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Strange media silence after Vindman testified he was offered job of Ukraine Minister of Defense 3 times By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on November 20th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/strange_media_silence_after_vindman_testified_he_was_offered_job_of_ukraine_minister_of_defense_3_times.html

How is this not the major story coming out of the House Intelligence Committee “impeachment inquiry” hearings yesterday? A United States military officer serving in the White House with responsibilities for relations a foreign country being offered the post of minister of defense of that country is shocking.

Yet, yesterday’s testimony by Lt.Col. Alexander Vindman that he was offered the position of Minister of Defense of Ukraine is not the subject of banner headlines today.

Vindman duly reported the offer up his chain of command, as any such offer must be reported. The fact that 2 other embassy staffers witting with him when the offer was made, as he subsequently noted, made that report inescapable. He says that he did not take it seriously, calling it “somewhat comical” and “funny.” And the former Ukrainian official who made the offer, Oleksander Danylyuk, the former Chairman of the National Security and Defence Council in Ukraine, now claims it was made in jest. Erin Banc of The Daily Beast:

[A]  former top national security official in Ukraine told The Daily Beast that he was “joking” when he offered Vindman the post and never actually had the authority to make such an offer.

Oleksander Danylyuk, the former Chairman of the National Security and Defence Council in Ukraine, said he only remembers speaking with Vindman once about the defense minister position. He said it he and Vindman had engaged in a light-hearted conversation about how the two used to live close to one another in the former Soviet Union. It was then that Danylyuk jokingly told Vindman that he should take the defense minister job in Ukraine. 

“We both smiled and laughed,” Danylyuk said. “It was clearly a joke.” Danylyuk said he wouldn’t have been able to seriously offer Vindman the position without direct sign off from President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

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Pompeo Busts the ‘Occupation’ Myth The claim that Israeli settlements are illegal was flimsy in 1978 and is ridiculous in 2019. By Eugene Kontorovich

Posted By on November 20th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pompeo-busts-the-occupation-myth-11574207220

Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not violate international law. That is now America’s official view, announced Monday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The historic decision repudiates the conclusions of a 1978 State Department memorandum.

For decades, Israel’s detractors have appealed to consensus, asserting that settlements are illegal because the entire international community agrees they are illegal. As with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the Trump administration has refused to be cowed by a hollow consensus. By dissenting, the U.S. has destroyed both the consensus and the frail arguments that relied on it.

The four-page 1978 memo, written by legal adviser Herbert Hansell, was hardly a thorough study. It painted with broad strokes across several issues and cited no precedent for its key conclusions. Most important, its legal analysis of occupation and settlements has never been applied, by the U.S. or anyone else, to any other comparable situation.

Hansell’s memo took two analytic steps. First, it concluded that Israel was an “occupying power” in the West Bank. Next, it invoked an obscure provision of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which says the “Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Hansell concluded that Jews who have moved past the Green Line into disputed territory have somehow been “deported or transferred” there by the state of Israel.

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Israel strikes Iranian military targets in Syria

Posted By on November 20th, 2019

https://worldisraelnews.com/israel-says-it-struck-iranian-military-targets-in-syria/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=push_notification&utm_campaign=vwo_notification_1574240011&vwo_powered=1

“The attack took place in response to the launching of rockets by an Iranian force from Syrian territory into Israeli territory,” says the IDF. 

Israel Air Force fighter jets attacked in Syria overnight, striking “dozens of military targets” belonging to the Iranian Quds Force and Syrian army, according to the Israeli army spokesman on Wednesday.

“The targets included surface-to-air missiles, command headquarters, weapons depots, and military bases,” said the Israeli military in a statement on Twitter.

“The attack was carried out in response to the launching of rockets by an Iranian force from Syrian territory into Israeli territory and an intent to cause damage in Israeli territory,” the statement added.

“We, as a military, will not allow Iran to entrench in Syria. We will not put up with Iranian entrenchment on our border and will stand up against it,” vowed the IDF spokesman.

The Israeli military also released a map which illustrated the locations of the targets which the Israeli jets struck, most near the Syrian capital of Damascus, but also close to the Syrian-Israeli border.

The IDF said that the attacks from Syria had come on Tuesday morning.

“Four rockets were fired at us,” said the statement on Twitter, adding that they were “intercepted by Iron Dome [air defense] batteries.”

The Israeli military says that it is “prepared for an attack and any scenario,” but that in the meantime, Israeli citizens living in the northern part of the country near the Syrian border could proceed with their daily routines.

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Malley in Wonderland How Obama’s ‘progressive’ foreign policy vision—to backpedal away from the Middle East, fast, while kicking our former allies in the region to the curb—became consensus in D.C. By Tony Badran

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/293996/malley-in-wonderlandLast month, Robert Malley, the former senior White House official who served as point man for President Barack Obama’s realignment strategy, published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “The Unwanted Wars: Why the Middle East Is More Combustible Than Ever,” in which he laid out what he sees as the future of Obama’s foreign policy legacy. The piece came out in the aftermath of Iran’s attack on Saudi oil facilities, and not long after the Iranians shot down a U.S. drone—two highly aggressive events that went without any visible military response from the Trump administration. Yet the main conceit of Malley’s essay is a warning against “war with Iran.” The only alternative to “war with Iran” is presented as diplomatic engagement, the apex of which is Obama’s Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). By unwinding the deal that Obama struck with the Iranian mullahs, the piece contends, the Trump administration’s regional posture sets the U.S. on an inexorable course toward war—whether the U.S. itself takes any kind of military action or not. 

“As long as its regional posture remains as it is,” Malley wrote, “the United States will be just one poorly-timed or dangerously-aimed Houthi drone strike, or one particularly effective Israeli operation against a Shiite militia, away from its next costly regional entanglement.” 

What America should, and must, do when confronted with such a tinderbox is obvious: backpedal away, fast, while kicking our former allies in the region to the curb, hard. The sentence warning of the dangers of Houthi drone strikes and effective Israeli operations encapsulates an attitude perhaps best captured in former Vice President Joseph Biden’s famous line: “Our biggest problem was our allies.” 

America’s allies are a problem, Malley, Biden, and other Obama administration policy kingpins–starting with Obama himself—have publicly stated, because of their capacity to involve the U.S. in a costly regional entanglement with Iran. In other words, America’s allies are actually our enemies. In particular, Saudi Arabia, with its reckless war in Yemen, and Israel, with its aggression against Iranian assets in Syria, Iraq, and  throughout the region, represent the “war” side of the equation—while Iran, the enemy of our allies, represents “peace.” The U.S. has a set of choices for how to engage the region: “diplomatically or militarily, by exacerbating divides or mitigating them, and by aligning itself fully with one side or seeking to achieve a sort of balance.” 

In other words, if our allies are strong, then America should seek to weaken them until “balance” is achieved, which will help bring about more “peace.” If Iran were stronger, and Israel and Saudi Arabia were weaker, then peace would therefore be more likely. American policy, in the present moment at least, should therefore be to strengthen Iran at the expense of Israel and the Saudis. 

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The Impeachment Clock By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-impeachment-inquiry-adam-schiff-working-against-the-clock/

Time is not on Adam Schiff’s side.

A dam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry is incoherent. Given the impossibility of a senatorial conviction, the only strategy is to taint the president with the brand of impeachment and weaken him in the 2020 election.

Yet Schiff seems to have no sense that the worm has already turned. Far from tormenting Trump and the Republicans by a long-drawn-out Schiff extravaganza, Trump’s supporters are beginning to feel that the longer the farce, the better the optics. Polls show that Trump is almost back to where he was in popularity when Schiff unleashed his late-September Ukrainian caper. And the point, after all, was again to drive down Trump’s popularity and render him politically inert.

From the day Schiff reemerged after his licking his wounds in hibernation, following the Mueller implosion, his efforts have insidiously gone downhill. Once Trump released the transcript of his July 25th call with Ukrainian president Zelensky, the nation learned that the Schiff’s gold-standard whistleblower was no such thing. Instead, he seems a rank partisan and sloppy leaker whose machinations and background are already boomeranging back on those who put him up to this present circus.

Schiff never expected that Trump would release a classified transcript of his own presidential call — Democrats expected secrecy and coverup, much as the deep-state intelligence-agency miscreants acted unethically and illegally on the presumption that Hillary Clinton would be easily elected and their dishonest efforts would be rewarded and kept quiet.

One of the strangest developments of the opening inquiry was Schiff’s own doubling-down admission that he didn’t know the name of the whistleblower. After previously lying that neither he nor his staff had contact with the whistleblower (“We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower”) — he now ups the ante, apparently assuming that neither his staff nor the whistleblower will testify under oath.

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FBI Looking Into Possibility that ‘Criminal Enterprise’ was Involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s Death By Tobias Hoonhout

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-looking-into-possibility-that-criminal-enterprise-was-involved-in-jeffrey-epsteins-death/

The FBI has opened an investigation into a possible “criminal enterprise” involved in the death of Jeffrey Epstein, according to the Tuesday Congressional testimony of Bureau of Prisons director Kathleen Hawk Sawyer

Sawyer announced the inquiry during a line of questioning from Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.).

“With a case this high profile there has got to be either a major malfunction of the system or criminal enterprise at foot to allow this to happen. So are you looking at both, is the FBI looking at both?” Graham asked, to which Sawyer responded that “the FBI is involved and they are looking at criminal enterprise, yes.”

Sawyer took her position in August after Attorney General William Barr demoted Hugh Hurwitz a week after Epstein died in his Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

Epstein, 66, died in what New York City’s chief medical examiner ruled was suicide by hanging on August 10, despite being put on suicide watch after attempting suicide a few weeks earlier on July 23. Prison staffers recommended days before his death that Epstein be taken off the watch for unknown reasons.

  

News broke Tuesday morning that the guards assigned to Epstein have been arrested and are accused of falsifying log entries to read that they checked on the late financier every half hour as required, when in fact they had neglected to do so for several hours.

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The Progressive ‘Policy Community’ Ukraine Fantasy By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/the-progressive-policy-community-ukraine-fantasy/

The Ukrainians merit our support as an enemy of Moscow, but they’re still a nasty, untrustworthy bunch.

‘A strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security.” This is the gospel according to Lieutenant Alexander Vindman, self-proclaimed member of our federal government’s “policy community,” the interagency conglomerate of experts on which Democrats are staking their case for the impeachment and removal of President Trump.

We need Ukraine as a “strategic partner,” Vindman told Adam Schiff’s impeachment-inquiry panel. We need it to be “stable, prosperous, and democratic,” a nation that is “integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community.” On this our vital interests depend, we’re told, because Ukraine is a front-line state and a “bulwark against Russian aggression.”

This, indeed, is why we’re supposed to be appalled at a new disclosure in testimony last week by Ambassador Bill Taylor, another policy-community stalwart. He says someone told someone that someone heard the president say he cared more about getting Ukraine to investigate possible Biden-family corruption than he did about Ukraine itself.

Imagine not caring about . . . Ukraine!

I can. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it.

I am pretty sure I care more about Ukraine than President Trump does. That said, it’s a lousy country. I’m very sympathetic to the goal of supporting it as a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin’s formidable anti-American regime. But I am certainly much more interested in knowing about what the Bidens were up to in Ukraine (and China), and in getting a full accounting of Ukraine’s collusion with Democrats in connection with the 2016 election, than I am in Ukraine.

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Why the U.S. Is Right to Recognize West Bank ‘Settlements’ as Legal By David Harsanyi

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/why-the-u-s-is-right-to-recognize-west-bank-settlements-as-legal/

Final-status negotiations between Israel and Palestinians will be predicated on the reality of disputed land.

Say what you will about Donald Trump’s mercurial foreign policy, his support for Israel has been resolute in ways that no other president can match.

It was Trump who finally followed the law and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. Every president since 1995 — the year the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which funds the relocation of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizes the city as the “undivided” capital of Israel, was passed overwhelmingly in both the House and Senate — had promised to move the embassy. None did.

It is probably Trump’s uniquely defiant disposition toward group-thinking State Department types that made the move possible. It’s difficult to imagine any of the other 2016 presidential hopefuls braving the massive internal opposition such a decision would provoke. But Jerusalem proper was never going to be the Palestinian capital, and it was about time everyone involved dealt with reality.

It was also the Trump administration that finally recognized Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights, a strategically vital strip of land from which Syria and her proxies have launched numerous wars, bombings, and terror operations against Israeli civilians over the past 70 years. Many of the same experts who claimed to be utterly disgusted by the idea of the U.S. ceding land in northern Syria were also grousing about how counterproductive it was for the United States to unilaterally affirm that Israel would control the Golan Heights. Well, Israel was never going to hand back this land to the Assad regime, or negotiate with it, and it was about time everyone accepted this reality.

And yesterday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that United States would no longer take the position that Israeli civilian “settlements” in the West Bank are “inconsistent with international law.” (Or, as our German ambassador Richard Grenell aptly put it, the United States would “no longer meddle in local Israeli zoning and building-permits issues.”) Many of those “settlements” — cities, really, some of them in existence for decades — are part of a de facto border, and they are never going to be bulldozed. That’s also reality.

It has always been a mistake for the United States to treat disputed territories in the West Bank as occupied. For one thing, it was impossible for Israel to “occupy” Palestinian territories because no such nation has ever existed. Israel spilled much blood taking the West Bank in self-defense from Jordan after that nation joined Egypt and Syria in the attempted destruction of Israel in 1967. Even then, Jordan had no legal claim to the territory. Israel offered 98 percent of the West Bank back right after the 1967 war, and on numerous occasions afterward. It was always refused.

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IMPEACHMENT FOLLIES

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

The Impeachment ‘Partial Transcript’ Lie Just Got Blown Out Of The Water

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/the-impeachment-partial-transcript-lie-just-got-blown-out-of-the-water/

In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, both Jennifer Williams, an adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman stated that the transcript of the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zolodymyr Zelensky was substantively accurate.

In direct response to a question as to whether the transcript was complete and accurate, neither suggested that it was not, except for minor details they found in their notes of the call.

This testimony blows up a month-long lie pushed by Democrats and their media allies that the transcript was partial, or redacted, suggesting that the White House was potentially hiding important details. For weeks the baseless claim that the transcript was so doctored that we don’t really know what happened on the call has been floated all over mainstream media coverage.

 
Vindman Just Admitted To Leaking To The Anti-Trump Whistleblower

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/vindman-just-admitted-to-leaking-to-the-anti-trump-whistleblower/

Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman admitted to the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday to leaking information to the anti-Trump whistleblower at the center of the Democrats’ partisan impeachment proceedings.

Vindman Exaggerated His Resume In Prepared Congressional Statement

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/vindman-exaggerated-his-resume-in-prepared-congressional-statement

Vindman claimed to be the “principal advisor to the National Security Advisor and the president on Ukraine.” Turns out, he’s never spoken to the president.

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The Trump Administration Is Right: Israeli Settlements Do Not Violate International Law Mike Pompeo’s announcement affirms the inhabitance of Jews in territories recaptured in the Six-Day War in 1967 does not violate international law.By Erielle Davidson

Posted By on November 19th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/no-israeli-settlements-do-not-violate-international-law/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday that the United States is abandoning a Carter-era bureaucratic decision that Israeli settlements – the homes of Jews living in Judea and Samaria – are illegal under international law. Pompeo’s statement represents a dramatic reversal from the Obama administration, which under the auspices of then-Secretary of State John Kerry, publicly held that Israeli settlements constituted a violation of international law.

Pompeo’s action is particularly notable coming shortly after the European Court of Justice ruled the EU was required by international law to label Israeli products from the West Bank as made in “settlements” in “occupied” territory. That decision, like the Carter-era policy Pompeo rejected, applied a unique rule, crafted solely for Israel, and masquerading as international law. Pompeo’s latest statement serves as a reminder that the Trump administration does not bow to anti-Israel sentiment positing itself as “international law,” no matter what shape it arrives in.

In challenging the international law consensus, Pompeo noted that the labeling of Israeli civilian settlements as “inconsistent with international law” has not actually forwarded the objective of long-term peace. Pompeo’s declaration is also an affirmative nod to what a host of others in the international community, particularly Professor Eugene Kontorovich of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, have been asserting in opposition for decades—the inhabitance of Jews in territories recaptured in the Six-Day War in 1967 does not violate international law.

The outrage over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s September announcement regarding the potential application of Israeli civil law in the Jordan Valley mirrors the current outrage being lodged at Pompeo’s declaration. Both Netanyahu and Pompeo’s assertions, however, find solid grounding in international law.