Comrade Ayatollah, it Always Points Back to Russia/USSR

Posted on April 22, 2016April 22, 2016 by Denise Simon

“Is Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei a graduate of the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Moscow? Did the KGB recruit Khamenei as a spy in the 1960’s? Is Soviet indoctrination and ideological training to blame for Khamenei’s hatred of the United States? The Persian blogosphere is boiling over with speculations about Khamenei’s alleged Soviet connections. The affair started Wednesday, as Iranian bloggers discovered Russia Today’s February 5, 2010 report on the 50th anniversary of the People’s Friendship University in Moscow, in which Khamenei is mentioned among the university’s “most notable graduates.” A claim also appears on Russia Today’s website, although the reference is made to “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini,” an obvious mistake. Subsequently, Iranian bloggers identified other Russian sources making the very same claim: The November 25, 2003 issue of Kommersant presents Khamenei as a People’s Friendship University graduate…………….”

Patrice Lumumba University was named after the murdered first Congolese prime minister after independence from Belgium. Lumumba was allegedly killed by Congolese rivals and Western intelligence services. I believe that to be true: Lumumba was perceived as a ‘communist’ by the West during the peak of the Cold War. The Soviet university attracted many third world students, and it is possible that a young Khamenei was among them, but it is highly unlikely. I doubt it very much: he must have started as a student of Islamic faith at a young age. Or maybe he was groomed as a communist mole inside Qom, a potential Manchurian Ayatollah. If true this would mean that Khamenei also speaks Russian in addition to Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. He is as much a communist as the Saudi Mufti is a secret Shi’a, as much as Bashar al-Assad is a Salafi.

Introduction:

For close to a century, destiny has played a bitter game with our ancient homeland. The winds of bizarre events have left us Iranians in a historical abeyance. Addicted to our shared agony and engrossed in our daily demise, we have even lost the ability to ponder the starting point of this common grief. Perhaps if our fathers sought out the root of this shared agony, a feasible solution would have emerged. What you are about to read is the result of two decades of chasing after questions that have perplexed me for half of my life. Finally when I started writing this book four years ago, I anticipated many possible outcomes. I expected this book to evolve into the biography of a ruthless dictator or the discovery of an old Soviet espionage network. But in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined that Comrade Ayatollah would turn into perhaps one of the largest research collections that sheds light on the darkest political and criminal dossiers in Iranian history. Today I declare with certainty that I have identified the root of the historical agony of our people and I have no doubt that all those who follow me on this journey to the conclusion of the book will acquire a new viewpoint on what has come to pass in our nation during the past century. The key to identifying the root cause of this shared agony lies not in our country but far away in the heart of Iran’s Northern neighbor — in the vast nation of Russia. The same place where in 1905 sparks of revolution were ignited in Tsarist Russia. Twelve years later, the flames of the Bolshevik Revolution at first engulfed the people of this expansive country and then spread to ancient Iran and other parts of the world to reduce their history, culture and identity to ashes.

Comrade Ayatollah investigates in ten chapters documents related to the pivotal role of the Soviet Union’s security agency in the planning and execution of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and this terrifying organization’s subsequent covert facilitation of the ascent of Seyed Ali Khamenei to the position of Absolute Supreme Leader in Iran. In each of these ten chapters you will encounter one of the hidden secrets and terrifying mysteries in the history of the Islamic Revolution. While deciphering these enigmas, I also provide material for independent research and a suggested topic for case studies.

The first chapter is a review of the history of the Cold War the origins of which can be traced back to the rivalry between two victors of World War I — the Russians and the British — for the control of the partitioned Ottoman territory. The Ottomans were the big losers of the war and the most prized spoils of war left behind by their defeated army were the historic lands of the Middle East and North Africa. The Bolshevik Revolution that coincided with the end of World War I kept the Russians from controlling a part of this valuable territory and thus Great Britain and France remained the two powers that won control over the lion’s share of the Middle East. After the 1917 revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union, the Russians once again began eyeing territories outside the boundaries of this newly established empire.

Their creeping influence accelerated in the former Ottoman territories, from Mesopotamia to Palestine and from Morocco to Egypt. With the advent of World War II, the Russian and the British armies entered Iran from the north and south, respectively, and occupied the entire country with the excuse that Iran was a supporter of Nazi Germany. The clandestine influx of the Soviet intelligence service’s spies and agents under the guise of the Red Army provided the opportunity for the Russians to penetrate all strata of society in the broad geographical expanse of Iran. At the end of World War II, the British army immediately began to withdraw. The Soviet Red Army months later under international pressure especially from the United States withdrew, but its intelligence service’s spies never left Iran. The result of their three-decade long operations in Iran to recruit and train elements loyal to the Soviet Union was the December 1979 Islamic Revolution. What transpired during this bitter era in Iran, the Middle East and North Africa has been depicted in this chapter.

The second chapter details the names of some of the powerful political figures who were trained in Moscow by the Soviet intelligence service for the roles they would play during the days leading up to the revolution and the years that followed, along with their respective biographies highlighting the services they rendered to the Russians. All this information is based on secret documents that are published for the first time in this book. We will see that all three influential factions in the Islamic Republic’s closed political circle in the past three decades have been in the service of Soviet intelligence. Seyed Ali Khamenei who leads the conservative or hardliners’ faction, Seyed Mohammad Moussavi Khoeiniha who is the spiritual father of the Reformist faction, and some of Mahmoud Amadinejad’s closest advisors including Kamran Daneshjoo, Mahmoud Mollabashi and Arsalan Ghorbani who comprise the neo-conservative faction are all graduates of the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, the official international spy training center for the Russians since 1960.

Read more here if you have the courage for history.

What About Those Firms Hosting Hillary Speeches

Posted on April 21, 2016April 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

Firms that paid for Clinton speeches have US gov’t interests

MSN/AP: WASHINGTON — It’s not just Wall Street banks. Most companies and groups that paid Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to speak between 2013 and 2015 have lobbied federal agencies in recent years, and more than one-third are government contractors, an Associated Press review has found. Their interests are sprawling and would follow Clinton to the White House should she win election this fall.

The AP’s review of federal records, regulatory filings and correspondence showed that almost all the 82 corporations, trade associations and other groups that paid for or sponsored Clinton’s speeches have actively sought to sway the government — lobbying, bidding for contracts, commenting on federal policy and in some cases contacting State Department officials or Clinton herself during her tenure as secretary of state.

Presidents are not generally bound by many of the ethics and conflict-of-interest regulations that apply to non-elected executive branch officials, although they are subject to laws covering related conduct, such as bribery and illegal gratuities. Clinton’s 94 paid appearances over two years on the speech circuit leave her open to scrutiny over decisions she would make in the White House or influence that may affect the interests of her speech sponsors.

Rival presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders and Republican critics have mocked Clinton over her closed-door talks to banks and investment firms, saying she is too closely aligned to Wall Street to curb its abuses. Sanders said in a speech in New York that Clinton earned an average of about $225,000 for each speech and goaded her for declining to release transcripts.

“If somebody gets paid $225,000 for a speech, it must be an unbelievably extraordinary speech,” Sanders said at an outdoor rally at Washington Square Park last week in advance of the New York primary. “I kind of think if that $225,000 speech was so extraordinary, she should release the transcripts and share it with all of us.”

Clinton said again Thursday she will release transcripts of her paid speeches to private groups or companies when other political candidates do the same. She compared such disclosures to the long-standing practice of politicians being expected to release their income tax returns, which she did far earlier and more thoroughly than Sanders in the campaign.

“Now there’s a new request to release transcripts of speeches that have been given,” Clinton said during a town hall. “When everybody agrees to do that, I will as well because I think it’s important we all abide by the same standards. So, let’s do the tax return standard first because that’s been around for a really long time.”

Clinton has said she can be trusted to spurn her donors on critical issues, noting that President Barack Obama was tough on Wall Street despite his prolific fundraising there. But her earnings of more than $21.6 million from such a wide range of interest groups could affect public confidence in her proclaimed independence.

“The problem is whether all these interests who paid her to appear before them will expect to have special access when they have an issue before the government,” said Lawrence M. Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington-based election watchdog group.

The AP review identified at least 60 firms and organizations that sponsored Clinton’s speeches and lobbied the U.S. government at some point since the start of the Obama administration. Over the same period, at least 30 also profited from government contracts. Twenty-two groups lobbied the State Department during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. They include familiar Wall Street financial houses such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., corporate giants like General Electric Co. and Verizon Communications Inc., and lesser-known entities such as the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries and the Global Business Travel Association.

Clinton’s two-year speaking tour, which took place after she resigned as secretary of state, “puts her in the position of having to disavow that money is an influence on her while at the same time backing campaign reform based on the influence on money,” said Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission. “It ends up creating the appearance of influence.”

Clinton dismissed those concerns in a town hall in Columbia, South Carolina, saying that “the argument seems to be that if you ever took money from any business of any kind, then you can’t fulfill your public responsibilities. Well, that’s just not the case.”

Clinton’s spokesman, Brian Fallon, said in a statement, “Hillary Clinton’s record shows she has consistently taken on these very same industries, and to suggest she would deviate from that at all as president is completely baseless.”

Despite months of controversy over her speeches to Wall Street patrons, Clinton’s biggest rewards came from Washington’s trade associations, the lobbying groups that push aggressively for industry interests. Trade groups paid Clinton more than $7.1 million, the review showed.

The National Association of Realtors spent $38.5 million on government contacts in 2013, the same year it paid Clinton $225,000 to appear at the group’s gathering in San Francisco. A group spokesman said Clinton was among former U.S. officials invited to share their experiences but said she was not paid as part of its lobbying activities.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization, which represents biotech and pharmaceutical firms, spent between $7 million and $8.5 million annually on lobbying since 2008, including contacts with the State Department — during Clinton’s tenure — on the agency’s biotech discussions with foreign governments. The trade group, which hosted Clinton for $335,000 at its event in San Diego in June 2014, has won more than $425,000 in federal payments since 2008 in work for the National Science Foundation and other agencies. The group did not respond to phone calls or emails for comment from AP.

The financial services and investment industry accounted for about $4.1 million of Clinton’s earnings. Its ranks included not only Wall Street powerhouses like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Corp., but also private equity and hedge funds like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. LP and Apollo Global Management LLC and foreign-owned banks such as Deutsche Bank AG and the Canada Imperial Bank of Commerce. Goldman Sachs, which gave Clinton $675,000 for three speeches in 2013, and Morgan Stanley, which paid her $225,000 for one speech the same year, both spent millions lobbying the U.S. during Clinton’s term at the State Department.

Nearly three dozen of Clinton’s benefactors spent more than $1 million annually on contacts with officials and Congress during the same year they paid her to appear at their corporate or association events, according to federal lobbying records. Many earned millions more in government contracts — indications of the regulatory and policy stances the groups might advocate during a Clinton presidency.

General Electric, which paid her $225,000 for a speech in Boca Raton, Florida, in January 2014, has the most extensive government portfolio. GE has spent between $15.1 million and $39.2 million annually on lobbying. The company has won nearly $50 million in government work since 2008, including $1.7 million from the State Department for lab equipment and data processing during Clinton’s tenure. The firm also lobbied the State Department all four years under Clinton on issues including trade and Iran sanctions.

As secretary of state, Clinton visited a GE aviation facility in Singapore and touted the State Department’s role aiding GE industrial and military deals abroad. Clinton met with GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt once about the agency’s efforts to salvage a planned business exposition in Shanghai and also talked with him by phone, according to her calendars.

A GE spokeswoman said, “GE works closely with the U.S. government and State Department, which often advocates for U.S. exporters.”

Clinton sought to defuse the issue of her Wall Street speeches during a February debate with Sanders by explaining that she “spoke to heart doctors, I spoke to the American Camping Association, I spoke to auto dealers, and, yes, I spoke to firms on Wall Street.”

Even the sponsors Clinton cited in her defense engaged in public advocacy — an indication of how many might seek favors if Clinton were elected.

The Cardiovascular Research Foundation, a fundraising group for cutting-edge heart medicine, paid Clinton $275,000 for a speech in Washington in September 2014. That same year, the organization joined other medical and health care groups in urging the Federal Drug Administration to reconsider its generic labeling rules. Foundation spokeswoman Irma Damhuis said Clinton was invited as a “recognized thought leader,” adding that “decisions on keynote speakers are made without a political agenda.”

The National Automobile Dealers Association paid Clinton $325,000 for a convention speech in New Orleans in January 2014. That same year, the trade group spent $3.2 million lobbying federal officials on taxes, automotive and trucking issues, labor and finance. A spokesman said the group’s lobbying and convention activities were separate.

The camping group also paid for lobbying in recent years, including $40,000 in 2015 on Transportation Department administrative actions, according to federal records. The group’s New York and New Jersey affiliate paid Clinton $260,000 for a March 2015 speech in Atlantic City.

Deirdre Petting, an executive with the national group, said its lobbying was separate from the affiliate’s decision to invite Clinton for the event.

After Subpoena: State Removed Benghazi Docs

Posted on April 21, 2016April 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

Obstruction of a government process and investigation. That is a violation of the law. Hillary, what say you and your team? Ever notice that the Democrats never ask questions or complain about lack of compliance or cooperation?

Exactly how many had access to Hillary’s office or permission to remove files? Ahem….

State Department Office Removed Benghazi Files After Congressional Subpoena

Release of records delayed over a year due to removal

FreeBeacon: State Department officials removed files from the secretary’s office related to the Benghazi attack in Libya and transferred them to another department after receiving a congressional subpoena last spring, delaying the release of the records to Congress for over a year.

Attorneys for the State Department said the electronic folders, which contain hundreds of documents related to the Benghazi attack and Libya, were belatedly rediscovered at the end of last year.

They said the files had been overlooked by State Department officials because the executive secretary’s office transferred them to another department and flagged them for archiving last April, shortly after receiving a subpoena from the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

The new source of documents includes electronic folders used by senior officials under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They were originally kept in the executive secretary’s office, which handles communication and coordination between the secretary of state’s office and other department bureaus.

The House Benghazi Committee requested documents from the secretary’s office in a subpoena filed in March 2015. Congressional investigators met with the head of the executive secretary’s office staff to discuss its records maintenance system and the scope of the subpoena last April. That same month, State Department officials sent the electronic folders to another bureau for archiving, and they were not searched in response to the request.

The blunder could raise new questions about the State Department’s records process, which has come under scrutiny from members of Congress and government watchdogs. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, blasted the State Department’s Freedom of Information Act process as “broken” in January, citing “systematic failures at the agency.”

The inspector general for the State Department also released a report criticizing the agency’s public records process in January. The report highlighted failures in the executive secretary’s office, which responds to records requests for the Office of the Secretary.

Since last fall, the State Department has taken additional steps to increase transparency, recently hiring a transparency coordinator.

But the late discovery of the electronic folders has set back the release of information in a number of public records lawsuits filed against the State Department by watchdog groups.

The State Department first disclosed that staffers had discovered the unsearched folders in a January court filing. Attorneys for the department asked the court for additional time to process and release the documents in response to a 2014 lawsuit filed by the government ethics group Judicial Watch.

Around the same time, the State Department alerted the House Select Committee on Benghazi to the discovery. On April 8, the department turned over 1,100 pages of documents from the electronic folders to the House Benghazi Committee, over a year after the committee’s subpoena. The committee had received other documents from the production in February.

The delay has had consequences. The Benghazi Committee had already completed the majority of its interviews with diplomats and government officials regarding the Benghazi attack before it received the latest tranche of documents.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), chairman of the Benghazi Committee, said in an April 8 statement it was “deplorable that it took over a year for these records to be produced to our committee.”

“This investigation is about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, and it could have been completed a lot sooner if the administration had not delayed and delayed and delayed at every turn,” Gowdy said.

The decision by State Department officials to transfer the electronic folders to another bureau after receiving the subpoena could also raise questions.

The subpoena requested Benghazi-related documents and communications from 10 of Hillary Clinton’s top aides for the years 2011 and 2012.

The requests included standard language that “Subpoenaed records, documents, data or information should not be destroyed, modified, removed, transferred or otherwise made inaccessible to the Committee.”

The State Department’s attorneys said the executive secretary’s office transferred the folders to the Office of Information Programs and Services for “retiring” in April 2015. Public records officials did not realize for almost eight months that the folders had been moved, and so they were not searched in response to FOIA requests or subpoenas.

“In April 2015—prior to its search in this [Judicial Watch] case—the Secretariat Staff within the Office of the Executive Secretariat (“S/ES-S”) retired the shared office folders and transferred them to the custody of the Bureau of Administration, Office of Information Programs and Services,” the State Department said in a Feb. 5 court filing.

“The IPS employees working on this FOIA request did not initially identify S/ES retired records as a location to search for potentially responsive records because they were operating with the understanding that, to the extent responsive records from the Office of the Secretary existed, they resided within [the executive secretary’s office].”

According to congressional sources, officials on the House Benghazi Committee had a meeting with the executive secretary’s office to discuss the subpoena and the locations of potentially relevant records on April 10, 2015. Electronic folders of senior staff members were discussed during the briefing.

State Department officials at the meeting included the director of the executive secretary’s office staff, who was responsible for handling the office’s records maintenance, the assistant secretary for legislative affairs, and Catherine Duval, the attorney who oversaw the public release of Hillary Clinton’s official emails. The officials gave no indication that electronic folders had recently been transferred out of the office.

The State Department declined to comment on whether the folders were transferred after the meeting took place.

A State Department official told the Washington Free Beacon that personnel did not mislead congressional investigators, and added that no officials at the meeting were involved in transferring the folders.

“The Department personnel who briefed the Select Committee in April 2015 did not play a role in the transfer of these files to State’s Bureau of Administration,” the State Department official said.

The official added that department files are often moved as a routine matter.

“Files that are generated in an office are regularly moved to the Bureau of Administration for storage according to published records retirement schedules,” the official said. “This is a routine action that would not involve a senior supervisor. It also continues to make them available to respond to either Congressional or FOIA requests.”

Duval left the State Department last September. She had previously overseen document production for the IRS during the targeting controversy. Republicans had criticized that process after agency emails were reportedly destroyed and a key IRS official’s hard drive was shredded months after they had been subpoenaed by Congress.

In recent months, the State Department has been working to increase transparency.

“The Department has worked closely with the Select Committee in a spirit of cooperation and responsiveness,” a State Department official said. “Since the Committee was formed, we have provided 48 witnesses for interviews and more than 95,000 pages of documents.”

The efforts drew some praise from the House Benghazi Committee last fall.

“It’s curious the Department is suddenly able to be more productive after recent staff changes involving those responsible for document production,” committee spokesman Jamal Ware said in a Sept. 25, 2015 press release.

Still, it could be months before the public is able to see many of the Benghazi-related documents belatedly discovered by the State Department. The House Benghazi Committee is still completing its investigation and has not released them.

The department’s attorneys have also been granted extensions to produce the documents in response to several public records lawsuits. In one FOIA case, first filed by the watchdog group Citizens United in 2014, a judge has given the State Department until next August to turn over the new materials.

Correction: The original version of this article stated that the House Select Committee on Benghazi had submitted two subpoenas to the State Department. The Committee only submitted one subpoena, on March 4, 2015. The November 2014 request was an official letter from the Committee to Secretary John Kerry.

Russian Aggression Higher than Cold War Era

Posted on April 21, 2016April 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

Former Soviet Fighter Pilot: Russian Jets ‘More Aggressive’ Than During Cold War

DailySignal: KYIV, Ukraine—As the NATO-Russia Council prepared to meet for the first time in almost two years, U.S. and Russian officials traded barbs over who’s to blame for a recent spike in military tensions.

The ambassadorial level meeting set for Wednesday at alliance headquarters in Brussels was to be the first time the format, which comprises NATO and Russian officials, has been convened since June 2014.

Looming over the talks are provocative Russian warplane intercepts. These include a pair of Russian Su-24 fighter jets that buzzed within 30 feet of the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea on April 11 and 12, and a Su-27 fighter jet that performed a barrel roll within 50 feet of a U.S. RC-135 spy plane April 14.

“These kinds of planned maneuvers are especially dangerous because they bring us very close to an unplanned accident,” a former Soviet fighter pilot told The Daily Signal.

The U.S. and NATO say Russia has demonstrated a pattern of military aggression and reckless brinksmanship across Eastern Europe that risks sparking a military conflict.

Russia says NATO’s military buildup on the alliance’s eastern frontier is a threat to Russian national security.

“It was definitely done on purpose, and with the NATO summit in mind,” Oleksiy Melnyk, a former Ukrainian air force lieutenant colonel who served as a fighter pilot in the Soviet air force, said of the aerial antics by the Russian jets in an interview with The Daily Signal.

“Having the same background, I’m sure the pilots were not too young and too stupid to realize that these kinds of maneuvers would create an international scandal,” said Melnyk, now co-director of foreign relations and international security programs at the Razumkov Centre, a Ukrainian think tank.

Beginning in 1986, Melnyk flew Mig-21s for the USSR. He said the intent of the recent Russian intercepts was likely twofold: To send a diplomatic message to NATO that the Baltics are Russian turf and to test NATO’s military responses.

Russia’s current pattern of intercepting NATO ships and aircraft is “more aggressive and more frequent” than what the Soviet Union authorized pilots to perform during the Cold War, Melnyk said.

Under Soviet rules of engagement governing intercepts of NATO aircraft, the recent actions would have been forbidden, he said.

Soviet rules governing air intercepts were tightened after the 1983 incident in which Soviet fighter jets shot down a Korean Air Lines 747. Melnyk described this month’s Russian intercepts as “reckless,” and said Soviet pilots would have been punished for such maneuvers if commanders had not approved them beforehand:

These kinds of planned maneuvers are especially dangerous because they bring us very close to an unplanned accident. And any unplanned accident can have grave consequences.

Underscoring the strain on U.S.-Russian relations after the USS Donald Cook incident, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the American ship could have fired on the Russian jets.

“It is reckless. It is provocative. It is dangerous. And under the rules of engagement, that could have been a shoot-down,” Kerry said in an interview with CNN Espanol.

Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed the U.S. version of the incident was “not consistent with reality” and that the Russian warplanes had “performed strictly in accordance with the international regulations on the use of airspace.”

Visitors check out Soviet-era aircraft on display at Ukraine’s State Aviation Museum in Kyiv. (Photo: Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal)

Eastern Front

NATO-Russian relations chilled in March 2014 after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and began providing military support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

A senior Obama administration official told The Daily Signal in an email that Wednesday’s NATO-Russia Council meeting “does not indicate a return to business as usual between NATO and Russia.” The official added:

As a direct result of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, NATO decided to suspend all practical civilian and military cooperation with Russia. However, NATO also decided to keep political channels of communication open at the ambassadorial level and above. This meeting is consistent with that policy.

According to NATO, the meeting was to focus on the Ukraine conflict as well as the security situation in Afghanistan.

The meeting comes as fighting in eastern Ukraine continues to escalate in periodic bursts, threatening a complete collapse of the tenuous Minsk II peace accord.

More than 9,200 Ukrainians have died in the conflict, according to the United Nations.

Buildup

Also on the docket: improved communications between NATO and Russia to prevent incidents such as the air intercepts from sparking a conflict.

Russia has shown a pattern of provocative actions in Eastern Europe, particularly in the Baltics, for more than two years. These include the alleged abduction of an Estonian intelligence officer on Estonian soil in 2014.

In July 2015, NATO officials reported the alliance had scrambled warplanes to intercept Russian aircraft more than at any time since the end of the Cold War. And according to U.S. Navy officials, Russian submarine activity in the North Atlantic now matches, and may even exceed, Cold War levels.

Since 2014, the U.S. has boosted its military presence in Eastern Europe to reassure its allies. Troops and warplanes have rotated among NATO countries across the region, and an ongoing exercise to train and equip Ukraine’s armed forces began in summer 2015.

Alexander Grushko, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, speaks to reporters after a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels. (Photo: Stephanie Lecocq/EPA/Newscom)

Ukraine is not a NATO member state. However, four NATO countries—Canada, Lithuania, Poland, and the U.S.—currently have troops in western Ukraine to train the nation’s military.

In 2014 the White House launched the European Resistance Initiative, pledging $1 billion to bolster U.S. military forces in Europe as a response to Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine.

Recognizing the long-term security threat Russia poses to the region, the White House included $3.4 billion in its 2017 defense budget for the European Reassurance Initiative—a fourfold increase over the $789 million tagged the previous year.

The funds finance more U.S. troops in the region, military exercises with allies, and construction of new infrastructure to house troops and store weapons and military hardware.

The U.S. buildup is intended to shore up confidence among NATO’s eastern members on the reliability of American support; it’s also a strategic deployment of troops and equipment to defend against a Russian attack.

In March 2015, a U.S. Army Stryker convoy traveled 1,100 miles through the Baltic states and across Eastern Europe on an operation called Dragoon Ride.

Thousands of civilians lined the highways waving American flags. At stops along the way, civilians swarmed U.S. troops, shaking hands and taking selfies.

Dragoon Ride was touted as a public relations event to reassure allies about U.S. commitment to defend the region.

U.S. troops on the convoy, however, said a secondary objective was to scout routes and analyze road conditions for the rapid deployment of armor across the Baltics in the event of a Russian invasion.

Ukraine’s State Aviation Museum in Kyiv displays Soviet-era aircraft such as this one. (Photo: Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal)

Exposure

NATO’s beefed-up military posture along its eastern frontier dates in part from a September 2014 summit in Wales, during which NATO pledged to stockpile supplies and forward-deploy troops in Eastern Europe to repel a Russian attack.

The Obama administration’s defense budget follows through on that initiative, tagging funds to permanently deploy a full armored combat brigade to the region.

Beginning in February 2017, approximately 4,500 troops will rotate every 90 days among Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.

Additionally, 250 tanks, heavy artillery, and armored personnel carriers will be stockpiled across the region.

Even with the increased U.S. presence, NATO’s Baltic states remain vulnerable to a Russian attack. A recent report by the RAND Corporation, a U.S. think tank, concluded that Russian forces could invade to the edge of Estonia’s capital of Tallinn or the Latvian capital of Riga in 36 to 60 hours.

“As currently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members,” the report said.

The report added that NATO needs seven combat brigades, including three heavy armored brigades, supported with airpower to “prevent the rapid overrun of the Baltic states.”

Substantial?

The Kremlin has called the U.S. plan for a rotating combat brigade in Eastern Europe a violation of NATO’s pledge not to forward-deploy troops on the alliance’s eastern frontier.

In the Russian Founding Act of 1997, NATO pledged not to station a “substantial” numbers of troops or deploy nuclear weapons among new member states from the former Warsaw Pact.

At the time, Russia criticized the deal for not setting a specific numerical limit on troop numbers. Now, Washington and Moscow are mincing words over whether a U.S. buildup in Eastern Europe would constitute a “substantial” increase in troops.

“We see an unprecedented military buildup since the end of the Cold War and the presence of NATO on the so-called eastern flank of the alliance with the goal of exerting military and political pressure on Russia for containing it,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said April 14, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

In a formal statement on the alliance’s website, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said:

What NATO has done when it comes to reinforcement of our collective defense is defensive; it is proportionate and it is a direct response to what we have seen of Russian aggressive behavior in Ukraine.

BY: Nolan Peterson

Nolan Peterson, a former special operations pilot and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is The Daily Signal’s foreign correspondent based in Ukraine.

On Iran, Obama Unwound Carter’s Action

Posted on April 20, 2016April 20, 2016 by Denise Simon

It all started with the Iranian hostages, then the Beirut bombings. President Jimmy Carter gave the order to freeze all accessible Iranian assets including military equipment. And so it was done, but Madeline Albright began to pull the threat on behalf of Iran, and Barack Obama continued to do the same in 2009.

There are countless moving parts here, so it is for sure convoluted so perhaps the bullet points here will help. A calculator may be good too.

The Supreme Court decided today in a 6-2 ruling on behalf of the victims to free up close to $2 billion in frozen Iranian assets—held in a New York bank for Iran’s central bank, Bank Markazi—to compensate more than 1,000 victims and family members harmed in terrorism incidents traceable to Iran, including the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marines barracks in Lebanon.
In 2000, in her speech on Friday, March 17, the U.S. Secretary of State, Mrs. Albright, made reference to the Iranian assets that the United States froze in the aftermath of the hostage crisis in 1979. It always had been that any normalization of relations between these two countries had to consider the unfreezing of the Iranian assets. What was never clear was the size and nature of the assets. In her speech, Mrs. Albright indicated that much of the frozen assets were turned over to Iran after 1981. Yet, she also intimated that there is more that was not turned over. The size of the remaining frozen assets has been one mystery. Their nature and location, too, are not clear. At the time of the freeze, reports indicated that the assets consisted of goods purchased by Iran and not delivered by the suppliers, including military supplies, cash and securities on deposit or in trust with various U.S. banks and financial institutions here and their branches and subsidiaries abroad, stock and bonds of United States issuers, real estate, right to interest, dividend, and distribution, contract rights, and other proprietary interests. Read the rest of the shocking summary here.
To dovetail the second bullet point above, today, Daily Beast published an item that explains why the legislation introduced to punish Saudi Arabia for any involvement in the 9/11 attacks on the United States should be avoided as noted by some key officials at the Pentagon. Why you ask, the historical house of the United States is not clean either, which too is further explained in the link of the second bullet item. This is for sure still up for debate, however, there are major indications that during Barack Obama’s trip to Saudi Arabia, he is likely reassuring the KSA he will veto any punishing legislation.
We can fully know at all exactly where or how much Iranian money resides in banks around the world and how is brokering business on behalf of Iran, investing for the rogue country, much less skirting sanctions for them as well. You see even China had/has ownership of $22 billion of Iranian funds mostly due to sanctions and to pay for oil.
In 2009, enter Barack Obama and $2 billion for Iran just to come to the table. WSJ: ” More than $2 billion allegedly held on behalf of Iran in Citigroup Inc. C 2.43 % accounts were secretly ordered frozen last year by a federal court in Manhattan, in what appears to be the biggest seizure of Iranian assets abroad since the 1979 Islamic revolution. The legal order, executed 18 months ago by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is under seal and hasn’t been made public. The court acted in part because of information provided by the U.S. Treasury Department.President Barack Obama has pledged to enact new economic sanctions on Iran at year-end if Tehran doesn’t respond to international calls for negotiations over its nuclear-fuel program. The frozen $2 billion stands at the center of an intensifying legal struggle between Luxembourg’s Clearstream Banking S.A., the holder of the Citibank account, and the families of hundreds of U.S. Marines killed or injured in a 1983 terrorist attack on a Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Clearstream is primarily a clearing house for financial trades and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche Börse AG. Luxembourg’s bank secrecy laws have helped it grow into a major European financial center.” More here from the WSJ.
So what about this Clearstream Banking operation you say? Well they were a nefarious operation as well. In 2014, The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today announced a $152 million agreement with Clearstream Banking, S.A. (Clearstream), of Luxembourg, to settle its potential civil liability for apparent violations surrounding Clearstream’s use of its omnibus account with a U.S. financial institution as a conduit to hold securities on behalf of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). More here from Treasury.
In January 2016, The U.S. State Department announced the government had agreed to pay Iran $1.7 billion to settle a case related to the sale of military equipment prior to the Iranian revolution, according to a statement issued on Sunday.
Iran had set up a $400 million trust fund for such purchases, which was frozen along with diplomatic relations in 1979. In settling the claim, which had been tied up at the Hague Tribunal since 1981, the U.S. is returning the money in the fund along with “a roughly $1.3 billion compromise on the interest,” the statement said.
Wait, there is the other $100 billion: That’s roughly how much the U.S. Treasury Department says Iran stands to recover once sanctions are lifted under the new nuclear deal.

We cant know if there is more, yet no wonder Iran is dancing in the streets and maintains threatening behavior where Obama continues to tell the region, get along with Iran….they are legitimate. Oh….Obama is working on a personal meeting with Rouhani too.

Intense U.S.-Iran negotiations appear to be underway at this time, on various levels. They have included meetings this week in New York between Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif and U.S. Secretary of State Kerry, and an April 14 Washington meeting between Central Bank of Iran governor Valiollah Seif and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew.[1] According to an April 19 report on the Iranian website Sahamnews.org, which is affiliated with Iran’s Green Movement, President Obama asked to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rohani in two secret letters sent in late March to both Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Rohani. According to the report, Obama wrote in the letters that Iran has a limited-time opportunity to cooperate with the U.S. in order to resolve the problems in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and promised that if Iran agreed to a meeting between him and Rohani, he would be willing to participate in any conference to this end. The Sahamnews report further stressed that Supreme Leader Khamenei discussed the request with President Rohani, that Rohani said that Iran should accept the request and meet with Obama, and that such a meeting could lead to an end to the crises in the region while increasing Iran’s influence in their resolution. Rohani promised Khamenei that any move would be coordinated with him and reported to him. According to the report, Khamenei agreed with Rohani. The Sahamnews report also emphasized that Khamenei’s recent aggressively anti-U.S. speeches were aimed at maintaining an anti-U.S. atmosphere among the Iranian public, whereas in private meetings he expresses a different position. Courtesy and more from MEMRI here.