Category Archives: Failed foreign policy

Results of OPCW Investigation in Syria

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Remember, the anti-Assad forces otherwise known as rebels don’t have aircraft and don’t have bombs that would create craters in the ground. Oh yeah, notice that Russia has not produced their own investigations or conclusions as they pledged to do?

 

The exact same sort of wheel assembly we saw on the Douma chlorine bombs on the chlorine bomb used in Saraqib!  The details of samples taken are interesting in light of the Douma attack, soils samples and samples from the munitions confirm the presence of chlorine, although these were taken close to the time of attack.   Here’s samples from Khan Sheikhoun, showing the same three chemicals as detected in the Saraqib attack, all indicators of Sarin use.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — 16 May 2018 —The Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), confirmed in a report released yesterday that chlorine was likely used as a chemical weapon on 4 February 2018 in Saraqib, Idlib Governorate, Syrian Arab Republic.

The FFM determined that chlorine was released from cylinders by mechanical impact in the Al Talil neighbourhood of Saraqib.

The conclusions are based inter alia on the presence of two cylinders, which were determined as previously containing chlorine; witness testimony; environmental samples that demonstrated the unusual presence of chlorine in the local environment; and the number of patients at medical facilities shortly after the incident who showed signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to chlorine and other toxic chemicals.

The Director-General stated: “I strongly condemn the continued use of toxic chemicals as weapons by anyone, for any reason, and in any circumstances. Such acts contradict the unequivocal prohibition against chemical weapons enshrined in the Chemical Weapons Convention.”

The FFM’s report on the Saraqib incident has been shared with States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention.  The report was also transmitted to the UN Security Council through the UN Secretary-General.

Background

In response to persistent allegations of chemical weapon attacks in Syria, the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) was set up in 2014 with an on-going mandate “to establish facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals, reportedly chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic”. The FFM’s mandate is to determine whether chemical weapons or toxic chemicals as weapons have been used in Syria. It does not include identifying who is responsible for alleged attacks. Attribution was part of the mandate of the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism, set up by the UN Security Council, which expired in November 2017.

The FFM has previously confirmed with a “high degree of confidence” the use of chlorine, sulfur mustard, and sarin as weapons.

The FFM is required to study available information relating to allegations of use of chemical weapons in Syria, including information provided by the Syrian Arab Republic and others. The FFM employs investigative methods to determine if chemical weapons have been used. It interviews witnesses and obtains environmental and bio-medical samples and physical evidence for analysis.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons operates according to a strict confidentiality regime, which governs the operations of the Organisation, protects the integrity of its investigations, ensures the security of its technical experts, and determines what information can be made public.

As the implementing body for the Chemical Weapons Convention, the OPCW oversees the global endeavour to permanently and verifiably eliminate chemical weapons. Since the Convention’s entry into force in 1997 – and with its 192 States Parties – it is the most successful disarmament treaty eliminating an entire class of weapons of mass destruction.

President Trump and ZTE

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There has to be an explanation for President Trump’s interest in saving jobs at ZTE.

In Concession, Trump Will Help China's ZTE 'Get Back Into ... photo

Could it be part of a trade issue with China to ensure China continues pressure on North Korea? Could it be to keep American intellectual property protected in some obscure plot where China continues to steal intelligence to eventually control all 5G?

The 2019 NDAA includes a provision to prohibit ZTE and Huawei use in the United States.

Reuters: “I hope the administration does not move forward on this supposed deal I keep reading about,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio said. Bilateral talks between the world’s two biggest economies resume in Washington this week.

The Wall Street Journal has reported Beijing would back away from threats to slap tariffs on U.S. farm goods in exchange for easing the ban on selling components to ZTE.

“They are basically conducting an all-out assault to steal what we’ve already developed and use it as the baseline for their development so they can supplant us as the leader in the most important technologies of the 21st century,” Rubio said at a Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Asia policy.

Trump had taken to Twitter on Sunday with a pledge to help the company, which has suspended its main operations, because the penalties had cost too many jobs in China. It was a departure for a president who often touts “America First” policies.

The Commerce Department in April found ZTE had violated a 2017 settlement created after the company violated sanctions on Iran and North Korea, and banned U.S. companies from providing exports to ZTE for seven years.

U.S. companies are estimated to provide 25 percent to 30 percent of components used in ZTE’s equipment, which includes smartphones and gear to build telecommunications networks.

The suggestion outraged members of Congress who have been pressing for more restrictions on ZTE. Some U.S. lawmakers have alleged equipment made by ZTE and other Chinese companies could pose a cyber security threat.

“Who makes unilateral concessions on the eve of talks after you’ve spent all this time trying to say, correctly in my view, that the Chinese have ripped off our technology?” Senator Ron Wyden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees trade policy, told Reuters.

Wyden, who is also on the Intelligence Committee, was one of 32 Senate Democrats who signed a letter on Tuesday accusing Trump of putting China’s interests ahead of U.S. jobs and national security.

The company has denied wrongdoing.

Republican Representative Mac Thornberry, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at a Bloomberg event on Tuesday he did not expect lawmakers would seek to remove a ban on ZTE technology from a must-pass annual defense policy bill making its way through Congress.

“I confess I don’t fully understand the administration’s take on this at this point,” Thornberry said. “It is not a question to me of economics, it is a question of security.”

Consider:

Axios: President Trump’s desire to help save ZTE could set the tone for the treatment of another Chinese telecom company that’s under investigation for sanctions violations, Axios’ Erica Pandey writes.

The backdrop:

  • ZTE has been found guilty of breaking U.S. law three times, including violating sanctions by selling equipment with American parts to Iran and North Korea.
  • The Pentagon has banned the sale of ZTE and Huawei phones at retail stores on military bases, citing concerns that the companies are using their devices to spy on military personnel.
  • ZTE and Huawei are both key players in China’s race to dominate 5G and the future of mobile communication. The Chinese Communist Party is painting U.S. moves against the Chinese phone makers as efforts to knock China out of the 5G race.

Between the lines: “Ross had a color wheel of approaches [on ZTE] ranging from a handslap to breaking them as a company,” says Chris Johnson, a former CIA China analyst who’s now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

  • The Chinese might have stomached a slap on the wrist, but by banning American companies from selling parts to ZTE, Ross served up a punishment harsh enough to halt operations. China in turn made ZTE a top trade priority and used its massive leverage to potentially sway the president.

Why it matters: China could use Trump’s apparent pivot on ZTE as a stepping stone to free Huawei. Or the ZTE case could be a lesson for the U.S. in negotiating with China.

How the ZTE deal could fare:

  • “The U.S. and China are closing in on a deal that would give China’s ZTE Corp. a reprieve from potentially crippling U.S. sanctions in exchange for Beijing removing tariffs on billions of dollars of U.S. agricultural products, said people in both countries briefed on the deal,” the Wall Street Journal’s Lingling Wei and Bob Davis report.
  • Steven Mnuchin is leading the U.S. in negotiating a deal that puts the brakes on actions against ZTE in exchange for China buying down its trade surplus, reports Axios’ Jonathan Swan.
  • China’s trade negotiator, Liu He, is in DC today. Axios contributor Bill Bishop hears that Liu will arrive “with an open checkbook to buy down the deficit but that progress on anything structural will be much harder.”

The bottom line: Taking the toughest possible approach to China might not be the smartest when the Asian power is stronger than ever and prepared to fight back.

 

U.S. Applies New Iran Sanctions, Hardly Enough

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We are still at war in the Middle East where Iran with proxies is the real and virtual enemy. The United States uses proxies as well, yet the United States near term and long range strategy remains fleeting.

The talks that continue between Iran and Europe on the JCPOA should include Iran’s war operation in the Middle East.

For related reading: How Iran Spreads Its Empire through Terrorist Militias, In Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere, Tehran has perfected the art of gradually conquering a country without replacing its flag.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_fdkmbEaLNsthfxOkoTpRxuhC2mSgPJfm2_f4IcdO9OLC8jMqBk5ambXr3ZwDw1cbXzPO0HkTEU_l5j-ZIOvKmJfUplgWyyl6COiJ7zOyS8IC7PFxOXsApqtEhf085IRRVbVd8e_ photo

Going forward for the United States:

Implications and Future Research
The unwillingness of the United States and its GCC partners to use their vast conventional military superiority has shifted the balance of power in the region from the conventional to the unconventional realm. Iran then relies on its willingness to assume more risk and its ability to better influence proxies than its adversaries, to achieve favorable foreign policy outcomes despite the opposition of the United States and its Arab allies. The use of proxy groups fundamentally decreases the physical cost a state incurs due to conflict. However, when the soldiers of a state die advising and assisting these proxies, it is more difficult to justify domestically, because using proxies signals that the objectives are not important enough to warrant decisive intervention. Therefore, states are most successful when they use proxies not as a cost-reduction mechanism alone but because proxies
are better able to achieve the desired end than conventional military forces. If the United States is unwilling to risk additional battle deaths or domestic political repercussions to prevent Iran from projecting power across the Middle East, then it must instead apply cost-imposing strategies.
Increasing the effectiveness of special operations forces from allied Arab states through intelligence sharing, kinetic strikes, training, and attached American advisors, while encouraging deployments of these elements to areas where Iranian advisors and IRGC units operate, would increase the human cost of Iranian activities. In addition to targeting Iran’s primary efforts in Iraq and Syria, these partnered operations should also confront peripheral Iranian efforts throughout the Gulf, including Yemen, in order to exploit the weakness of Iranian popular support for its presence therein. By working through Arab partners, the United States can apply the indigenous force necessary to confront Iranian proxies, while increasing the likelihood that Arab states achieve a confluence of shared ideology and objectives with their proxies, which eludes the United States
as a separate actor. Saudi and Emirati support to Yemeni military units recapturing the port of Aden and the Bab al-Mandab Strait serve as good examples of the type of effort the United States should expand.
In addition to combating Iranian proxy groups directly, targeting the ground, air, and sea logistical routes that the IRGC Quds Force uses to supply its proxies would affect Iran’s ability to support its efforts in the region. As long as Iran continues to rely on a domestically based force projection model, its network is vulnerable to air strikes, raids, and sabotage. An expanded network of friendly proxies partnered with US and allied
-Arab advisors would be ideally suited to facilitating this type of targeting.
The author is: Maj. Alex Deep is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is a Special Forces officer with ten years of service and multiple deployments to Afghanistan in conventional and special operations task forces. He served as a rifle platoon leader and company executive officer in the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team prior to completing Special Forces Assessment and Selection and subsequently the Special Forces Qualification Course. He then served as a Special Forces detachment commander and battalion assistant operations officer in 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne). He currently teaches SS307: Introduction to International Relations. Deep holds a Bachelor of Science in American Politics and Arabic from the United States Military Academy at West Point and a Master of Arts in Strategic Studies and International Economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Qasem Soleimani, Marshal of Global Terror and Money Laundering

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Primer: Qasem Soleimani, the military maestro of the IRGC, commanded the base that attacked Israel earlier this week. Further, the Israelis asked permission to assassinate Soleimani during the Obama administration. They were denied and Obama officials leaked the plot to Iran. Now, that same request has apparently been asked of the Trump administration and the request was approved.

General Qassem Suleimani: The Thinker Of Our Time ...

Soleimani has a long terror history, globally.

Tower: The United States Treasury Department, working with authorities in the United Arab Emirates, broke up a money laundering scheme that provided millions of dollars to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF), Reuters reported Thursday.

Treasury designated six individuals and three business entities for their role in the scheme. The UAE, where companies facilitating the money laundering were located, but the same people and entities on its list of terrorists and terror organizations that do business with the IRGC-QF.

In a statement announcing the new sanctions, Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said, “The Iranian regime and its Central Bank have abused access to entities in the UAE to acquire U.S. dollars to fund the IRGC-QF’s malign activities, including to fund and arm its regional proxy groups, by concealing the purpose for which the U.S. dollars were acquired. As I said following the President’s announcement on Tuesday, we are intent on cutting off IRGC revenue streams wherever their source and whatever their destination. Today we are targeting Iranian individuals and front companies engaged in a large-scale currency exchange network that has procured and transferred millions to the IRGC-QF.”

Mnuchin thanked the UAE for its “close collaboration” in disrupting the money laundering and called on all nations to “be vigilant” in fighting Iranian attempts at money-laundering to “fund the nefarious actors of the IRGC-QF and the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.”

United States and United Arab Emirates disrupt large scale currency exchange network transferring millions of dollars to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force: Exchange Network CHART:

Reuters described the IRGC as Iran’s “most powerful security entity,” with control over a large share of Iran’s economy. IRGC-QF is described as “an elite unit in charge of the IRGC’s overseas operations.”

In 2015, Reuters reported that more than $1 billion in cash had been smuggled into Iran despite sanctions, utilizing “money changers and front companies in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates and Iraq.” Iran preferred using a network of front companies to handle the money laundering in order to conceal “the overall size of the dollar-purchasing operation.”

When he announced the United States’ withdrawal from the nuclear deal earlier this week, President Donald Trump gave companies either three month or six months to wind down their dealings with Iran.

Did the Trump Operation Hire Black Cube for Dirty Ops?

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The allegations are that certain former Obama officials were part of discredit operation by Donald Trump. Humm, perhaps but who has been fully discredited that anyone seems to know or care about?

‘Dirty Ops’?

The Observer did not name any Trump officials or the private Israeli intelligence firm said to be involved in the plot, which was allegedly hatched when “Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago,” according to the report. The plan was to “get dirt” on Rhodes and Kahl “as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal,” The Observer said. Trump has suggested he will not recertify that Iran is complying with the pact when it comes up for renewal May 12. (The U.K., Russia, France and Germany also signed the deal.)

Veteran Washington foreign affairs journalist Laura Rozen told Newsweek that Kahl showed her the first email his wife got from the person, who identified herself as “Adriana Gavrilov from Reuben Capital Partners.” Rozen said she recognized Reuben Capital from a New Yorker story by Ronan Farrow that described it as a cover for Black Cube, a private Israeli spy firm reportedly hired by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein to dig up dirt on the women who accused him of sexual misconduct, harassment, assault or rape.

Farrow reported Sunday on another attempt linked to Black Cube: In 2017, Rhodes’s wife, a former State Department official, received a proposal from a London-based film company called Shell Productions for a movie that would follow the personal lives of “government officials in the positions that determine war and peace” during times of geopolitical crisis, including “nuclear negotiations with a hostile nation.” She said she found the pitch “bizarre” and never responded. Farrow said two sources told him the proposal originated with Black Cube.

*** War News Updates: An Insider's View On White House Policy ...  White House aide Ben Rhodes responds to controversial New ...

A former deputy assistant to president Barack Obama and national security adviser to vice president Joe Biden responded on Twitter Sunday night to reports he was targeted by the private Israeli security firm Black Cube in an attempt to discredit the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.