Saturday, October 7, 2017

FOUR ELITE U.S. SOLDIERS KILLED IN NIGER - AS THE MEXICAN CARTELS POUR OVER AMERICA'S OPEN BORDERS

FOR THE LAST 75 YEARS AMERICAN HAS BEEN IN WARS GLOBALLY. WE HAVE SQUANDERED TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND YET HAVE LOST ALL THESE WARS. MEANWHILE OUR COUNTRY IS CRUMBLING. 



JUDICIAL WATCH:

“The greatest criminal threat to the daily lives of American citizens are the Mexican drug cartels.”




“Mexican drug cartels are the “other” terrorist threat to America. Militant Islamists have the goal of destroying the United States. Mexican drug cartels are now accomplishing that mission – from within, every day, in virtually every community across this country.” JUDICIALWATCH

Killings of four elite soldiers in Niger highlight vast scale of American military operations in Africa

By Eddie Haywood
7 October 2017
On Wednesday, four US Green Berets soldiers were killed in an ambush while conducting a training mission with the Nigerien military in southwestern Niger near the border with neighboring Mali. The Nigerien soldiers suffered four casualties. Two other US soldiers, along with eight Nigerien soldiers were injured in the attack.
The ambush occurred 120 miles north of the capital city Niamey, near the village of Tongo-Tongo in the remote Tillaberi region. During the course of conducting a patrol with Nigerien forces, the troops came under attack.
According to the Washington Post, the garrison of US elite troops and Nigerien forces were led into an ambush by Malian Islamist militants affiliated with Al-Qaeda who crossed the border into Niger. The remote region has been an area of frequent raids by Islamist militants targeting Nigerien garrisons and checkpoints.
The official claim that US troops practice “non-engagement” with hostile forces, and are only providing training and sharing intelligence with the Nigerien military, has been exposed as a lie by this latest incident. It is clear that the US soldiers were carrying out an offensive operation, since the elite troops were patrolling with Nigerien forces deep into a hostile region.
The deployment of troops to Niger is an element of Washington’s “scramble for Africa,” which was commenced by Obama and is being continued under Trump. In occupying the Sahel region, soldiers under the command of AFRICOM have also been stationed in neighboring Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Nigeria.
Measuring the vast dimension of US military operations, General Donald Bolduc, head of US Special Operations for AFRICOM, recently reported that there are over 100 active US special operations missions at any given moment across the African continent.
The exact number of elite US forces deployed in Niger is unknown, but it is reported to be at least several dozen. The cumulative numbers deployed across the Sahel and surrounding region number in the hundreds. These forces occupy numerous outposts in Niger and the Lake Chad region, with some 250 US military service personnel deployed to a military base in Garoua, Cameroon. Dozens of special forces soldiers have been deployed to neighboring Nigeria last year.
Underscoring the scope of US military activity across Africa is Flintlock, an annual military exercise conducted by AFRICOM and the military forces of several Sahel countries, including Niger, as well as forces from Canada, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The military exercises began in 2005.
Flintlock is just one of the numerous military exercises conducted in recent years across the continent. The nature and scale of warfare scenarios the exercises conjure up, comprising aircraft and ground combat exercises, crowd control, mass bombardment and urban warfare, makes clear that Washington is preparing for much larger wars in Africa.
The backdrop to Washington’s hostile presence in the Sahel is the joint US and French-led war conducted in neighboring Mali, and the imperialist US/NATO bombing and destruction of Libya in 2011.
Under US-French leadership, the Nigerien forces have been conducting offensive missions against Malian Islamist militants since 2014, under the guise of the G5 Sahel, a proxy army comprised of forces from nations in the Sahel region. In addition to Niger, the G5 Sahel includes Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Burkina Faso.
The roots of the war in Mali flow from the fallout of the US-backed NATO regime change operation against neighboring Libya, in which the US/NATO nexus armed and trained Islamist fighters to carry out its dirty operation of capturing and assassinating Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Spilling forth from the complete breakdown of Libyan society brought about by US/NATO bombardment, the Islamist forces scattered to various parts of Northern Africa and the Middle East, including the Sahel region.
This began in 2012 with the Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali after a coup ousted Mali President Amadou Toure, as the Tuareg rebels took advantage of the diversionary chaos the coup afforded. The rebels advanced deeper into Mali’s interior and began taking control of territory and cities formerly held by government forces.
In early 2013, France, with Washington’s backing, deployed troops to Mali to neutralize the rebel militias. In exchange for deploying its military forces, France extracted agreements from the new Malian government for establishing French bases to host a permanent contingent of French troops.
After the joint US-French effort stabilized the government in Bamako, France supported the installation of the current president of Mali, Ibrahim Keïta, a figure with a long history in Mali politics who resided in Paris, where he obtained his education.
Niger is seen as an integral component of American military operations in West Africa with AFRICOM’s Niamey base conducting drone flights across the region. The construction of a new drone facility in Agadez, a city in central Niger, constitutes an expansion of the United States’ drone capability in the Sahel with further flight range and duration.
The US military outposts in Niger are part of an extensive network of such bases reaching into nearly every corner of the African continent. Over 60 bases dot the African continent, highlighting Washington’s determined effort to establish US dominance over Africa’s vast economic resources by force. The Sahel region alone possesses trillions of dollars of mineral wealth, as well as holding significant gas and oil reserves.
The US military forces arrayed across the Sahel underscore the reckless imperialist ambition behind Washington’s geopolitical strategy for the region, that in its drive for military domination it runs the risk of sparking a conflict with its rivals that could lead to all-out war on the continent.
A significant part of the equation in the new “scramble for Africa” is Washington’s aim to neutralize China. In the last decade, Beijing has increased its economic influence across the continent, drawing up investment deals signed with various African governments for the rights of resource extraction and development, including minerals, oil, and gas.




Surrounded by generals, Trump remarks on “the calm before the storm”

By Peter Symonds
7 October 2017
Surrounded by top military leaders at the White House Thursday evening, US President Donald Trump ominously described the current world situation as “the calm before the storm.” While he refused to be more specific, Trump’s menacing remark—almost certainly directed against North Korea—is another warning that the US is on the brink of launching a catastrophic war.
Far from being off-the-cuff, Trump made the comments to a hastily-convened photo-op before a dinner with “the world’s greatest military people” and their wives. Defence Secretary James Mattis, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Joseph Dunford and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly were all present.
The US president, who had just met with the generals, brushed aside subsequent repeated questions from reporters asking: “What storm?” Trump finally declared: “You’ll find out.”
In his opening remarks to the earlier meeting, Trump directed his most threatening remarks at North Korea, declaring: “We cannot allow this dictatorship to threaten our nation or our allies with unimaginable loss of life. We will do what we must do to prevent that from happening.”
Trump underscored the last point by adding: “And it will be done, if necessary—believe me.”
In reality, it is the Trump administration, not the North Korean regime, which is chiefly responsible for the extremely tense situation on the Korean Peninsula. Trump who is commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military apparatus has repeatedly threatened the small, economically backward country with annihilation.
Trump followed up his fascistic speech at the UN last month, warning North Korea faced “total destruction,” by tweeting that North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un “won’t be around much longer.” He has effectively ruled out negotiations with North Korea, publicly rebuking US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last weekend for “wasting his time” by exploring the possibility of talks with Pyongyang.
The extreme danger of war with North Korea is exacerbating divisions within ruling circles in Washington and the White House itself. The differences are tactical in character. Tillerson, Defence Secretary Mattis and National Security Adviser McMaster have all warned North Korea that “the military option is on the table.” At the same time, they have emphasised the need for a diplomatic solution to the confrontation.
All three of Trump’s top advisers have also supported the 2015 agreement reached with Iran to severely limit its nuclear programs. Trump, on the other hand, has slammed the deal as one of “the worse and most one-sided transactions” that the US has ever struck. He is reportedly poised to decertify the agreement next week—a move that will lead to escalating tensions with Tehran and also with Washington’s European allies that support the deal.
Under these conditions, Trump’s meeting on Thursday with his top generals appears aimed at ensuring full support, above all, for his reckless and aggressive preparations for war with North Korea. In his remarks before the discussion, Trump declared he expected those assembled to provide him “with a broad range of military options… at a much faster pace.” He made clear the generals were in charge, declaring he was relying on them “to overcome the obstacles of bureaucracy.”
What is at stake in a US war with North Korea was underscored yesterday by Democrat congressman Ted Lieu. He warned that a conflict with North Korea would be “unbelievably bloody.” While condemning the Pyongyang regime as “an absolute danger and threat,” he said there were “no good military options.” Lieu is a former Air Force officer who was stationed on Guam in the 1990s and participated in war games designed to prepare for conflict with North Korea.
Lieu and Congressman Ruben Gallego wrote to Defence Secretary Mattis on September 26, declaring it was “wrong to use military force without first exhausting all other options, including diplomacy.” They requested answers to a series of questions centred on “the best- and worst-case casualty estimates [American, South Korean and Japanese] for the North Korean conventional and nuclear responses to a US military attack.”
“Before this administration leads America down the dark, bloody and uncertain path of war with North Korea, the American people and their representatives in Congress deserve answers to the critical questions list above,” the letter concluded.
Lieu was at pains to stress yesterday he is not opposed to war. Indeed, he has been a vocal supporter of the McCarthyite witch-hunt against “Russian influence” in the 2016 federal elections and over the Trump administration. This faction of the American ruling elite favours a confrontation and, if necessary, war with Russia first, rather than with North Korea and by implication China.
In comments to the Los Angeles Times last month, retired Air Force brigadier-general Rob Givens warned: “Too many Americans have the view that it [a US war with North Korea] would be like the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan, or like combat operations in Libya or Syria, but it wouldn’t remotely resemble that.”
Givens bluntly declared: “There is only one way that this war ends. With North Korea’s defeat—but at what cost?” Givens, who served on the Korean Peninsula, reported that the Pentagon has estimated 20,000 South Koreans would die every day, even before the use of nuclear weapons.
There is every indication that the Trump administration, in a bid to forestall any North Korean retaliation, is preparing a massive military attack with conventional and/or nuclear weapons to destroy its military apparatus, industry and top leadership.
Military analyst Daniel Pinkston told the Los Angeles Times that any attempt to destroy North Korea’s nuclear arsenal “has a high likelihood that you are going to unleash the very thing that you are trying to prevent”—namely nuclear war.
In that event, a report released yesterday by the 38 North monitoring group based at Johns Hopkins University estimated that as many as 3.8 million people in Tokyo and Seoul alone could die in North Korean nuclear attacks. While the group made no estimate of the wider death toll, millions more would die in American nuclear attacks on North Korea, even if a broader war with nuclear-armed China and Russia were initially avoided.
The political divisions in Washington and the White House make a US attack on North Korea more likely, rather than less likely, as Trump desperately seeks a means of shoring up his administration and projecting the acute social tensions in the United States outward against a foreign foe.


JAMES WALSH

THE OBAMA HISPANICAZATION of AMERICA

 How the Democrat party surrendered America to Mexico:
                                                                                          


“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.”  Washington Times

More than 52 million Americans live in 

economically distressed communities

By Sandy English
28 September 2017

A new analysis of Census data shows that the so-called economic recovery under the Obama administration was an unmitigated catastrophe for the 20 percent of the American population that live in the poorest areas of the United States and that gains of jobs and income have gone overwhelming to the top 20 percent richest areas.
The 2017 Distressed Communities Report,” published by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), analyzes the census data for 2011-2015 for people living in each of the nearly 7,500 American zip codes according to several criteria.
The EIG’s Distressed Communities Index (DCI) considers the percentage of the population without a high school diploma, the percentage of housing vacancies, the percentage of adults working, the percentage of the population in poverty, the median income ratio (the percentage of median income that a zip code has for its state), the change in employment from 2011 to 2015, and the change in the number of businesses in the same period.
The report divides the findings for zip codes into five quintiles based on these indicators, rated from worst- to best-performing: distressed, at risk, mid-tier, comfortable, and prosperous.
The results show that distressed communities—52.3 million people or 17 percent of the American population—experienced an average 6 percent drop in the number of adults working and a 6.3 percent average drop in the number of business establishments.
“Far from achieving even anemic growth from 2011 to 2015,” the report notes, “distressed communities instead experienced what amounts to a deep ongoing recession.”
Further, “fully one third of the approximately 44 million Americans receiving SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or food stamps) and other cash public assistance benefits (such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)) live in distressed communities.” The report notes that most distressed communities have seen zero net job growth since 2000.
Residents in these zip codes are five times more likely to die than those in prosperous zip codes. Deaths from cancer, pregnancy complications, suicide, and violence are even higher. “Mental and substance abuse disorders are 64 percent higher in distressed counties than prosperous ones, with major clusters in Appalachia and Native American communities where rates exceed four or five times the national average,” the report continues.
One other important and alarming fact which the report highlights is that over a third of the distressed zip codes contain so-called “brownfield” sites—areas which are polluted or contaminated in some way. Not only do these have impacts on real estate and business development, they present a whole array of health hazards to the very poorest Americans.
Distressed communities can be found all over the United States but are concentrated in the South: 43 percent of Mississippi’s zip codes are distressed, followed by Alabama, West Virginia, Arkansas and Louisiana. According to the report, [the South] “is home to a staggering 52 percent of all Americans living in distressed zip codes—far above its 37.5 percent share of the country’s total population.”
After this, the Southwest and Great Lakes region have the largest share. In the Northeast, most distressed communities tend to be found in urban areas and in the South, primarily in rural areas.
The biggest cities with the largest numbers of distressed zip codes are Cleveland, Ohio, Newark, New Jersey, Buffalo, New York, Detroit, Michigan and Toledo, Ohio. Mid-sized cities with the highest number of distressed zip codes include Youngstown, Ohio, Trenton, New Jersey, Camden, New Jersey, Gary, Indiana, Hartford, Connecticut and Flint, Michigan.
Urban counties with the highest number of distressed zip codes include Cook County in Illinois, with Chicago at its center, Los Angeles County in California, Harris County in Texas, with Houston at its center, and Wayne County in Michigan, encompassing Detroit. Most of these urban areas were once industrial centers and home to the industrial working class.
Distressed zip codes that have a majority of minorities living in them are more than twice as likely to be distressed as zip codes that are majority white. “In total,” the report notes, “45 percent of the country’s majority-minority zip codes are distressed and only 7 percent of them are prosperous.” At the same time there are numerous distressed communities that are almost completely white. A quarter of the total distressed population is under 18.
The report found that the economic benefits of the recovery after the 2008 recessions have gone to the top quintile of zip codes, where the wealthier layers of the population 
live, including not only the very rich but also the upper middle class.
These areas, which the DCI terms prosperous, and make up roughly 85 million Americans or 27 percent of the US population, have for the most part the economic wherewithal to finance higher levels of education, have the lowest housing vacancy, highest percentage of working adults, and have had the lion’s share of job and business expansion.
“The job growth rate in the top quintile was 2.6 times higher than nationally from 2011 to 2015, and business establishments proliferated three times faster than they did at the national level,” the report notes. “Prosperous zip codes stand worlds apart from their distressed counterparts, seemingly insulated from many of the challenges with which other communities must grapple. The poverty rate is more than 20 points lower in the average prosperous community than it is in the average distressed one.”
The report makes much less of an analysis of the other three, middle quintiles, the at risk, mid-tier, and comfortable categories, but it does note some trends that address the overall trends nation-wide. “A remarkably small proportion of places fuel national increases in jobs and businesses in today’s economy. High growth in these local economic powerhouses buoys national numbers while obscuring stagnant or declining economic activity in other parts of the country.”
One of the more telling aspects of the report is that extreme poverty in the US is presided over by both capitalist parties: Democratic and Republic politicians have equal numbers of distressed communities in their constituencies. Democrats, in fact, “represent six of the 10 most distressed congressional districts.”
Another observation from the voting data, and one of the few that looks at conditions beyond the bottom and top quintiles, is worth quoting in full:
“President Trump accumulated a 3.5 million vote lead in counties that fell into the bottom three quintiles of well-being (equivalent to 9.4 percent of all votes cast in these counties). A vast array of factors determined voting patterns in the 2016 election, but it stands that the ‘continuity’ candidate performed better in the places benefiting most from the status quo, while the ‘change’ candidate performed better in the places one would expect to find more dissatisfaction.”
Broader figures and the historical view of wealth distribution in the US—that one percent of the population control 40 percent of the wealth or the decades-long decline in the percentage of the national income that goes to the working class—is not brought out in the report but the data add to a complete picture of social conditions across the United States, the character and geographical distribution of social and economic conditions in a country of more than 320 million.
The portrait provided by the EIG report is not simply one of increasing misery and poverty for the bottom 20 percent, and not only one in which only a minority of Americans are achieving anything like “prosperity,” but of growing and explosive dissent among tens of millions.
It exposes as a bold-faced lie the claim that President Obama made at the end of his second term, that “things have never been better” in America.

NYT: Trump Will Decertify Iran Nuclear Deal, Force Congress to Make Next Move

The New York Times cites sources briefed on President Trump’s plans for the Iran nuclear deal who say the president intends to decertify the deal without fully withdrawing from it. This will reignite what the Times calls a “volatile political debate” in Congress and effectively force the legislature to make the next move.

“Mr. Trump’s expected move would allow him to tell supporters that he had disavowed the accord, while bowing to the reality that the United States would isolate itself from its allies if it sabotaged a deal with which Iran is viewed as complying,” writes the Times, judging that Republican representatives have “little appetite” for the debate Trump allegedly plans to drop on them in about two weeks.
One Republican who does seem to have an appetite for debating the nuclear deal is Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), who is said to be “working closely with the White House to devise its strategy.”
Cotton wants to use the threat of scuttling the deal to drag Iran and the Europeans back to the table to hammer out a better deal. European leaders have been sending signals they will remain with the deal even if the United States pulls out.
The three changes Cotton most urgently recommends are eliminating “sunset clauses” that would automatically erase most of the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program by 2030, beefing up the international inspections regime, and explicitly curtailing Iran’s missile programs.
Refusing to certify the deal is the mildest action President Trump could take. As the NYTexplains, he does not have to prepare a legal case for Iranian noncompliance, which would run afoul of International Atomic Energy Agency assurances that Tehran is in technical compliance and has addressed deficiencies brought to its attention. Trump can notify Congress he declines to certify the deal again because he believes it is no longer in America’s national interest, kicking the political football deep into Congress’s end zone. This could also infuriate and mobilize opponents of the deal inside Iran.
Another potential pitfall referenced in the New York Times’ analysis is that some Iranian leaders are unhappy with how various aspects of the deal have worked out. Broadly speaking, they do not think the economic benefits have lived up to projections, in part because the U.S. government has not enthusiastically driven business to post-sanctions Iran. These Iranian critics would probably bring their own complaints to any new negotiations.
CNN scores the Trump plan a political victory for the president at the expense of congressional Republicans: “His expected decision to decertify the agreement would allow him to save face and dent Barack Obama’s legacy. And by handing its fate to lawmakers, he would also limit his political exposure to any decision to kill off a pact backed by US allies.”
Writing at the New York TimesDanielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute argues that if Trump merely withholds certification of the deal and dumps it on Congress, he would be abandoning his own stated goal of dealing more broadly with Iranian aggression in the Middle East.
“For the president to pass the buck displays neither leadership nor courage,” Pletka charges:
At a minimum, Mr. Trump needs to tell members of Congress what he wants them to do, and then work to ensure the resulting legislation can pass. And whether he decertifies the pact or not, the president must decide by Jan. 12 whether to waive once again the application of one in a broad set of sanctions that existed before the deal was struck and that have been suspended since. It is these waivers, not presidential certifications under the review law, that keep the nuclear deal alive.
Pletka lists Iranian plans in progress everywhere from Yemen and Syria to Iraq and Lebanon, finding Trump strangely reluctant to combat any of them while the nuclear deal is kept hanging by a thread. The great danger lies in the White House taking some minimal action to wave away the political irritation of the nuclear deal without addressing the rest of Iran’s activities, which would be the exact opposite of Trump’s stated goal to develop a broader strategy for Iran that merely begins with removing what Tehran regards as a shield against all serious Western diplomatic and economic pressure.
“If rolling back and diminishing Iranian power is the priority Mr. Trump insists it is, simply dumping the nuclear agreement in Congress’s lap may be the worst possible option. That would be politically easy, but it won’t get the job done,” Pletka warns.
A more optimistic view is that Trump’s threat to scuttle the nuclear deal might already be squeezing a little cooperation from Tehran. Reuters noted on Friday that Iran has “signaled to six world powers that it is open to talks about its ballistic missile arsenal, seeking to reduce tension over the disputed program.”
Although Iran publicly insists it has no intention of slowing ballistic missile research and production, Reuters cites sources in both Western governments and Iran who say quiet overtures have been made to discuss trimming back certain “dimensions” of its missile program – currently among the largest missile programs in the Middle East, and steadily advancing toward nuclear-capable long-range weapons.

No comments: