MoA—Turkey has UAVs, signal intelligence and military outposts throughout those regions. It has lots of intelligence assets on the ground. None of them knew about those ISIS leaders living in those areas? All three U.S. operations were launched from Iraq or from Kurdish controlled areas in northeast Syria even though the flight time from the U.S. base in Incirlik, Turkey, would have been much shorter. It seems that the U.S. did not trust its NATO ally to prematurely learn of such missions. After being shamed over its willful negligence towards ISIS assets in areas it controls Turkey took some diversionary steps.
SYRIA & LEBANON
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US Needs To Occupy Syria Because Of Kurds Or Iran Or Chemical Weapons Or Oil Or Whatever
28 minutes readCAITLIN JOHNSTONE—These wildly different reasons the public has been given for America’s need to forcibly insert a military presence into Syria all have only one thing in common, and that’s America forcibly inserting a military presence into Syria. This is because they are not reasons, but excuses. The US forcibly inserted a military presence into Syria with the full intention of keeping it there, and then started diddling a bunch of completely different narratives in order to justify the thing it already wanted to do long before any of those excuses arose.
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ALASTAIR CROOKE—There have been protests (mostly pointing up economic stress) across the region for some months: from Egypt to Iraq. But the Lebanese demonstrations have caught the global attention. And there is no doubting that the Lebanese protests represent a major phenomenon. We may ask whether they are essentially a local manifestation, reflecting only the well-attested Lebanese problems of corruption, widening disparities in wealth, nepotism and failing state structures, or do they signal something much deeper? Lebanon, historically, has been viewed as ‘the bell weather’ – pointing up the general health of this region.
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As for Trump, you might ask me a question and I give you an answer that might sound strange. I say that he is the best American President, not because his policies are good, but because he is the most transparent president. All American presidents perpetrate all kinds of political atrocities and all crimes and yet still win the Nobel Prize and project themselves as defenders of human rights and noble and unique American values, or Western values in general. The reality is that they are a group of criminals who represent the interests of American lobbies…
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Obama’s War in Syria Led to Trump’s War in Syria
8 minutes readBAR—Democrats pretend that the bloodshed in Syria is Donald Trump’s legacy, but Black Alliance for Peace national organizer Ajamu Baraka says, “We have to remind people of the role that the Obama administration played in engaging in regime change war in Syria.” Baraka is also an editor and columnist for Black Agenda Report, and will speak at BAR’s 13th anniversary celebration at the People’s Forum in New York City, October 26th.