US Politics

[CBU-105]

wtf, is this for real ?

edit, it is real, she made a Trump painting with her puszy too, LOL !

SAD !

 

[The SC]

Why has Trump shown such eagerness to select former military brass for his Cabinet? The reasons may be both pragmatic and political.


Donald Trump didn’t always speak highly of military brass. “I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” he said in fall 2016. “Believe me.” In September, he added, “I think under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble. They have been reduced to a point where it’s embarrassing for our country…. And I can just see the great—as an example—General George Patton spinning in his grave as ISIS we can’t beat.”

But Trump’s disdain had a caveat: “I have great faith in the military. I have great faith in certain of the commanders, certainly.”

These days, he’s leaning toward the second pole. Already, Trump has selected three retired generals for Cabinet-level jobs. On Tuesday, he formally announced that he’s nominating retired Marine General James Mattis as defense secretary. On Wednesday, multiple outlets reported that he has selected John Kelly, another retired Marine general, as secretary of homeland security. Former Lieutenant General Michael Flynn got the nod as national security adviser on November 17.

That may not be the last of it. Trump has met with General David Petraeus, the former head of the CIA, apparently about the secretary of state position. Stanley McChrystal, a former Army general, said this summer he’d decline a job with Trump if offered, but his name remains in circulation. So is that of Admiral Mike Rogers, the head of the NSA. Retired Army General Jack Keane says he declined an offer to lead the Pentagon.

It’s hard, if not impossible to remember such a brass-heavy Cabinet. Ulysses S. Grant, a former general, once had four former generals serving in his Cabinet in the same year—but that was in an era just after a disproportionate share of politically involved white men had served in high-ranking positions in the Civil War.

The predominance of generals is already raising some conflicts. Mattis’s appointment specifically contravenes a law, intended to help preserve “civilian control” of the armed forces, that says that no one who has served on active duty within the last 10 years can lead the Pentagon. A candidate can, however, obtain a waiver from Congress to circumvent that, and it appears Mattis will get one without too much trouble. Democrats (like Leon Panetta) seem to either think he should receive the waiver, or not to care enough to put up a huge fight.

There’s a debate between policy experts about the wisdom of appointing so many generals, and whether it poses a risk to the nation. Too many military leaders, critics say, warp national priorities at best and slouch toward a junta at worse.

“Appointing too many generals would throw off the balance of a system that for good reason favors civilian leadership,” writes The New York Times’ Carol Giacomo. “The concern is not so much that military leaders might drag the country into more wars. It is that the Pentagon, with its nearly $600 billion budget, already exercises vast sway in national security policymaking and dwarfs the State Department in resources.” In The Washington Post, Phillip Carter and Loren DeJonge Schulman warn that “great generals don’t always make great Cabinet officials” and add that “relying on the brass, however individually talented, to run so much of the government could also jeopardize civil-military relations.” Rosa Brooks, meanwhile, suggests this isn’t much to worry about, saying that the old, formalized notions of civilian control are obsolete.

There’s some concern within the military, too. During the presidential campaign, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff criticized Flynn and retired Marine General John Allen, who backed Hillary Clinton, for intervening in politics, worrying about what effect their campaigning might have on civilian-military relations. One can imagine that leaders in the Navy and Air Force, thinking of the longstanding rivalries between branches, might be getting nervous seeing former Army and Marine generals gaining so much influence at the White House.

But setting aside the good or bad of the appointments, what might account for Trump’s disproportionate reliance on brass? It’s tempting to offer a psychoanalytic explanation. Trump seems somewhat star-struck by generals; this is a man who attended military school, but repeatedly obtained draft deferrals on somewhat questionable bases, and may glamorize generals in a vicarious way. Trump, the consummate entertainer, also seems enthralled by dramatic figures like Patton and MacArthur, as my colleague James Fallows has noted, either in real life or through on-screen depictions.

Some of the reasons may be more pragmatic, though. First, Trump has no national-security experience, and has shown very little interest in gaining it. It’s important for both his administration and his credibility to have people who know what they’re talking about around him, and the military imprimatur provides that. Second, Trump alienated so many civilian Republican figures—especially those in the national-security and defense realms—that he has little choice but to look outside the proven class of civil servants.

There’s also a political valence to it, however. Trump has spent the last few months promising to “drain the swamp,” and railing at the establishment and the Republican Party. That rules out almost anyone traditionally qualified for top jobs, even ones willing to serve in a Trump administration. The military is one of the few institutions that remains widely trusted by American society. In a Gallup poll this summer, it was the most highly ranked option, exceeding even small businesses and churches. At 73 percent, the number of people saying they trusted the military at least “quite a lot” was more than double those who said the same about the presidency.

Choosing ex-generals for top spots, then, checks a lot of boxes for Trump: He can appoint proven leaders who are willing to serve and will start out with a baseline level of trust with the American public. Of course, this explanation only goes so far: Trump’s other picks have included billionaire business leaders and former bankers including Steven Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, and Betsy DeVos. In the Gallup poll, banks and big business, fared much worse, at 27 and 18 percent, respectively.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/all-the-president-elects-generals/509873/

 

[Matirpola]

Thread title..

 

[CBU-105]

another sinister themed Trump documentary, interesting stuff so far

@LA se Karachi

 

[LA se Karachi]

another sinister themed Trump documentary, interesting stuff so far

@LA se Karachi

Lol, well this isn't much of a documentary. I wouldn't worry. Websites and videos like this are very common these days. There are conspiracy theorists on both the right and left.

Frontline, however, is a respected program produced by PBS, and I didn't find it to be sinister.

 

[CBU-105]

Lol, well this isn't much of a documentary. I wouldn't worry. Websites and videos like this are very common these days. There are conspiracy theorists on both the right and left.

Frontline, however, is a respected program produced by PBS, and I didn't find it to be sinister.

yep, disappointing one, "evil right wing billionaires... ok, but they never bothered explaining why they're evil, just that Trump has no "workers" in his cabinet

poorly made commie trash.

and he's been tweeting again, rips Brennan a new one

https://twitter.com/x/status/820786730257285120

https://twitter.com/x/status/820789938887294977

also read that Brennan might be an undercover wahhabi, a saudi mole lol

 

[The_Showstopper]

States Won by Trump Have Highest 'Obamacare' Enrollment

A record number of people signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act for the coming year, Barack Obama's administration announced Wednesday, with the most people selecting coverage in states that Donald Trump won in November.

Some 6.4 million people signed up by the mid-December deadline — 400,000 more enrollees than the same period last year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

In a twist, the states with the most people selecting coverage all went for Trump in the presidential election: Florida, with just under 1.3 million selections; Texas, with about 776,000; North Carolina, with 369,077; Georgia, with 352,000; and Pennsylvania, with 290,950.

Those tallies do not include states that created their own digital health insurance exchanges, like New York and California, instead of using the federal government's HealthCare.gov website.

The enrollment numbers include new subscribers (2.05 million) and returning consumers who had to renew their coverage and were not automatically enrolled. The tallies do not yet include automatic enrollments, which will be added to the total later.

HHS Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell did not directly attribute the spike to the election of Trump, who has promised to repeal and replace "Obamacare," but noted that more than 30,000 people have called HHS operators "worrying about the future of coverage in the wake of the election."

Speaking to reporters on a conference call, Burwell said officials have been assuring consumers that "Obamacare" remains the law of the land through the 2017 calendar year and that people will be guaranteed coverage at least until then under the existing law.


http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/states-won-trump-highest-obamacare-enrollment/story?id=44344734

 

[Hindustani78]

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/591948/trump-take-oath-abraham-lincoln.html

Trump to take oath on Abraham Lincoln Bible, Pence on Reagan's
Washington, Jan 17, 2017 (PTI)

Donald J Trump will be sworn-in as the US President on Friday using two Bibles: the one that President Abraham Lincoln used at his first inauguration, plus his own that dates back to the President-elect's childhood. US Chief Justice John Roberts will administer the oath of office to Trump, according to the 58th Presidential Inauguration Committee (PIC) which announced more details of swearing-in ceremony.

"In his first inaugural address, President Lincoln appealed to the 'better angels of our nature'," said PIC Chairman Tom Barrack. "As he takes the same oath of office 156 years later, President-elect Trump is humbled to place his hand on Bibles that hold special meaning both to his family and to our country," he added.

Trump's Bible was presented to him by his mother upon his graduation of Sunday Church Primary School at First Presbyterian Church, Jamaica, New York, on Children’s Day, June 12, 1955, a media release said. The Bible is a revised standard version published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in New York in 1953 and is embossed with his name on the lower portion of the front cover. The inside cover is signed by church officials and is inscribed with his name and the details of when it was presented.

The Lincoln Bible was purchased for the first inauguration of President Lincoln by William Thomas Carroll, Clerk of the Supreme Court. The Bible is bound in burgundy velvet with a gold-washed white metal rim along the edges of the covers. It is part of the collections of the Library of Congress and has been used at three inaugurals: 1861, 2009, and 2013. Outgoing US President Barack Obama had used Lincoln's Bible for his inaugurations in 2009 and 2013.

On the other hand, vice president-elect Mike Pence would take oath using The Reagan Family Bible. Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas will administer the Oath of Office to him on January 20. "President Reagan placed his faith in a loving God and the goodness of our country. He set out to change a nation and in doing so, he changed the world. In the march of history, Ronald Reagan's time in office was limited, but his legacy inspired a generation and will continue beyond," Pence said.

"It will be humbling to enter office with President Donald Trump, standing next to my family, with my wife Karen holding the same Bible used by President Reagan when he took office," he said. The Bible that Pence will place his right hand upon was used by Reagan for his gubernatorial and presidential inaugurations. This marks the first time a person other than Reagan has used it at an inauguration.

The Reagan Family Bible has never been out of the possession of the Reagan family or the Reagan Foundation, and is currently on permanent display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California.

 

[خره مينه لګته وي]

Those new polls giving Donald Trump low approval ratings?

They're rigged, too, says the president-elect.

"The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls," Trump tweeted early Tuesday. "They are rigged just like before."

https://twitter.com/x/status/821344302651555840

In the latest survey, only 40% of respondents in a Washington Post/ABC News poll approve of the way Trump has handled the post-election transition, making him the least popular incoming president of the last seven chief executives.

His transition has featured frequent clashes with intelligence agencies, political opponents and reporters, particularly over evidence that the Russians interfered in the election by hacking emails from Democrats close to Hillary Clinton.

Many pre-election surveys forecast a Clinton victory, but Trump took enough states to win the Electoral College; Clinton won nearly 2.9 million more popular votes.

The recent approval surveys are largely divided along party lines. In general, Republicans support Trump while large numbers of Democrats oppose him even before he takes office.

Stay with USA TODAY for full coverage of the 2017 inauguration.


http://www.usatoday.com

 

[خره مينه لګته وي]

The US government has given half a billion dollars to the UN's Green Climate Fund, just three days before Donald Trump takes office.

Barack Obama's outgoing administration announced the contribution of $500m (£406m; €468m) on Tuesday, bringing the total funds to date to $1bn.

Mr Obama pledged in 2014 to give $3bn to help tackle the effects of climate change in the poorest countries.

Mr Trump has previously called global warming a hoax.

The president-elect has also threatened to pull the US out of the Paris accord - a global agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions - and America's commitment to the fund.

Mr Trump could decide to withhold the rest of the fund.

However, John Kirby, the State Department spokesman who announced the grant, said there was no "nefarious desire or intent" behind the timing.

Donald Trump has previously called climate change a hoax, and a number of his cabinet members deny its existence


"It's not being done to try to provoke a reaction from the incoming administration or to try to dictate to them one way or the other how they are going to deal with climate issues," Mr Kirby said.

"This is an investment that had been long planned."

Republican senators have previously stated their opposition to the fund, and called the payments a waste of money.

But Mr Trump's team may not be taking such a hard line on climate change as initially thought.

Last week Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil chief and the president-elect's nominee for secretary of state, said he wants the US to keep "a seat at the table" regarding global warming.

"No one country is going to solve this alone," he said at his Senate confirmation hearing.

"The risk of climate change does exist, and the consequences could be serious enough that actions should be taken."



http://www.bbc.com

 

[خره مينه لګته وي]

On 20 January, inauguration day in the United States, a nameless, unknown military aide will be seen accompanying President Barack Obama to the handover ceremony at the US Capitol in Washington.

That military aide will be carrying a satchel over his or her shoulder containing a briefcase known as "the nuclear football". Inside will be a piece of digital hardware measuring 3in (7.3cm) by 5in, known as "the biscuit".

This contains the launch codes for a strategic nuclear strike. The briefing for the incoming president on how to activate them will have already taken place out of public sight, but the moment President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office that aide, and the satchel, will move quietly over to his side.

Donald Trump will then have sole authority to order an action that could result in the deaths of millions of people in under an hour. The question on a lot of people's minds right now is, given his thin skin and impulsive temperament, what are the safeguards, if any, to prevent an impetuous decision by one man with catastrophic consequences?

First off, it should be said that Donald Trump has rowed back on some of his earlier, provocative comments on the use of nuclear weapons. He has recently stated he would be "the last person to use them", although he has not ruled it out.

• Donald Trump: US must greatly expand nuclear capabilities
• Russia's top spin doctor in nuclear warning
• North Korea's nuclear programme: How advanced is it?

Other senior figures are also involved in the chain of command, such as the incoming US Secretary of Defence, retired US Marine Gen James Mattis, But Mark Fitzpatrick, a nuclear non-proliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Washington, says that ultimately, the sole authority to launch a strike rests with the president.

"There are no checks and balances on the president's authority to launch a nuclear strike," he says. "But between the time he authorises one and the time it's carried out there are other people involved."

The idea of a rogue president taking such a monumental decision on his own is unrealistic. He gives the order and the secretary of defence is constitutionally obliged to carry it out.

The secretary of defence could, in theory, refuse to obey the order if he had reason to doubt the president's sanity, but this would constitute mutiny and the president can then fire him and assign the task to the deputy secretary of defence.

Image captionDonald Trump says the US should "greatly strengthen and expand" its nuclear capabilities...Image copyrightDREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

Under the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution a vice-president could, in theory, declare the president mentally incapable of taking a proper decision, but he would need to be backed by a majority of the cabinet.

So how would it work in practice?

Inside that briefcase, the "nuclear football" that never leaves the president's side, is a "black book" of strike options for him to choose from once he has authenticated his identity as commander-in-chief, using a plastic card.

Washington folklore has it that a previous president temporarily mislaid his identification card when he left it inside a jacket that was sent to the dry cleaners.

Once the president has selected his strike options from a long-prepared "menu", the order is passed via the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Pentagon's war room and then, using sealed authentication codes, on to US Strategic Command HQ in Offutt Airbase in Nebraska.

The order to fire is transmitted to the actual launch crews using encrypted codes that have to match the codes locked inside their safes.

The US and Russia both possess enough nuclear missiles to destroy each other's cities several times over - there are reported to be 100 US nuclear warheads aimed at Moscow alone. The two countries' arsenals account for more than 90% of the world's total number of nuclear warheads.

As of September 2016 Russia had the most, with an estimated 1796 strategic nuclear warheads, deployed on a mixed platform of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and strategic bombers.

Under a programme ordered by President Vladimir Putin, Moscow has recently invested billions of roubles in upgrading its strategic nuclear missile force, keeping an arsenal of constantly mobile ballistic missiles travelling through tunnels deep beneath the forests of Siberia.

America had, in September 2016, 1,367 strategic nuclear warheads, similarly deployed in land-based underground missile silos, which by their static nature are vulnerable to a first strike, at sea onboard submarines, where they are harder to detect, and at airbases, where they can be loaded on to bombers.

The UK has about 120 strategic warheads, of which only a third are deployed at sea. The Royal Navy always keeps a portion of the nation's Trident nuclear force somewhere in the world's oceans, maintaining what is known as the continuous at sea deterrent.

The Topol is one of Russia's mobile ICBMs

ICBMs travel at a speed of over 17,000mph (Mach 23), flying high above the Earth's atmosphere before descending towards their pre-programmed targets at four miles a second.

The flight-time for land-based missiles flying between Russia and the US is between 25 and 30 minutes. For submarine-based missiles, where the boats may be able to approach a coast covertly, the flight time could be considerably shorter, even as little as 12 minutes.

This does not leave a president much time to decide whether it is a false alarm or imminent Armageddon. Once ICBMs have been launched they cannot be recalled, but if they remain in their silos they will probably be destroyed by the inbound attack.

A former senior White House official told me recently that much would depend on the circumstances in which a nuclear strike was being considered.

If this was a long-term, measured policy decision to say, carry out a pre-emptive strike on country X, then a lot of people would be involved. The vice-president, National Security Adviser, and much of the cabinet would all be likely to be included in the decision-making process.

But if there was an imminent strategic threat to the United States, ie if an inbound launch of ICBMs from a hostile state had been detected and were minutes from reaching the US then, he said, "the president has extraordinary latitude to take the sole decision to launch."


http://www.bbc.com

 

[خره مينه لګته وي]

With just days to go before inauguration, Donald Trump is making life rather difficult for his party's leadership in Congress.

It could be by accident. It could be part of a plan to establish his independent credentials. Or it could simply be an early attempt at framing Republican policies in terms palatable to his working-class supporters.

Whatever the reason, Mr Trump has staked out positions that are not exactly in harmony with Republican orthodoxy or the policy direction in which the Republican-led Congress seems to be heading.

Better than Obamacare
Over the weekend Mr Trump told the Washington Post that the goal of his healthcare reform plan, following repeal of the Affordable Care Act, is "insurance for everybody".

"There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can't pay for it, you don't get it," the president-elect said. "That's not going to happen with us."

Universal coverage is an objective President Barack Obama's healthcare reform sought, but never actually achieved. According to the federal government, even with full implementation of Obamacare and its insurance-coverage mandate, the US uninsured rate was 8.6% in 2016 - albeit a 50-year low.

"Insurance for everybody," outside a single-payer government-provided healthcare plan, is virtually unachievable.

This is why, when Republican congressional leaders describe their healthcare reform proposals, they generally use the term "universal access" not "universal coverage".

"Our goal here is to make sure that everybody can buy coverage or find coverage if they choose to," a Republican House of Representatives aide told reporters in December.

Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan may not see eye-to-eye on universal healthcare coverage.


The yet-to-be announced plan congressional Republicans are currently formulating is more likely to be a blend of the measures floated by various conservatives in the past.

For instance Congressman Tom Price, Mr Trump's nominee to be health and human services secretary, suggested a system that leaned heavily on tax credits and an expansion of existing health-savings accounts, where individuals could put aside untaxed money to pay for future medical needs.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has proposed the creation of federally funded high-risk insurance pools that would enrol individuals who couldn't get insurances elsewhere because of pre-existing medical conditions or other complicating factors.

None of these would come close to approaching universal coverage or even Mr Obama's uninsured mark over the past few years, however.

As if that weren't enough, Mr Trump also advocated using the buying power of the federal Medicare prescription-drug programme for the elderly to drive down the cost of pharmaceuticals.

While this has long been a goal of Democrats, conservatives have opposed the idea for more than a decade. It's enough to make rank-and-file Republicans reach for their antacids.

Looming over this entire discussion is a Congressional Budget Office reportreleased on Tuesday that predicts a straight-up repeal of Obamacare without any kind of a replacement would result in a doubling of premiums in the individual insurance market by 2026, at which point a total of 32 million Americans would have lost their coverage.

Mr Trump, in his comments this weekend, has essentially laid down a marker that repeal will be quickly followed by a replacement that will do a better job advancing Democratic goals of lower drug prices and more universal coverage than the Democrats' own best attempt.

It is, to put it bluntly, a high bar to reach.

A simple tax plan
If reshaping the US healthcare system turns out to be a challenge, at least tax reform was considered a low-hanging fruit for Mr Trump and his party. Even here, however, the president-elect has made comments that undermine Republican efforts to achieve legislative consensus.

A key part of the nascent congressional tax plan involved something called "border adjustments", which would tax corporations based on their final point of sale and not on where they are based. This would allow the US to give preference to businesses based in the US - one of Mr Trump's key goals during the campaign. It would also raise enough revenue to allow the overall US tax rate to be lowered from its current 35% mark.

Donald Trump doesn't want a "complicated" tax reform plan


Mr Trump, however, said the idea was "too complicated".

"Anytime I hear border adjustment, I don't love it," he said. "Because usually it means we're going to get adjusted into a bad deal."

Mr Trump appears to support a more direct border tariff, not the more complicated congressional work-around. On Monday he threatened European automakers with a 35% tax on foreign-made vehicles sold in the US.

The problem this presents for both the president-elect and congressional leaders is it runs directly against his party's long-standing free-trade positions - principles many in Congress have campaigned, and won, on for years. They might be able to dance around the issue with border adjustments and corporate tax reform, but Mr Trump seems more like a bull than a ballerina.

'Congress can't get cold feet'
It's possible to imagine that Mr Trump's recent comments were just, to put it delicately, rhetorical missteps and that he, in fact, is actually on the same wavelength as his Republican colleagues in Congress.

Then again, when pressed by the Washington Post on how he could get his healthcare priorities advanced despite an apparent conflict with current Republican plans, Mr Trump dug in his heels.

"The Congress can't get cold feet because the people will not let that happen," Mr Trump said.

"I think we will get approval. I won't tell you how, but we will get approval. You see what's happened in the House in recent weeks."

That was an apparent reference to Mr Trump's Twitter-based effort to force House Republicans to back away from a plan to weaken an independent congressional ethics investigation office several weeks ago.

Donald Trump says "the people" won't let Congress back away from his ideas


Whether he was directly responsible for causing the legislators to change course or simply reflecting popular outcry is open to debate, but the president-elect seems to be feeling his oats.

And if it's this way on tax law and healthcare reform - areas where Republicans and Mr Trump have a fair amount of ideological common ground - imagine what might happen when the president tries to advance his more controversial ideas on immigration or trade. Or pushes his childcare proposal, which met with significant opposition from his party "allies" pretty much from the moment he proposed them last October.

And what's in store if Mr Ryan goes through with his long-sought dream of entitlement reform - despite Mr Trump's campaign pledges not to touch Medicare or Social Security benefits?

Candidate Trump was a political wild-card, willing to buck conventional wisdom and his own party seemingly on whim.

Early indications are President Trump could do more of the same. As Republicans celebrate this weekend, storm clouds may be forming on the horizon.

http://www.bbc.com

 

[خره مينه لګته وي]

FILE - A man crosses the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) logo in the lobby of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.


A White House spokesman says President-elect Donald Trump's administration will have to choose whether to side with the U.S. intelligence community, or Russia and WikiLeaks.

Josh Earnest was responding to a question about Russian President Vladimir Putin's accusing President Barack Obama's administration of attempting to undercut Trump by spreading false information.

Putin said last week's release of an unverified dossier containing salacious allegations about Trump was part of an effort to "undermine the legitimacy of the president-elect" in spite of Trump's "convincing" presidential win.

Putin described as "fake" an allegation in the document that Trump engaged in sexual activities at a Moscow hotel in 2013. Putin added that those responsible for the allegations are "worse than prostitutes," and he questioned why Trump would "need prostitutes" when he has "been with the most beautiful women in the world."

U.S. intelligence agencies released a report concluding that Russia, under Putin's orders, worked to undermine the U.S. presidential election and aspired to help Trump win.

Earnest defended the work of the intelligence community at Tuesday's White House briefing, saying this is not the first time those agencies have had "some uncomfortable things to say about Russia."

"These are the kinds of things that I'm sure the Russians would rather not hear," Earnest said. "But ultimately -- and this is something that the next administration is going to have to decide -- there's a pretty stark divide here."

Trump has blamed the intelligence community for leaking unsubstantiated information, which also linked Trump to the Russian government, and questioned whether Central Intelligence Director John Brennan was responsible.

In a Twitter post last week, the president-elected compared the intelligence community to Nazi Germany.

https://twitter.com/x/status/819393877174087682

In an interview Monday with The Wall Street Journal, Brennan described the comparison to the Nazi's as "repugnant" and said Trump's criticism of the intelligence community's credibility was unwarranted. "Tell the families of those 117 CIA officers who are forever memorialized on our wall of honor that their loved ones, who gave their lives, were akin to Nazi's," said Brennan.

Brennan denied leaking the dossier, which was compiled by a retired British intelligence officer. Brennan said a synopsis of the report was included in briefing documents that were delivered to President Obama and President-elect Trump at the request of the FBI.

The dossier had circulated around Washington for months before it was published by BuzzFeed News last week.

At a separate news conference Tuesday in Moscow, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said relations with the U.S. could improve when Trump assumes the presidency.

"If what Donald Trump and his team say about Russia, the readiness to search for joint approaches to the resolution of common problems and the deterrence of common threats ... we will reciprocate," Lavrov said.

The Russian foreign minister said Trump administration officials should attend talks in Kazakhstan later this month devoted to ending Syrian civil war. Lavrov expressed hope that a Trump administration "will not apply double standards in order to use the war on terrorism to achieve goals that don't have anything to do with this goal."

The U.S. and Russia have clashed over the Syrian conflict during the Obama administration, with Washington backing moderate rebel groups, while Russia has thrown its full support behind the government of Bashar al-Assad.


http://www.voanews.com

 

[خره مينه لګته وي]

President Obama will fail to keep one of his most high-profile promises — closing the detention facility for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the White House acknowledged on Tuesday.

“At this point, I don’t anticipate that we will succeed in that goal of closing the prison, but it’s not for a lack of trying,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his final media briefing.

“The only reason it didn’t happen is because of the politics that members of Congress of both parties, frankly, played with this issue,” Earnest said with just two full days left in Obama’s term.

The outgoing president had made a top priority of closing the facility, opened under his predecessor in 2002, at the dawn of the modern war on terrorism. Obama contended that it served as a terrorism-recruiting tool and later seized on the argument that keeping the facility open for a diminished population of prisoners was a waste of taxpayer dollars.

“To overcome extremism, we must also be vigilant in upholding the values our troops defend — because there is no force in the world more powerful than the example of America,” Obama told a joint meeting of Congress in February 2009. “That is why I have ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, and will seek swift and certain justice for captured terrorists — because living our values doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us safer and it makes us stronger.”

But lawmakers blocked his proposals to shift the prisoners to prison facilities on U.S. soil and have criticized his efforts to transfer detainees overseas to countries willing to harbor them under close supervision.

In the latest transfer, 10 prisoners were shipped to Oman for what that country called a “temporary” stay. Just 45 detainees remain at the naval base, down from 242 when Obama took office.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest (Photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters)


Ironically, it was a liberal Democrat who dealt the first blow to Obama’s promise.

In May 2009, Democratic House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey stripped $80 million that Obama had requested to close the prison from an emergency funding bill. “While I don’t mind defending a concrete program, I’m not much interested in wasting my energy defending a theoretical program,” Obey said at the time. “So when they have a plan, they’re welcome to come back and talk to us about it.“

Republican hardliners (with not just a few Democrats going along) seized on the issue to try to make Obama look weak on national security. The Obama administration provided all the ammo Republicans needed with its clumsy and ill-fated plan to transfer a handful of forlorn Chinese Uighur prisoners to a Northern Virginia suburb, touching off a full-blown NIMBY (not in my backyard) rebellion in Congress.

The Obama team members seriously underestimated how difficult a task they had assigned to themselves. “There was kind of this naiveté that somehow, if the president said we’re going to close Guantánamo, and we have a plan to close Guantánamo, that ultimately that would happen,” recalled former CIA Director Leon Panetta.


https://www.yahoo.com

 

[خره مينه لګته وي]

President-elect Donald Trump admitted that receiving intel briefings has shown him that the U.S. faces some formidable "enemies" but said he will "solve the problems."

"I've had a lot of briefings that are very ... I don't want to say 'scary' because I'll solve the problems," Trump told Axios in an interview published Wednesday. "But we have some big enemies out there in this country and we have some very big enemies -- very big and, in some cases, strong enemies."

He continued: "You also realize that you've got to get it right because a mistake would be very, very costly in so many different ways."

Of his intel briefings, Trump said he likes them short.

"I like bullets or I like as little as possible," he said. "I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you."


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Trump Says He Doesn't Need Daily Intelligence Briefings That Say 'Same Thing' Every Day


In December, the president-elect told Fox News he doesn't need daily intelligence briefings because he is "a smart person" and doesn't "have to be told the same thing in the same words" every day.

"I get it when I need it," Trump said. "These are very good people that are giving me the briefings ... You know, I'm, like, a smart person. I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years ... I don't need that. But I do say, 'If something should change, let us know.'"


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