Month: October 2017

The United States delivered two A-29 Super Tucano light-attack aircraft to Lebanon’s army on Tuesday, a sign of continued U.S. support despite Israeli accusations that the Lebanese military is controlled by Hezbollah.

The planes will be used as armed observation aircraft, a security source in Lebanon said, and represent a big upgrade for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF).

Earlier this month, U.S. ally Israel said Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shi’ite Muslim movement, had gained control over Lebanon’s conventional military, a charge the Lebanese army denies.

Hezbollah, which was designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department in 1997, last fought Israel in a war in 2006. Lebanon is formally in a state of war with Israel.

“The significant increase in LAF combat capability that this aircraft represents will ensure that the LAF will remain a national unifying force, a bulwark against extremism and terrorism,” said U.S. Ambassador Elizabeth Richard.

The Islamic State militant group held a pocket of land straddling Lebanon’s border with Syria until August.

Over the last decade, the U.S. government has invested over $1.5 billion in training and equipment, and has trained over 32,000 Lebanese troops, Richard said.

“We have recently announced another $120 million in foreign military financing, which brings the total investment in the LAF to over $160 million just this year,” she said. The United States will deliver another four Super Tucanos to Lebanon.

The two new aircraft — which have advanced combat and surveillance capabilities — will “make a qualitative leap in improving the aerial capabilities of the LAF,” said Lebanese Army Commander General Joseph Aoun.
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The White House said Tuesday that President Donald Trump has developed a “warm rapport” with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte even though the Manila leader has verbally attacked the United States in profane terms.

A senior Trump administration official, talking about details of Trump’s five-nation Asia visit that starts Friday and includes a stop in Manila, said Trump and Duterte have become friendly during telephone conversations and exchanges of letters.

“I think there’s a warm rapport there and he’s very much looking forward to his first in-person meeting with President Duterte,” the official said. Their meeting is scheduled on the last stop of Trump’s 12-day trip that includes visits to Japan, South Korea, China and Vietnam.

Anti-drug campaign praised

Duterte has alleged that the U.S., despite its long-standing alliance with the Philippines, has treated it “like a dog,” and a year ago, before Trump assumed power, announced a “separation” from the U.S. The Philippine leader was angered that the administration of former President Barack Obama voiced objections to the country’s extrajudicial killings of people involved in drug transactions.

But Trump, in a May call to Duterte, praised his anti-drug campaign, saying Duterte was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”

The White House official said, “The amount of cooperation that’s taking place below the leader level, made possible by our long-standing relationship and alliance with the Philippines, is still very robust. And that expands to areas like counter-terror, all of the close people-to-people ties between the countries, and human rights as well. The president will have frank and friendly discussions in his first meeting with Mr. Duterte.”

Elsewhere on his trip, Trump is planning to advance efforts to force North Korea to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and pushing countries in the region to adhere to United Nations sanctions to limit trade with Pyongyang that it needs to fund its missile and nuclear tests.

No DMZ visit

But the White House official said Trump, unlike some other U.S. presidents, “is not going to visit the DMZ,” the heavily armed buffer zone between North and South Korea.

He said, “There’s not enough time in his schedule. It would have had to be DMZ or Camp Humphreys,” a military base south of Seoul, the South Korean capital, to highlight the military cooperation between the U.S. and South Korea.

“No president has visited Camp Humphreys, and we thought that that made more sense in terms of its messaging, in terms of a chance to address families and troops there,” the official said.

“It’s becoming a little bit of a cliche, frankly” to visit the DMZ, the official said, noting that Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all visited the buffer zone this year.
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A bipartisan pair of U.S. senators plans to introduce legislation on Tuesday seeking to boost the cyber defenses of state election systems, after warnings from senior U.S. officials that future elections may be vulnerable to foreign interference.

The Securing America’s Voting Equipment, or SAVE, Act is the latest attempt by lawmakers to respond to what U.S. intelligence agencies say was a multi-pronged cyber operation, including hacking and online propaganda by Russia during the 2016 presidential election aimed at helping President Donald Trump.

Moscow has repeatedly denied the accusations.

The bill will be introduced by Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich and Republican Senator Susan Collins, a Heinrich spokeswoman said. It does not currently have other co-sponsors.

“Until we set up stronger protections of our election systems and take the necessary steps to prevent future foreign influence campaigns, our nation’s democratic institutions will remain vulnerable,” Heinrich said in a statement.

The SAVE Act would authorize the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to grant security clearance to the top election official in each state in addition to one other designee. It would also allow the DNI to share some classified information with the states about threats to their voting systems.

Several state election officials have complained that they were left in the dark about Russia’s attempts to probe their voting systems during the 2016 campaign.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not notify 21 states it said had been targeted by Russian until last month, in part due to confidentiality and classification restrictions.

The DHS in January designated voting systems as a critical part of the nation’s infrastructure, making state elections eligible for more federal protections.

The legislation would write that designation into law, and also create a grant program for states to upgrade their systems to better fend off physical and cyber threats.

It was not clear whether the bill would gain momentum in an otherwise gridlocked Congress.

 
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U.S. officials say special operations forces have captured a militant who was instrumental in the attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. The attack resulted in the death of the American ambassador to the country.

The officials say U.S. commandos captured the unidentified man in Libya and are transporting him back to the U.S. The officials say the mission was approved by President Donald Trump and done in coordination with Libya’s internationally recognized government.

The officials weren’t authorized to speak on the matter and demanded anonymity.

The September 2012 assault killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

The attack was the fodder of multiple congressional investigations to determine what went wrong and whether the Obama administration misled the public on the details of the bloody assault.
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When real estate mogul Donald Trump was running for the U.S. presidency, a young foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, attempted to arrange a meeting between Russian government officials and the Trump campaign. Trump, in an interview at the time, described Papadopoulos as “an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy.”

The would-be Trump-Russia meeting never occurred. But on Monday, however, special counsel Robert Mueller disclosed that Papadopoulos pleaded guilty earlier this month to lying to agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the timing and importance of his contacts with “an overseas professor.” He understood this person to have “substantial connections” to Russian officials that had “dirt” on Trump’s election challenger, Democrat Hillary Clinton, and to communications with “a certain female Russian national” believed to be a niece of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Papadopoulos, according to his guilty plea to a criminal information, told FBI agents in a January 27 interview that his contacts with the London professor came before he joined the Trump campaign and that his contacts with the Russian woman were casual and inconsequential, both of which prosecutors said were lies.

The prosecution’s statement of the case against Papadopoulos said he “made numerous false statements and omitted material facts” about his contacts with the professor and the Russian woman and a connection with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

U.S. Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the Papadopoulos guilty plea “is just the latest in a series of undisclosed contacts, misleading public statements, potentially compromising information, and highly questionable actions from the time of the Trump campaign that together, remain a cause for deep concern and continued investigation.”

Papadopoulos graduated in 2009 from DePaul University in Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in political science and government, then earned a master’s degree from University College London and the London School of Economics. He later worked for the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, from 2011 to 2015 before joining the unsuccessful Republican presidential campaign of Dr. Ben Carson, whom Trump later named as his housing secretary.

After Trump took office, Papadopoulos worked as an independent oil, gas and policy consultant.

With his guilty plea, Papadopoulos faces up to five years’ imprisonment and a $250,000 fine, but his sentence could be substantially less if he testifies about his contacts with Trump campaign officials that are described in the statement of his actions.

WATCH: What is an indictment?
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A U.S. court has blocked President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military.

“The effect of the Court’s Order is to revert to the status quo with regard to accession and retention that existed before the issuance of the Presidential Memorandum,” the order filed by United States District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly read, referring to policies in place before Trump’s June 30 executive order banning transgenders from serving in the military.

The judge did, however, dismiss plaintiffs’ motion to block a ban on funding for sex reassignment surgery.

The case was brought by a group of transgender service members who asked the court to block the ban while it considers whether it violates their constitutional rights.

In August, the Trump administration sent a memo to the Department of Defense directing it to implement the ban.

The policy would give the Pentagon the ability to expel military members based on a standard of whether they could be deployed to war zones or take part in other missions. It would also deny admittance to new transgender people who want to join the military, and would end spending for medical treatment related to sexual reassignment for current transgender service members.

Trump, in his tweets, based his decision on what he said were the “tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

The move came a year after the Pentagon under former President Barack Obama announced transgender military members would be allowed to serve openly.
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The governor of Puerto Rico, the U.S. territory that was devastated by a hurricane a month ago, called Sunday for the immediate cancellation of a contract to restore electrical power to the Caribbean island as questions grow about the small company that was awarded the work.

Governor Ricardo Rossello said the board of the island’s power company should rescind the $300 million pact with Whitefish Energy Holdings, an upstart repair company in Montana, a western U.S. state, even though just days ago he defended the contract. The island awarded the contract without a normal public bidding process that would have allowed other companies to compete for the work.

He said the contract with Whitefish Energy had become a distraction after critics in the electric power industry, Congress and the Federal Emergency Management Agency raised questions.

Rossello said that at least $8 million has been paid to Whitefish so far, but “there cannot be any kind of distraction that alters the commitment to restore electrical power as soon as possible in Puerto Rico.”

He asked that power crews from New York and Florida be dispatched to help restore power.

Some Democratic lawmakers in Washington questioned what influence the administration of President Donald Trump might have played in the awarding of the contract. Whitefish is based in the Montana town of the same name, which also is the hometown of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva of Arizona said, “Congress needs to understand why the Whitefish contract was awarded and whether other, more cost-effective options were available.” Some critics of the deal with the for-profit company say the island should have opted to use a mutual-aid network of public utilities that usually are called on for massive repair work after natural disasters.

The Department of Homeland Security says its has started an investigation of the awarding of the contract and will look for any “inappropriate relationships.”

The Associated Press obtained Whitefish’s contract, which called for payments of $20,277 an hour for a heavy lift Chinook helicopter, $650 an hour for a large crane truck, $322 an hour for a foreman of a power line crew, $319 an hour for a journeyman lineman and $286 an hour for a mechanic. Each worker also gets a daily allowance of $80 for food, $332 for a hotel room and $1,000 for each flight to or from the U.S. mainland.

Whitefish, which had just two employees when it won the contract, but since hired more than 300, had started work on restoring electrical power to the island, where only about 30 percent of the island’s 3.7 million residents have had power since Hurricane Maria ravaged the territory and decimated its electrical grid system.

Rossello has said he hopes the island will have most of its power grid back in operation by the end of the year, but if bidding is opened for the repairs that could push back restoration of power.
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Washington is bracing for the first criminal charges linked to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, even as President Donald Trump continued to claim Sunday the investigations are a “Witch Hunt for evil politics.”

A federal grand jury on Friday approved charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to several major news outlets, and the allegations could be disclosed Monday, with a suspect taken into custody.

It was not immediately known who is being targeted or the nature of the charges. They are under seal, by order of a federal judge.

But the allegations would mark a significant milestone in Trump’s nine-month White House tenure. He has often disparaged the investigations, Mueller’s and three congressional probes, into links between his campaign and Russia, arguing they are attempts by Democrats to explain his stunning upset of his challenger, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In a Twitter comment last week, Trump contended, “It is now commonly agreed, after many months of COSTLY looking, that there was NO collusion between Russia and Trump. Was collusion with HC!,” referring to Clinton.

On Sunday, he said he had “never seen such Republican ANGER & UNITY as I have concerning the lack of investigation on Clinton” into her campaign’s funding of research into Trump’s links to Russia, which was started by a conservative news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon, and later continued by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee at what he suggested was a cost of $12 million.

A former British intelligence officer was hired for the investigation and produced what Trump said was a “Fake dossier” about his business ties to Russia, as well as making unsubstantiated claims linking him to Moscow prostitutes.

Trump said Republicans are also angry at the lack of probes into a 2013 uranium deal in which Russia took control of 20 percent of the U.S. production and purported links to funding of Clinton’s charitable foundation, the involvement of former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey in probing Clinton’s handling of classified material on her private e-mail server when she was the country’s top diplomat from 2009 to 2013, “and so much more.

“Instead they look at phony Trump/Russia ‘collusion,’ which doesn’t exist,” Trump said. “The Dems are using this terrible [and bad for our country] Witch Hunt for evil politics, but the R’s are now fighting back like never before. There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out. DO SOMETHING!”

The U.S. intelligence community concluded in early 2017 that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed a campaign to undermine U.S. democracy and help Trump win. But none of the months-long probes has been completed yet or reached conclusions, contrary to Trump’s contention.

In addition to examining the Russian involvement, Mueller is probing whether Trump obstructed justice when he fired Comey, who was heading the agency’s Russia investigation before Mueller, a former FBI director, was named to take over.

Trump has said he was thinking of “this Russia thing” when he decided to dismiss Comey last May and a day later boasted to Russian officials in a White House meeting that he had removed “great pressure” from his presidency by ousting Comey. He described Comey as “crazy, a real nut job.”

But days later, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named Mueller to lead the investigation after Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself, much to Trump’s chagrin, from handling any aspect of the Russia investigation.

Legal experts say the first charges could be against a peripheral figure in the case, with prosecutors using a common strategy to first build their case against lower level officials before focusing on more prominent people.

CNN reported lawyers working on Mueller’s team were seen entering the federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., on Friday, where the grand jury meets to hear testimony.

Mueller is believed to be examining activities of two key Trump campaign officials, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired by Trump less than a month after he assumed power for lying to Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to Washington, and Michael Manafort, who for a short time last year was Trump’s campaign manager and also had wide lobbying interests in Ukraine and links to Russia.

Some Republicans have begun to call for an end to the investigations, but one key Republican lawmaker, Congressman Trey Gowdy, told Fox News Sunday he would encourage members of his party to give Mueller “a chance to do his job. He hasn’t done anything to cause a lack of confidence in him… he is a pretty apolitical guy.” Gowdy said he opposes cutting Mueller’s funding for the investigation.

Gowdy, as chairman of the House of Representatives government oversight panel, last week opened an investigation into Comey’s and the FBI’s handling of its probe into Clinton’s use of the private email server.
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As President Donald Trump prepares for a 10-day trip to Asia, his first to the region since taking office, one of the region’s leaders brought to Washington last week insights that potentially represent sentiments held not just by his government.

Lee Hsien Loong — eldest son of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister, and a successor to the position his father held for decades — told audiences in the U.S. capital that the emerging geostrategic landscape of the Asia Pacific depends not only on internal dynamics, but also on U.S. intention and action.

At a White House ceremony, Lee told Trump that Singapore, “like many other countries,” watches U.S.-China relations “very closely.”

Trump leaves for the region Nov. 3.

​Presence and preparedness

Lee, Singapore’s prime minister since 2004, alluded to the geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China while speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington think tank.

He stressed the importance of the U.S. to maintain a strategic presence where such presence is called for.

“If you’re not there, everybody else in the world will look around and say, ‘I want to be friends with both the U.S. and the Chinese, and the Chinese are ready, I’ll start with them,’” he told the audience.

Lee, who is fluent in English, Mandarin Chinese and Malay, three of Singapore’s four official languages, visits Washington often, and also makes periodic trips to Beijing, including one just last month. 

Lee said Chinese officials perceive the current U.S. administration as demonstrating gong-li-zhu-yi, a term that may be best translated as placing an overriding premium on profitability. While the phrase sounds slightly derogatory, it may also indicate that Chinese officials see Trump as wanting to see results, not just empty talk.

‘Westerners can be inscrutable, too’

In another observation he shared, Lee said the Chinese don’t quite know what to make of Trump or of U.S. foreign policy under the current administration.

“They’re not quite sure how to figure you out, they’re looking for a way to understand you,” Lee said of his counterparts in Beijing. “If you find them inscrutable, you must realize Westerners can be inscrutable, too!”

Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) drew worldwide attention with the 19th Party Congress.

During the weeklong event, which marked the end of Xi’s first five-year term, the CCP agreed not only to give Xi a second term, but to add his political “thoughts” to its constitution, putting him on par with the country’s founder Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, who set China on a path for economic reform.

Western media covered the event in depth. President Trump even took note of Xi’s “extraordinary elevation” (via a tweet).

Xi seeks to extend influence to 2050

“The era he [Xi] envisages extends to not just the next five, or even 10, years, [encompassing] two terms, but extending to 2050, and taking China to 100 years after the revolution,” Prime Minister Lee said, referring to the time that will have lapsed from 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party officially defeated the Kuomintang (KMT) Party in a drawn-out civil war.

Xi’s illuminations, together with those of his predecessors, now bear the historical responsibility of ensuring China’s enrichment and empowerment for decades, if not centuries, to come, if all goes according to the party’s plan. 

How China’s Xi will wield his newly sanctioned power at home and abroad is being watched closely from a variety of vantage points, not the least of which being Taiwan.

In November 2015, Singapore hosted a meeting between leaders of China and Taiwan. Asked if his country may once again facilitate such a dialogue, Lee said, “We have a very limited role.” He described Singapore’s hosting of the 2015 meeting between Xi and Taiwan’s then-President Ma Ying-jeou: “Our job was to provide the room and tea cups, that’s it!”

Given the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Taiwan’s current ruling party and their equally intransigent counterparts on the mainland, Lee said his opinion was: “The best you can hope for is a standoff.”

​‘In politics, no party remains in power forever’

During Lee’s discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, one audience member, who had praised Lee’s knowledge of details, asked, “You stated that ‘in politics, no party remains in power forever,’ does that apply to Singapore?”

“I’m sure it does. I don’t know when it will happen, but I will not want to make it happen sooner than it needs to,” he quickly said, before shifting his gaze and attention to the next questioner.

Lee, 65, has been at the head of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and has been prime minister since 2004. His late father, Lee Kuan Yew, co-founded PAP in 1954 and was prime minister of the Southeast Asian nation-state from 1965 to 1990 and remained a powerful figure until a few years before he passed away, in 2015.
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