forces were resuming counterterrorism, or CT, operations as well as helping secure the oil fields, which provide the Kurds badly needed revenue.”President Trump has been clear and consistent about wanting to get our forces out of Syria,” Roebuck concluded. “The residual presence to protect the oil and fight ISIS buys us some time,” he said, using an alternate name for the Islamic State.But he cautioned: “Our diplomacy will also need to recognize we — with our local partners — have lost significant leverage and inherited a shrunken, less stable platform to support both our CT efforts and the mission of finding a comprehensive political solution for Syria.”This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
November 7, 2019Read More
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Thursday that the International Atomic Energy Agency had validated his long-standing allegation that Iran has been maintaining a secret nuclear site in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty — a claim that the agency did not publicly confirm.Netanyahu’s assertion came as the Vienna-based agency held a closed-door meeting Thursday about questions concerning Iran’s “safeguard declarations” but did not specify more precisely what had been discussed.The Israeli leader spoke hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, while visiting Europe, accused Iran of “nuclear extortion” by having accelerated its ability to develop a nuclear weapon in a shortened time frame.The statements from Netanyahu and Pompeo, both avowed critics of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, appeared aimed at escalating the pressure on the Europeans to abandon the accord instead of scrambling to salvage it, as they have been doing since President Donald Trump formally withdrew last year and reimposed tough sanctions on Iran.”The IAEA now confirms that Iran lied. And that Iran continues to lie,” Netanyahu said. “Europe must stop stalling,” he added. “It must act against Iranian aggression now.”Netanyahu was referring to a site in Turquzabad, south of Tehran, where, in a speech at the United Nations in September 2018, he charged that Iran had been storing “massive amounts” of nuclear equipment and material. He said then that Israel had shared that information with the agency’s inspectors.Providing further details, Israeli intelligence and national security officials contended late Thursday that the atomic agency’s inspections earlier this year, including analysis of samples taken from the site, had shown that Iran stored nuclear material at the Turquzabad site that had been converted from raw uranium but not yet enriched. The Israelis also said the material’s characteristics and age did not correspond with any nuclear facility previously disclosed by Iran.In other words, the Israeli officials said, the inspection pointed to the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear conversion facility, which if confirmed amounted to a fresh violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s safeguards agreement.The Israeli officials briefed international journalists on the condition that their names, titles and agencies not be published.Echoing the prime minister, the Israeli officials expressed hope that what they described as the new finding would help persuade the international community — and in particular Germany, France and Britain, along with the broader European Union — to abandon hopes of reviving the Iran nuclear deal, and join with the United States in its “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against Iran.Earlier Thursday, Pompeo said Iran was moving toward being able to develop a nuclear weapon in a short time frame, asserting that Iran’s behavior should inspire “all nations” to increase pressure.But he made no threat of military action. Nor did the Israelis, though they considered striking Iran’s facilities several times before the 2015 nuclear accord had been reached under the Obama administration. In response to Trump’s abandonment of the accord, the Iranians began edging out of its restrictions earlier this year, saying they would not remain in compliance while the United States was violating its terms by reimposing sanctions.Iran said this week that it had increased its supply of advanced centrifuges and reactivated a much larger number of old centrifuges that had been idle, accelerating its ability to produce enough nuclear material to make a bomb. The addition of centrifuges is among several steps Iran has taken in recent months to ratchet up pressure on the West in response to Trump’s decision to exit the 2015 nuclear agreement and reimpose sanctions.In a statement released by the State Department, Pompeo said Iran’s actions amounted to “nuclear extortion” and were designed to intimidate the world into accepting its sponsorship of violent insurgencies and terrorism. Pompeo was in Germany for meetings with government officials.The moves raise “concerns that Iran is positioning itself to have the option of a rapid nuclear breakout,” Pompeo said, meaning a rush to develop a nuclear bomb. He added: “The United States will never allow this to happen.”There was no immediate response from the government of Iran, which has denied having any ambition to be a nuclear power. Experts say that Iran has not yet come near the level of uranium enrichment needed for a weapon, but some Western analysts say that if it attempted a “breakout,” Iran could develop a bomb in less than a year.The International Atomic Energy Agency’s closed-door meeting Thursday to discuss Iran followed a recent move by Iranian authorities to prevent an agency inspector from entering its main nuclear facility at Natanz. She was briefly detained.After the meeting, an agency spokesman, Fredrik Dahl, said that top officials had discussed “questions related to the completeness of Iran’s safeguards declarations,” the commitments that nations make to the agency to ensure that nuclear material intended for peaceful uses is not diverted to weapons.The agency did not announce any actions.Under the nuclear agreement signed in 2015, Iran agreed to limit the size and scope of its uranium enrichment, in return for relief from damaging economic sanctions imposed by the United States.Trump withdrew the United States from that pact last year and reimposed sanctions. Administration officials say the measures are intended to pressure Tehran to agree to stricter limits and cut off its support for militia groups around the Middle East.Iran has responded with its own pressure campaign, deliberately going beyond the limits imposed by the 2015 deal as it pushes for relief from the sanctions.Pompeo landed in Germany on Wednesday for a two-day trip commemorating 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and, with it, the Iron Curtain that once divided Europe into the communist east and democratic west.As a U.S. soldier, Pompeo was posted in 1986 to a base in Bindlach, Bavaria, where he was focused on securing the borders with what was then East Germany and Czechoslovakia. That base closed in the 1990s when the United States drew down its troop strength after German reunification.He met Thursday with German and American veterans who served at the same time. He also toured a village known as Little Berlin, which once straddled the border.Later Thursday, he traveled to Leipzig to meet with Heiko Maas, the German foreign minister, and tour the St. Nicholas church, where East Germans held mass demonstrations calling for democratic reforms in 1989.American-German relations have been strained under Trump, who has frequently criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel and her policies on immigration, climate change and Iran. On Friday, Pompeo is to meet in Berlin with Merkel and her ministers of defense and finance.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
November 7, 2019Read More
Democrats aim to repeal an expired deadline on the measure to ensure equality of the sexes, clearing the way for Virginia — where they just won legislative control — to be the last state to ratify it.
November 7, 2019Read More
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