The New York Times is an Irresponsible Warmonger

Lying us into wars since at least 1898 if not before.

"These have been disastrous weeks for American foreign policy, a popular presenter on Russia’s state television told viewers on Sunday night. The United States essentially turned its back on Ukraine amid the impeachment inquiry, TV host Dmitry Kiselyov said in his weekly show. Then, Washington abandoned the Syrian Kurds. “The Kurds themselves again picked the wrong patron,” Kiselyov said. “The United States, of course, is an unreliable partner.” As the Middle East reels from President Trump’s erratic foreign policy, Russia is savoring a fresh chance to build its status as a resurgent world power and cast itself as a force for stability. The withdrawal of US troops from northeastern Syria, coupled with Turkey’s incursion, is allowing Russia to play the part of responsible peacemaker.

Yeah, and we can't have that, can we, New York Times? 

That's the last thing the lead war-promoter and liar wants! I guess they would rather have an irresponsible warmonger.

I suppose as long as the peacemaker isn't China, huh?

It’s too soon to tell whether Russia will be able to manage the new volatility in Syria, just as it’s not clear if the impeachment furor over Ukraine will help the Kremlin’s interests in Eastern Europe, but as Russian President Vladimir Putin landed in Saudi Arabia Monday for a state visit to one of America’s most important allies, it appeared clear that Trump’s moves in recent months were helping him make the case that Moscow, not Washington, was the more dependable actor on the world stage. Putin appears to be betting that he can boost Russia’s global standing by playing to other countries’ individual interests in a world in which the Trump administration’s moves have left many traditional US allies in dismay. “Russia will never be friends with one country against another,” Putin said in an interview with two Arab news networks and the Kremlin-controlled channel RT Arabic that aired Sunday. “We build bilateral relations that rely on positive trends generated by our contacts; we do not build alliances against anyone.” (New York Times)

I suppose there will be no Peace Prizes for Putin -- not that that the self-aggrandizing, self-adulating pos means anything after being prematurely awarded to Obummer, who proceeded to then initiate regime change in Libya over false pretenses; attempt regime change but fail in Syria; assist the Saudis in their war crimes in Yemen; and successfully overthrow and change the duly elected government of the Ukraine (that gets lost amidst the Deep State smoke and mirrors pre$$ coverage of current events and what is at the root of everything. Thus it must be obfuscated).

Somehow, the discredited organ of propaganda is still blaring its spew from the front page:

"Assad’s Syrian forces move into area hit by Turkey" by Ben Hubbard and Eric Schmitt New York Times, October 14, 2019

DOHUK, Iraq — Syrian government forces streamed into the country’s northeast Monday, seizing towns where they had not stepped foot in years and filling a vacuum opened up by President Trump’s decision to abandon the United States’ Syrian Kurdish allies.

That ominous phrasing has me wondering and worrying about what horrific false flag is being planned or activated in response.

Less than a week after Turkey launched an incursion into northern Syria with Trump’s assent, President Bashar Assad of Syria, considered a war criminal by the United States, has benefited handsomely, striking a deal with the Kurds to take the northern border and rapidly gaining territory without a fight.

In addition to Assad, Trump’s decision to pull US forces out of the way could also help Russia and Iran, as well as the Islamic State group, as the US retreat reconfigures battlelines and alliances in the eight-year war.

Faced with a fast-unraveling situation, Trump’s policy toward the region continued to fishtail. Having essentially greenlighted the Turkish incursion a week ago, then threatening ruin to Turkey’s economy, on Monday Trump announced sanctions on Ankara, raising tariffs on steel and suspending negotiations on a $100 billion trade deal.

There is a question as to whether that narrative provided by the New York Times is correct. It makes Trump look bad, and it is like Chomsky saying Israel is a tool of the U.S. when the opposite is the case. Israel does what it wants, and we really can't do anything about it. In this case, Erdogan probably told Trump on the phone that he's doing this, period. Trump had no choice but to move our guys out of the way, and it is more evidence proving that the world is beginning to run end-runs around the U.S. after offering the required lip service. The Empire is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Trump’s decision has turned a relatively stable corner of Syria into its most dynamic battleground. As Turkey and Syrian fighters it supports push in from the north to root out the Kurdish-led militia that was allied with the United States, Assad’s forces have moved in from the south, gobbling up territory.

Oh, Assad has "gobbled up" territory like a guy from 80-something years ago. 

In a sign of the concern over the safety of the remaining US troops in Syria, General Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke Monday with his Russian counterpart about the deteriorating security in the country’s northeast.

On Monday, without a fight, government forces seized a number of towns that had been held by the United States’ allies, including Tel Tamer, home to an Assyrian Christian community; Tabqa, which has a large hydroelectric dam on the Euphrates River; and Ein Issa, where the United States kept a contingent of forces, until recently.

Fighting continued in towns near the Turkish border to the north, pitting a number of forces against each other and terrifying civilians.

Kurdish militiamen battled Turkish troops around Ras al Ain and Tal Abyad, Syrian border towns the Turks claim to have taken, and both Turkey and the Syrian government were sending troops toward Manbij, raising the specter of new fighting there.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has said that the incursion is necessary for his country’s security and that Turkey seeks to establish a 20-mile-deep “safe zone” for hundreds of miles next to Syria’s border.

There you go. Finally some truth. No annihilation planned despite the wailing all week. What the Turks have done is nothing more than what Israel has done in regards to Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon.

The invasion has provoked widespread international condemnation and on Monday, the foreign ministers of all 28 European Union member states agreed to stop selling arms to Turkey, an unprecedented step toward a fellow NATO member, but Erdogan appeared unfazed, vowing that Turkey would press on in a speech in Azerbaijan. “We are determined to take our operation to the end,” he said. “We will finish what we started. A hoisted flag does not come down.”

Aren't they right next to Armenia?

Much of the territory contested in the current fighting was wrested from the jihadis of the Islamic State by an international coalition led by the United States in partnership with a Kurdish-led militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. As the jihadis were rolled back, the SDF seized its territory, which it sought to govern under protection from the United States, but that partnership angered Turkey, which considers the Kurdish fighters terrorists for their links to a Kurdish guerrilla organization that has been fighting the Turkish state for decades.

Call it selective amnesia, but the New York Times is acting as if Syria, Russia, and Iran had no hand at all in beating U.S-created and supported ISIS™ while thwarting part of the Yinon/PNAC plan for carving up the region.

No longer protected by the United States, the Kurds struck a deal with the Syrian government, a US enemy, to bring its forces north to protect the area.

A Kurdish official, Aldar Xelil, said in a statement Monday that the agreement would put Syrian government forces on two strips along the border, but not in a section where Kurdish fighters are currently battling the Turks. The government forces would defend the border against the Turks, he said, while the Kurdish-led administration would continue to oversee governance and internal security in the region, but much about the agreement remained unclear, and the Syrian state news media made no mention of it in its coverage of Syrian troops seizing towns and being welcomed by locals chanting in support of Assad.

Making one wonder if there was a deal or not, or whether it is more face-saving disinformation from the war-promoting pre$$?

About 1,000 US troops serve on a number of bases throughout northeastern Syria, but Trump’s orders will remove the troops over the next few weeks, sending them, at least initially, to Iraq. From there, they could be repositioned to other neighboring countries such as Jordan or Lebanon, or head back to the United States, military officials said.

So he is really doing it, huh?

For now, the Pentagon plans to leave 150 Special Operations forces at a base called al-Tanf, in southern Syria.

Oh, not completely. 

That means the illegal presence of U.S. troops on Syrian soil shall continue.

Trump administration officials had long argued that the troops were needed to check the influence of Iran, Russia, and Assad; prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State; and give the United States leverage in eventual peace talks aimed at ending Syria’s war.

The administration has not explained how it plans to pursue these goals without troops or local allies in Syria.

Hassan Hassan, a Syria analyst at the Center for Global Policy, said it had become clear that Turkey and Assad had the most to gain from the US withdrawal and the reshuffling of Syria’s northeast.

I have no idea who they are; however, it looks like it is funded by Sunni Arab money (Saudi Arabia and the UAE being the prime suspects).

Despite the international condemnation, Turkey had managed to quash the dream of Kurdish-led self-rule that had been growing for years.

“This is the end or the beginning of the end of the Kurdish project in Syria,” Hassan said.

That is why there is daily front-page coverage this past week. A major portion of the agenda-pushing project has been thwarted and the separatist Kurdish leaders may get lengthy prison terms for sedition (I guess there are good separatists and bad separatists, huh?).

Thus, Kosovo and Sudan get a voice and vote while Palestine and Kashmir do not.

Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers had also won big because the United States had expended tremendous resources to defeat the Islamic State, and now Assad is poised to regain the territory.

“It is not just that you left, but that you did all this fighting on his behalf for the last five years,” Hassan said.

The biggest losers were the Kurds, who lost their foreign backers and saw their political dreams collapse, and the region’s civilians, who were now subject to yet another era of violence and uncertainty.

Talk about a vacuum. Raqqa and Mosul are still in ruins and stink do to decaying corpses with the box being opened on the era of violence with the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- the same invasion the New York Times helped promote by blaring lies from its front pages!

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"News analysis: Trump followed his gut on Syria. Calamity came fast" by David E. Sanger New York Times, October 14, 2019

Oh, my, NYT "news analysis" by another leader of the war-promoting cabal.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s acquiescence to Turkey’s move to send troops deep inside Syrian territory has in only one week’s time turned into a bloody carnage, forced the abandonment of a successful five-year-long American project to keep the peace on a volatile border, and given an unanticipated victory to four US adversaries: Russia, Iran, the Syrian government, and the Islamic State group.

One week and it is already bloody carnage!! 

One wonders, then, what the toll has been in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen all these years.

Rarely has a presidential decision resulted so immediately in what his own party leaders have described as disastrous consequences for US allies and interests. How this decision happened — springing from an “off-script moment” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in the words of a senior US diplomat — is likely to be debated for years by historians, Middle East specialists, and conspiracy theorists, but this much already is clear: Trump ignored months of warnings from his advisers about what calamities likely would ensue if he followed his instincts to pull back from Syria and abandon America’s longtime allies, the Kurds. He had no Plan B, other than to leave. The only surprise is how swiftly it all collapsed around the president and his depleted, inexperienced foreign policy team. 

Yeah, "conspiracy theorists" and historians are going to debate this for years (as if it matters), but the New York Times is going to make things perfectly clear. The final sentence more or less confirms that Bolton has been leaking like a sieve to the NYT and is behind this impeachment push. What is also left unsaid is that the entire portfolio has been left in the hands of Jared Kushner, who has also been invisible regarding the Ukraine mess.

Btw, I was surprised at how swiftly those WTC towers collapsed on 9/11.

Day after day, they have been caught off-guard, offering up differing explanations of what Trump said to Erdogan, how the United States and its allies might respond, and even whether Turkey remains a US ally. For a while, Trump said he acted because the Islamic State group was already defeated and because he was committed to terminating “endless wars” by pulling US troops out of the Middle East. By the end of the week he added 2,000 — to Saudi Arabia.

Related: US to send additional troops to Saudi Arabia to boost defenses against Iran

Yeah, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, speaking Friday at the Pentagon, said that ‘‘Iran’s attempts to use terror, intimidation, and military force to advance its interests are inconsistent with international norms,’’ and only we are allowed to do that.

Also see:

"Explosions rocked an Iranian oil tanker in the Red Sea early Friday in what the state news media described as a missile attack, raising fears about increasing tensions in an already volatile and economically crucial region. The circumstances of the attack remained murky, with conflicting reports in the state news media about whether the ship was on fire, whether an oil spill had been stopped and even whether the tanker had been hit by missiles in the first place....."

Yeah, the Iranians faked it all. 

Another classic case of propaganda projection from my pre$$, and certainly an incident that didn't garner the print of the attack on Saudi oil facilities.

Well, at least the Globe is saying the US shouldn’t take military action against Iran, but not that it is complicit in the Saudi war on Yemen. 

The focus is now on Turkey and the firestorm over limited nature of the troop relocation, not withdrawal, as Trump turns a blind eye to a slaughter of Kurds, who stand to be destroyed if Turkey follows through with its planned invasion, a situation that could quickly escalate according to Jonathan Schanzer, a Syria scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Pat Robertson says Trump is at risk of losing his ‘mandate from heaven’ -- not that that is a crime or anything -- while the Globe scolds us for having blood on our hands and Israel feels betrayed (say goodbye to the Peace Prize)!

Thus the Kurds are pummeled with the fear that the Turkish invasion will lead to genocide. Never mind the fact that it is carving out a sliver of a corridor as a buffer zone and resettlement area, and speaking of genocide.... I'm told that the endless wars must continue, but only from Over-the-Horizon, a strategy that has proved successful, though it has not received the recognition it deserves. Since 2001, using just such a strategy, the United States toppled the Taliban and kicked Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan; weakened and fragmented Al Qaeda in Pakistan; reduced Al Shabab’s territorial control in Somalia; and eliminated the Islamic State’s operational sanctuaries in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2018 (if so, why do we need to stay?). Of course, the likelihood of an ISIS resurgence remains hard to gauge, since the Syrian Kurdish leadership may have exaggerated some incidents to catch the West’s attention, and Kurdish militias are now allying with the Syrian government and its Russian allies in the absence of support from their former US allies. Nevertheless, it is a “stain on the American conscience.”

As usual, the Democrats are silent (they must be deaf or dead) on the matter -- other than Sanders, who said that  “some way or another, we are going to have to include serious discussion of foreign policy,” a polite way of saying we must confront our militarism and empire if we are to advance in any way, while the Republicans are even worse. They claim to be  reviving the American Dream (you better get this down) and bringing about the New American Dream in wake of the failure of the American Dream.

At least you know whom to blame.

One day he was inviting Erdogan to visit the White House; the next he was threatening to “totally destroy and obliterate” Turkey’s economy if it crossed a line that he never defined.

Erdogan just kept going.

Trump’s error, some aides concede in off-the-record conversations, was entering the Oct. 6 call underprepared and then failing to spell out for Erdogan the potential consequences — from economic sanctions to a dimunition of Turkey’s alliance with the United States and its standing in NATO. He has since threatened both, retroactively, but it is not clear Erdogan believes either is a real risk.

More off-the-record conversations leaked by turncoats, traitors, and Deep State operatives showing up in the pre$$ regarding his telephone calls. Better release the transcript.

The drama is nowhere near over. Out of necessity, the Kurds switched sides Sunday, turning their backs on Washington and signing up with President Bashar Assad of Syria, a man the United States has called a war criminal for gassing his own people. At the Pentagon, officials struggled with the right response if Turkish forces — NATO allies — opened fire on any of the 1,000 or so Americans now preparing to retreat from their positions inside Syria. Those troops are trapped for now, since Turkey has cut off the roads; removing them may require an airlift, and over the weekend, State and Energy department officials were quietly reviewing plans for evacuating roughly 50 tactical nuclear weapons that the United States had long stored, under US control, at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, according to two US officials.

Oh, it's a DRAMA, is it?

Yup, our nuclear weapons could be captured and used as hostages! 

Who knows? 

Erdogan might even give on to ISIS so they can mushroom-cloud Chicago!

Those weapons, one senior official said, were now essentially Erdogan’s hostages. To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance. To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago.

In other words, Obama was negligent -- especially after the 2016 coup attempt that failed.

“I think this is a first — a country with US nuclear weapons stationed in it literally firing artillery at US forces,” Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies wrote last week.

For his part, Erdogan claims nuclear ambitions of his own: Only a month ago, speaking to supporters, he said he “cannot accept” rules that keep Turkey from possessing nuclear weapons of its own.

“There is no developed nation in the world that doesn’t have them,” he said. (In fact, most do not.)

OMG!

“This president keeps blindsiding our military and diplomatic leaders and partners with impulsive moves like this that benefit Russia and authoritarian regimes,” said Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island and longtime member of the Armed Services Committee.

“If this president were serious about ending wars and winning peace, he’d actually articulate a strategy that would protect against a re-emergence of ISIS and provide for the safety of our Syrian partners,” Reed added. “But he has repeatedly failed to do that. Instead, this is another example of Donald Trump creating chaos, undermining US interests and benefiting Russia and the Assad regime.”

The other major beneficiary is Iran, perhaps Trump’s most talked-about geo-political foe, which has long supported the Syrian regime and sought freer rein across the country, but none of that appeared to have been anticipated by Trump, who has no fondness for briefing books and meetings in the Situation Room intended to game out events two or three moves ahead. Instead, he often talks about trusting his instincts.

“My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me,” he said late last year. He was discussing the Federal Reserve, but could just as easily been talking foreign policy; in 2017 he told a reporter, right after his first meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, that it was his “gut feel” for how to deal with foreign leaders, honed over years in the real estate world, that guided him. “Foreign policy is what I’ll be remembered for,” he said, but in this case the failure to look around corners has blown up on him at a speed that is rare in foreign policy and national security.

Did he look into Putin's soul like Bush, who also operated on gut instinct?

It was at that point that the print copy ended. The web version added this:

The closest analogue may date back to 1950, during Harry Truman’s administration, when Secretary of State Dean Acheson described America’s new “defense perimeter” in a speech, saying it ran from southern Japan through the Philippines. That left out the Korean Peninsula, and two weeks later, Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, appeared to have given Kim Il Sung, grandfather of the current North Korean leader, permission to launch his invasion of the South. The bloody stalemate that followed lives with the United States today.

At the time, the United States kept a token force in South Korea, akin to the one parked along the Turkish-Syrian border, and it is impossible to know whether the North Korean attack would have been launched even without Acheson’s failure to warn about US action if a vulnerable ally was attacked — just as it is impossible to know if Erdogan would have sent his troops over the border if that phone call, and Trump’s failure to object, had never happened.

It was Trump himself who, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, blamed President Obama for a similar error. “President Obama and Secretary Clinton created a vacuum the way they got out of Iraq,” he said, referring to the 2011 withdrawal. “They shouldn’t have been in, but once they got in, the way they got out was a disaster. And ISIS was formed.”

Even his allies see the parallel. “If I didn’t see Donald Trump’s name on the tweet I thought it would be Obama’s rationale for getting out of Iraq,” Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders in recent years, but among his harshest Republican critics for the Syria decision, said last week.

He's an AIPAC attack dog.

As James F. Jeffrey, who worked for Obama as ambassador to Turkey, then to Iraq, and now serves as Trump’s special envoy for Syria, noted several years ago, it’s debatable whether events would have played out differently if the United States had stayed in Iraq.

“Could a residual force have prevented ISIS’ victories?” he asked in a Wall Street Journal essay five years ago. “With troops we would have had better intelligence on Al Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS, a more attentive Washington, and no doubt a better-trained Iraqi army, but the common argument that U.S. troops could have produced different Iraqi political outcomes is hogwash. The Iraqi sectarian divides, which ISIS exploited, run deep and were not susceptible to permanent remedy by our troops at their height, let alone by 5,000 trainers under Iraqi restraints.”

Trump may now be left to make the same argument about Syria: That nothing could have stopped Erdogan, that the Russians would benefit in any case, that there are other ways to push back at Iran. Perhaps history will side with him.

For now, however, he has given up most of what little leverage he had.

He's just bumbling around, isn't he?

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Of course, who could ever question the veracity of the AmeriKan pre$$?

"NBC News hits back against Ronan Farrow’s ‘Catch and Kill’ book" by Tiffany Hsu New York Times, October 14, 2019

NBC News pushed back against investigative journalist Ronan Farrow on Monday, denying his allegations that the network tried to conceal complaints about former “Today” host Matt Lauer and obstruct Farrow’s reporting into film mogul Harvey Weinstein.

“We have no secrets and nothing to hide,” NBC News president Noah Oppenheim wrote in an extensive memo, which was sent to employees of NBC News and MSNBC in response to reporting in Farrow’s new book, “Catch and Kill.”

Oppenheim, who is portrayed in the book as failing to understand the newsworthiness of Farrow’s investigation into sexual misconduct allegations involving Weinstein, described the reporting in it as a “smear” and a “conspiracy theory.”

OMG! 

They are throwing that term around so often now it has lost its meaning as well as having the opposite effect of that they intend. Must be something to the charge then.

Farrow has also blamed the NBC News chairman Andrew Lack for impeding his reporting on Weinstein. Farrow left the network in 2017 and later won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the story, which was published in The New Yorker.

And yet somehow, the New York Times gets credit for breaking the story even after they sat on it for thirteen years. Not only that, they minimized Epstein at the time and suppressed Bush spying until after the 2004 election. They have also brought you the Gulf of Tonkin lie, the babies thrown out of Kuwait incubators lie, and the Iraq has WMD lie, and now seem more intent on promoting books by their reporters and calling it news.

Farrow’s book, which is expected to be released Tuesday, contains new details about the circumstances of Lauer’s firing in November 2017, which followed a complaint of sexual misconduct against him. Farrow spoke to a woman, Brooke Nevils, who said that Lauer anally raped her in 2014, which Lauer has denied and characterized as a consensual encounter.

You gotta believe the woman. 

When is his trial?

Appearing on “CBS This Morning” Monday, Farrow said his book “is an extraordinarily, meticulously fact-checked work of investigative journalism” and that he is “very confident” in his reporting.

Unlike what you will find in any newspaper.

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Related:

"A counterterrorism analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency has been charged with leaking top-secret details about foreign countries’ weapons systems to two journalists, including a reporter with whom he was apparently romantically involved, federal authorities said Wednesday. Henry Frese, 30, of Alexandria, Va., ‘‘was caught red-handed disclosing sensitive national security information,’’ the Justice Department said. His motive apparently was to advance the career of the female reporter with whom he had a relationship, the FBI said. Frese allegedly passed additional top secret information to one of the woman’s colleagues at ‘‘an affiliated but different news outlet.’’ Frese, who had a high-level security clearance, was arrested Wednesday morning."

It wasn't Ali Watkins, was it?

The latest leaker is obviously Bolton. I mean, right after he gets fired the leaks begin and impeachment heats up. Real subtle. Trump should have adopted LBJ's philosophy regarding Hoover. Better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

"President Trump says he’ll ‘‘be looking into’’ the case of a US financial adviser charged with killing a hotel worker while on a family vacation in Anguilla after the man’s wife appeared on the ‘‘Fox & Friends’’ morning show and urged Trump to intervene. Trump tweeted shortly after the segment that, ‘‘Something looks and sounds very wrong.’’ He says: ‘‘I know Anguilla will want to see this case be properly and justly resolved!’’ Scott Hapgood and his family were on vacation when they say a hotel worker showed up at their room unannounced and demanded money before attacking them on April 13. An autopsy report shows the victim, 27-year-old Kenny Mitchel of Dominica, died of positional asphyxia and received blunt force injuries to his torso and other areas."

He just can't help interfering, can he?

White House says Trump ‘strongly condemns’ violent video attacking media

The video was played at a conference for Trump’s supporters at Trump National Doral Miami last week, and somehow the New York Times on Sunday obtained footage of the video.

Made me wonder what Kathy Griffin is up to these days, but there are cases where shouting you down and threatening you is approved!

Trump should just resign already (that would be above the fold front page news).