by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 16, 2016 | Initiative
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan, said on June 16 that the United States and its allies have made gains against Islamic State but that the the group will change its tactics to make up for lost territory.
“To compensate for territorial losses, ISIL (Islamic State) will probably rely more on guerrilla tactics, including high-profile attacks outside territory it holds,” Mr. Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
He also said that there are more ISIS fighters now than there were al-Qaida fighters at that terror group’s height.
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by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 16, 2016 | Initiative
A 54-page report entitled “Taking Sides,’’ compiled by the Syria Campaign, an advocacy group opposed to the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, denounces the United Nations for allegedly taking the side of the Assad regime in the Syrian Civil War. It is signed by more than 50 Syrian civil-society organizations and uses interviews with current and former U.N. officials as well as Syrians in besieged areas and humanitarian workers.
The report says that the U.N. abandoned its neutrality by yielding to the demands of Assad’s regime, including letting it veto aid deliveries to rebel-held areas besieged by Assad’s forces.
The report accuses the UN of prioritizing its cooperation with the Syrian government “at all costs,” allowing the diversion of billions of dollars of international aid to one side of the conflict and thus killing civilians in besieged areas that have been denied access to food and medicine.
The report urges U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to set “red lines’’ for its humanitarian operations in Syria or withdraw its cooperation with the Assad government. The report’s writers assert that the organization’s failures have tarnished its legacy and let the regime use starvation as a weapon.
“There has been a systematic failure in the U.N.-led response,” said Roger Hearn, the former head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency office in Damascus, who ran the organization during the first year of the conflict, which started in 2011.
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by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 15, 2016 | News
Amidst fears about Islamist mass-murderers getting into the European Union via Turkey, that nation has missed a E.U. deadline that if Turkey had met it would have allowed its citizens visa-free travel through most of Europe.
E.U. leaders had conditionally promised the Turkish government that 79 million Turks would get access to Europe’s 26-country border-free Schengen travel zone by this month, as part of a controversial bargain on migration. But that depended on Turkey meeting 72 E.U. conditions on border security and fundamental human rights, including changes to increasingly authoritarian Turkey’s tough anti-terrorism laws.
Intensifying European worries is that Islamist terrorists can sometimes make their way from Syria and Iraq across Turkey and then into Europe.
Still, E.U. officials are expected to approve the opening of negotiations on one part of Turkish E.U. membership talks, which some people call a charade.
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by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 15, 2016 | Initiative
Belgian and French police are on the watch for the possibility that small groups of Islamist terrorists may have left Syria the aim of staging mass murders in the two European nations. But they still don’t know how serious the threat may be.
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by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 15, 2016 | AI World Society Summit
(June 21st, 2016) The Democratic National Committee has disclosed that Russian government hackers penetrated the DNC’s computer network to get into the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
DNC officials and security experts said that the intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also could read all e-mail and chat traffic, reported The Washington Post.
Russian spies have been hard at work targeting U.S. candidates, especially Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and political parties. But details on those cases were not available, The Post reported.
Inevitably, Russian government spokesman Dmitri Peskov denied the reports.
“I completely rule out a possibility that the [Russian] government or the government bodies have been involved in this.’’
Russian government hackers are considered the best in world at industrial espionage, intellectual-property theft and cyberwar (as against Ukraine and Estonia), followed by the Chinese. The theft of opposition research on Mr. Trump might be considered a bit ironic since he has lauded Russian President Vladimir Putin for his strong leadership style. Mr. Putin has become Russia’s de-facto dictator in recent years.
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