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You know the country has really gone to the dogs when Washington’s main allies in its war on Syria are the two biggest terrorist incubators on the planet. I’m talking about Saudi Arabia and Turkey, both of which are run by fanatical Islamic zealots devoted to spreading violent jihad to the four corners of the earth. Not that the US doesn’t have blood on its hands too. It does, but that’s beside the point.

Four and half years later, the place is a worse mess than Iraq.  Half the population is either dead or internally displaced, the civilian infrastructure is a shambles, and nothing has been achieved. Nothing.  Assad is safely tucked away in Damascus, the jihadi proxies are on the run, and everyone hates the US more than ever. Great plan, eh? Where’s the downside? The downside is that now Washington finds itself backed against the wall with precious  few options that don’t involve a direct confrontation with Moscow.

These developments have forced Washington into a fallback position that will likely entail air-support for Turkish ground forces who will be deployed to Northern Syria to take and hold area sufficient for a “safe zone”, which is an innocuous sounding moniker the media invokes to conceal the fact that Turkey plans to annex sovereign Syrian territory which, by the way, is an act of war. Now fast-forward to last week:

Donald Trump has claimed he will sign an executive order mandating the death penalty for all convicted cop killers, as a petition to deny him entry to the UK becomes the most signed on parliament’s website. It follows a week of controversial rhetoric from the Republican presidential hopeful. On Monday, the billionaire claimed as president he would order a “complete shutdown” of all Muslim immigration to the US, sparking a week-long row that has dominated media coverage and seen Trump recover in the polls, having fallen behind Ted Cruz in an earlier Monmouth poll.

Accepting the endorsement of the New England Police Benevolent Association, a local police union representing more than 4,000 officials, Trump issued his latest legally-murky commandment on Thursday night.

"One of the first things I do, in terms of executive order if I win, will be to sign a strong, strong statement that will go out to the country -- out to the world -- that anybody killing a policeman, policewoman, a police officer -- anybody killing a police officer, the death penalty. It's going to happen, OK?"

The latest media driven shooting attack said to have taken place in San Bernardino, California over a week ago now – and still there’s a growing list of details that don’t add up. After a week of whitewashed reports, a media scripted ransacking of the alleged ‘shooters’ home (tampering with a potential crime scene) and eyewitness accounts that contradict the official narrative, we also learn that the very room where 14 people were reportedly killed (along with 21 injured) during a deadly shooting attack at the Inland Regional Center, there was an “active-shooter” training drill involving some of the victims almost a year before the attack.

In our previous articles on this subject, we pointed out multiple markers which clearly indicate ‘active shooter’ armed rehersal drills held at and around the Inland Regional Center location. Here’s another – another unbelievable development discussed recently by the LA Times: “About a year ago, employees of San Bernardino County’s Environmental Health Services division underwent an “active-shooter training.” “It was held at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino — in the very same room that would one day be a site of bloodshed and horror.” “It was not clear if gunman Syed Rizwan Farook, an environmental health specialist for the county, attended the earlier training, but some of the victims of Wednesday’s mass shooting were likely to have participated, said a county spokeswoman.” One must consider that statistically speaking, the chances of a real shooting event taking place in the exact same room where a multi-agency ‘active shooter’ drill took place approximately one year ago – has to be close to zero. Furthermore, this strange and unlikely coincidence should highlight the suspicious nature of the shooting event itself.

Yesterday Hillary Clinton gave a speech in Washington at the Saban Forum of Brookings that included more pandering to Israel than any speech I’ve heard from any American politician. It was endless. Israel is a brave democracy, a light unto the nations, a miracle, its “prowess in war” is “inspiring,” and we must take the US-Israel relationship to the “next level.”

Just as the Republican candidates had attacked Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) at the Republican Jewish Coalition last week, Clinton said that BDS was hurting the U.S.’s ability to fight terrorism. This is language straight out of Benjamin Netanyahu’s office. Speaking of Netanyahu, Clinton was asked by Saban what she would do on her first day in office and she said dutifully: on the first day I would extend an invitation to the Israeli prime minister to come to the United States hopefully within the first month, certainly as soon as it could be arranged to do exactly what I briefly outlined. To work toward very much strengthening and intensifying our relationship on military matters, on terrorism and on everything else that we can do more to cooperate on that will send a strong message to our own peoples as well as the rest of the world. So that is on my list for the first day. Here are more incredible pander quotes.

The boycott movement against Israel is making our alliance with Israel “more indispensable than ever”. Here is where she suggests that BDS is hurting US efforts to fight terrorism: In this period of period of peril, Israel needs a strong America by its side, and America needs a strong and secure Israel by our side. It’s in our national interest to have an Israel that remains a bastion of stability and a core ally in a region in chaos. An Israel strong enough to deter its enemies, and strong enough to take steps in the pursuit of peace. We need a brave democracy whose perseverance and pluralism are a rebuke to every extremist and tyrant. We need a light unto the nations as darkness threatens. Today three trends in the region and the world are converging and making our alliance with Israel more indispensable than ever. The first is a rising tide of extremism across a wide arc of instability, from North Africa to South Asia. The second is Iran’s continued aggression. The third is the growing effort to delegitimize Israel on the world stage. America and Israel need to address these threats together. We must take an already strong relationship to the next level. We have to develop a common, strategic vision and pursue a coordinated approach, deepen our cooperation and consultation across the board.

The US Defense Department (DOD) is preparing to expand its global network of military bases by establishing a new “string” of bases in countries stretching from Africa to East Asia, unnamed Pentagon officials told the New York Times Wednesday. The enlarged US basing arrangements will include at least four new large-scale bases or “hubs,” including new facilities in East Africa and West Africa and Afghanistan, along with a greater number of smaller camps or “spokes,” sources told the Times . The new bases, which the Pentagon describes as “enduring” bases, will host forces ranging from dozens of commandos up to 5,000 soldiers at the largest hubs, the unnamed military officials said. West Africa is a main focus of the expanded basing plans, and will host one of the larger hubs. The West African countries of Niger and Cameroon are the only countries set to host smaller “spoke” bases listed by the Times report. The Pentagon plans to build a large “hub” near Erbil in northern Iraq, where US special forces have already been conducting combat operations for months. US Special Forces commandos affiliated with the “expeditionary targeting force” announced last week by US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter are already setting up operations in the same area, according to reports.

The new bases are only the latest development in the metastatic growth of Washington’s global military apparatus. According to the official list of US overseas bases, US forces are stationed in Afghanistan, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, British Indian Ocean Territory, Bulgaria, Cuba, Djibouti, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Honduras, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Netherlands, Norway, Oman, Romania, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom. Taking into account non-officially acknowledged bases, “forward operating posts,” and other long-term deployments, the list of US bases expands to include the majority of the countries in the world.

The Israeli occupation bulldozers launched on Wednesday morning a limited incursion into Palestinian lands in eastern al-Bureij refugee camp, in central Gaza Strip. Local sources said four Israeli army bulldozers of the D9 brand moved into the border fence in eastern al-Bureij refugee camp. The bulldozers raked through the area and leveled Palestinian lands amid intermittent discharge of gunfire. Two Israeli military jeeps were, meanwhile, deployed in an adjacent area, near the border fence. Earlier, on Tuesday evening, a similar incursion was carried out into northern Gaza Strip. Army bulldozers moved some 100 meters into the Beit Hanun (Erez) border-crossing and leveled Palestinian lands in the western border fence. The incursions are the latest in a series of Israeli violations of the Cairo-brokered ceasefire accord signed in the wake of the 2014 offensive on the besieged coastal enclave.

Now, in the latest example of just how tenuous Washington’s grip on the region has become, the Iraqi parliament's Security and Defense Committee is calling for the review and cancellation of Baghdad’s security agreement with the US.  “The government and parliament need to review the agreement signed with the United States on security because the United States does not seriously care about its fulfillment,” committee member Hamid al-Mutlaq, a senior Sunni lawmaker told Sputnik on Wednesday. “We demand that it be annulled,” he added. 

and in the fight against terrorism in Iraq," another committee member said earlier this week.  Recall that this is precisely what we said would happen once we learned in September that Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria had set up a joint intelligence sharing cell in Baghdad. It was clear from the beginning that Tehran saw an opportunity to consolidate its power in Iraq and preserve its influence in Syria by convincing Vladimir Putin that Russia could replace the US as Mid-East superpower puppet master by helping Tehran to defeat the insurgency in Syria and boot the US from Iraq once and for all. Moscow will of course get a warm reception from Iraqi lawmakers thanks to the fact that many MPs are loyal to Iran.  This makes sense logistically as well. Once the Russians and Iranians have retaken Aleppo (which admittedly is taking a while), they can push east towards Raqqa and from there, move straight across the border, effectively pinching ISIS between an advance from the west and Iran’s Shiite militias already operating in Iraq. Of course that will entail some measure of cooperation with the US, France, Britain, and, once in Iraq, the Peshmerga. It is at that point that Washington’s resolve when it comes to preserving whatever charade is being perpetrated in Raqqa will be put to the ultimate test.  In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how the US responds to a move by Baghdad to nullify the security agreement.

It now appears that the stage is set for Baghdad to claim that the US, like Turkey, is illegitimately occupying the country (again). If Iraq nullifies the security agreement and moves to invite the Russians into the country, the US will be forced to either pack up and leave, cooperate with Moscow, or fight for the right to preserve American influence. 

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi on Friday instructed the Foreign Ministry to lodge an official complaint to the UN Security Council over the deployment of Turkish troops in northern Iraq.A statement by Abadi's office said the incursion by Turkish troops "is blatant violation of the provisions and principles of the UN Charter and a violation to the sovereignty of the Iraqi state, which happened without the knowledge and consent of the Iraqi authorities."Iraq demands the UN Security Council "to shoulder its responsibilities and orders Turkey to withdraw its troops immediately, and to ensure unconditionally withdrawal to the internationally recognized border between the two countries," the statement said.

On Thursday, an Iraqi foreign ministry spokesman said that Iraq has contacted the five permanent member states of the UN Security Council for condemning Turkey's deployment of troops on Iraqi soil.He also said that Iraq demanded an Arab League extraordinary session to "discuss the consequences of the Turkish breach (to Iraqi sovereignty) and adopt an Arab stance against it."Iraq's latest move came a day after the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that withdrawing Turkish troops from Iraq is out of the question and that the Turkish soldiers are in Iraq as part of a training mission."Turkish troops in Mosul are not there as combatants; they are trainers. Their numbers may vary depending on the size of Kurdish Peshmerga troops. It is out of the question, for now, to pull them out," he said.The crisis between the two countries sparked last Friday when reports said a Turkish training battalion equipped with armored vehicles was deployed near the city of Mosul to train Iraqi paramilitary groups in fighting the ISIL terrorist group.Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, has been under ISIL control since June 2014.

Baghdad has insisted that the Turkish troops had no authorization from the Iraqi government and thus demanded their withdrawal, while Ankara called the troops only a routine rotation of the trainers.

“I’ve shown photos taken from space and from aircraft which clearly demonstrate the scale of the illegal trade in oil and petroleum products,” Vladimir Putin told reporters earlier this month on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Antalya. Putin was of course referencing Islamic State’s illicit and highly lucrative oil trade, the ins and outs of which we’ve documented extensively over the past two weeks: The Most Important Question About ISIS That Nobody Is Asking Meet The Man Who Funds ISIS: Bilal Erdogan, The Son Of Turkey's President How Turkey Exports ISIS Oil To The World: The Scientific Evidence ISIS Oil Trade Full Frontal: "Raqqa's Rockefellers", Bilal Erdogan, KRG Crude, And The Israel Connection Turkey’s move to shoot down a Russian Su-24 warplane near the Syrian border afforded the Russian President all the motivation and PR cover he needed to expose Ankara’s alleged role in the trafficking of illegal crude from Iraq and Syria and in the aftermath of last Tuesday’s “incident,” Putin lambasted Erdogan. “Oil from Islamic State is being shipped to Turkey,” Putin said while in Jordan for a meeting with King Abdullah. In case that wasn’t clear enough, Putin added this: “Islamic State gets cash by selling oil to Turkey.”

To be sure, it’s impossible to track the path ISIS oil takes from extraction to market with any degree of precision. That said, it seems that Islamic State takes advantage of the same network of smugglers, traders, and shipping companies that the KRG uses to transport Kurdish crude from Kurdistan to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. From there, the oil makes its way to Israel and other markets (depending on which story you believe) and if anyone needs to be thrown off the trail along the way, there’s a ship-to-ship transfer trick that can be executed off the coast of Malta. The maneuver allegedly makes the cargoes more difficult to track.  Some believe Erdogan’s son Bilal - who owns a marine transport company called BMZ Group - is heavily involved in the trafficking of Kurdish and ISIS crude. Most of the ships BMZ owns are Malta-flagged.  In light of the above, some have speculated that Turkey shot down the Su-24 in retaliation for Russia’s bombing campaign that recently has destroyed over 1,000 ISIS oil trucks. Here’s what Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoub said on Friday:

“All of the oil was delivered to a company that belongs to the son of Recep [Tayyip] Erdogan. This is why Turkey became anxious when Russia began delivering airstrikes against the IS infrastructure and destroyed more than 500 trucks with oil already. This really got on Erdogan and his company’s nerves. They’re importing not only oil, but wheat and historic artefacts as well." Al-Zoub isn’t alone in his suspicions. In an interview with RT, Iraqi MP and former national security adviser, Mowaffak al Rubaie - who personally led Saddam to the gallows - said ISIS is selling around $100 million of stolen crude each month in Turkey. Here are some excerpts:  “In the last eight months ISIS has managed to sell ... $800 million dollars worth of oil on the black market of Turkey. This is Iraqi oil and Syrian oil, carried by trucks from Iraq, from Syria through the borders to Turkey and sold ...[at] less than 50 percent of the international oil price."   "Now this either get consumed inside, the crude is refined on Turkish territory by the Turkish refineries, and sold in the Turkish market. Or it goes to Jihan and then in the pipelines from Jihan to the Mediterranean and sold to the international market.”

A military statement has ordered civilians to leave the "Islamic State"-held city, without giving further details. Some analysts believe a major US-led operation to retake the city is imminent.

Monday's statement was broadcast on Iraqi state TV, requesting that Ramadi civilians leave the city from its southern Himaira area. No further details were given. The announcement immediately fuelled speculation that a major operation by Iraqi forces to retake Ramadi from "Islamic State" ("IS") militants was about to begin. The statement followed three days of air strikes in Iraq and Syria by the US-led coalition fighting the jihadist group, and was issued after Iraqi forces cut the last "IS" supply line into the city by seizing a key bridge. IS militants were imposing a 5,500 euro ($6,000) levy for anyone who wanted to leave, the military said, adding that around 50,000 civilians have been prevented from traveling.

American and allied jets conducted seven strikes against "IS" positions around the city on Saturday and five on Sunday.

For hours on a Friday, a staff sergeant using the fake name “Jinx” testified in open court about her yearlong work here at a prison for suspected terrorists once considered the CIA’s prized war-on-terror captives.

The few reporters who went to court or watched on video feeds from Guantánamo to Fort Meade, Maryland, as well as a dozen legal observers and the mother and sister of a man killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, heard her say all that in open court. But as far as the public court record is concerned, those things were never said.

In a first for the war court, intelligence agencies scrubbed those and other facts — including questions asked by the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl — from a 379-page transcript of the Oct. 30 pretrial hearing in the 9/11 death-penalty case. A Miami Herald examination counted more than 130 pages with blacked out public testimony. Of them, 37 pages are completely redacted in the latest challenge to the remote war court’s motto, “Fairness, Transparency, Justice.”　Typically the court releases the transcripts “word for word with no redactions,” chief prosecutor Brig. Gen. Mark Martins told reporters Saturday, defending the “rare” exception of “ex-post redactions” as a security necessity.“I have not encountered it actually thus far for a transcript to be redacted. But there is a rule that enables that,” he said. “The government is fully entitled to look and say in the aftermath … ‘It ought to be protected, it could be damaging.’”

Martin Shkreli, a boastful pharmaceutical executive who came under withering criticism for price gouging vital drugs, denied securities fraud charges on Thursday following an early morning arrest, and was freed on a $5 million bond. While the 32-year-old has earned a rare level of infamy for his brazenness in business and his personal life, what he was charged with had nothing to do with skyrocketing drug prices. He is accused of repeatedly losing money for investors and lying to them about it, illegally taking assets from one of his companies to pay off debtors in another. “Shkreli essentially ran his company like a Ponzi scheme where he used each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors from the prior company,” Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said at a press conference.

Evan Greebel, a New York lawyer, who is alleged in the federal indictment to have helped Shkreli in his schemes, was also arrested and charged. Like Shkreli, he pleaded not guilty, and he was freed on a $1 million bond. Both men and their lawyers declined to comment after their court appearance.

Read the full text of the indictment here In the federal indictment and a complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission, authorities say Shkreli began losing money and lying to investors from the time he began managing money. In his mid-20s, he got nine investors to place $3 million with him and at one point he had only $331. Securities fraud is hardly unheard of on Wall Streeet and the amounts involved here are nowhere near on the scale of Bernie Madoff. But Shkreli’s case has drawn such attention because of his defiant price-gouging and his own up-by-the-bootstraps history. The son of immigrants from Albania and Croatia who did janitorial work and raised him and his brothers in working-class Brooklyn, Shkreli seemed at first to embody the American dream and then to mock it. After dropping out of an elite Manhattan high school, he worked as an intern for Jim Cramer’s hedge fund as a 17-year-old and quickly impressed with his ability to call stocks. He created hedge funds, taught himself biology and, after earning a BA at Baruch College in New York City, began hedge funds investing in biotech.

During secret proceedings in Washington, a key witness in undermining the $9.5 billion judgment Chevron faces in Ecuador repudiated much of his explosive testimony, transcripts made public today show.     Since agreeing to testify for the oil giant, Judge Alberto Guerra's fortunes have changed, and so have Chevron's.     Roughly two years ago, Guerra took to the witness stand in a New York federal courtroom and swore that lawyers for rainforest villagers bribed him to ghostwrite a multibillion-dollar Ecuadorean court judgment against Chevron for oil contamination to the Amazon jungle.     About a year before he made a deal with Chevron, Guerra had little more than $100 to his name. He also owed tens of thousands of dollars in debt and could not afford to visit his children living in the United States.     U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan had warned early on in proceedings that he did not "assume that anyone's hands in this are clean," yet he credited Guerra's testimony last year in ruling that the Ecuadoreans obtained their award "by corrupt means."     The Ecuadoreans have long attacked Guerra, who has a contract with Chevron for various perks, including at least $326,000, an immigration attorney and a car, as a "paid-for" participant in the oil giant's self-styled witness-protection program.     Kaplan's decision conceded that "Guerra's credibility is not impeccable," but found that his account was "corroborated extensively by independent evidence."

Both that credibility and the corroborating evidence came under withering attack this year during closed-door proceedings before an international arbitration tribunal.     Though the hearings took place without press or public access at the World Bank in Washington on April 23 and 24, the tribunal agreed to release transcripts of the proceedings in response to a Courthouse News request that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press supported.     Courthouse News obtained advanced copies of more than 3,000 pages of transcripts, which were formally released on Monday.     They show Guerra putting a new twist on an old saying. "Money talks, gold screams," Guerra said in a June 25, 2012, meeting with Chevron representatives - a meeting Chevron recorded.     Testifying about this comment at the arbitration hearing, Guerra said Chevron showed him a safe filled with money. He recounted Chevron's representatives telling him: "Look, look, look what's down there. We have $20,000 there."     He remembered replying: "Oh, OK, very well, very well."     Guerra said he had only $146 in his bank account a year earlier, and owed tens of thousands more to finish the construction of his house. He said he could not scrape money for airfare to visit his children in the United States.

 Minutes from Guerra's meeting with Chevron that came to light during the tribunal proceedings showed that Chevron's lawyers hoped to find evidence that the Ecuadorean government had pressured the Guerra to rule against the company.     Guerra disappointed by saying that Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa's administration "never butted in" to the process, the transcript shows.     "These guys are idiots, but the truth, the truth, I attest, damn, they never got involved," Guerra added, referring to Correa's government.     The remark appears to undercut the foundation of Chevron's arbitration case, which asks the tribunal to blame the Ecuadorean government for a miscarriage of justice.     Guerra stood by those comments on the arbitration panel's witness stand.      "My position is that the government did not intervene," Guerra said.     The only time an Ecuadorean government official tried to elbow into the case, Guerra testified, was under a prior administration. Correa's predecessors pushed to dismiss the case in Chevron's favor in 2003, he said.

Vladimir Putin has called Turkey “accomplices of terrorists” and warned of “serious consequences” after a Turkish F-16 jet shot down a Russian warplane on Tuesday morning, the first time a Nato country and Moscow have exchanged direct fire over the crisis in Syria. The Russian president, speaking before a meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan in Sochi, said the plane had been shot down over Syrian airspace and fell 4km inside Syria. Putin said it was “obvious” the plane posed no threat to Turkey.

“Our military is doing heroic work against terrorism … But the loss today is a stab in the back, carried out by the accomplices of terrorists. I can’t describe it in any other way,” he said. Putin suggested the Turks were shielding Islamic State terrorists from Russian attacks, saying: “Do they want to make Nato serve Isis?” Ankara and the Kremlin gave conflicting accounts of the incident, which appears to have occurred in an area near the Turkish-Syrian border straddling Iskenderun and Latakia. The Turkish military said it scrambled two F-16 fighter jets after a plane entered Turkish airspace in the province of Hatay at 9.20am on Tuesday, warning it to leave 10 times in five minutes before shooting it down. A government official said: “In line with the military rules of engagement, the Turkish authorities repeatedly warned an unidentified aircraft that they were 15km or less away from the border. The aircraft didn’t heed the warnings and proceeded to fly over Turkey. The Turkish air forces responded by downing the aircraft.

“This isn’t an action against any specific country: our F-16s took necessary steps to defend Turkey’s sovereign territory.” Russia’s defence ministry, in a series of tweets, confirmed that a Russian Su-24 had been shot down, but insisted the plane had never left Syrian airspace and claimed that fire from the ground was responsible. “At all times, the Su-24 was exclusively over the territory of Syria,” the defence ministry said. “The Su-24 was at 6,000 metres and preliminary information suggests it was brought down by fire from the ground. The circumstances are being investigated.” A rebel brigade in Syria said both pilots had been shot dead as they parachuted from the jet. The Turkish TV network CNN Türk reported that one of the pilots was found dead. A graphic video purporting to show a dead Russian pilot has been widely circulated.

The Department of Defense announced today that US Special Forces and Kurdish forces launched an air assault against an Islamic State-run prison near Hawijah in central Iraq. One US soldier was killed during the raid, which the military insists was not a combat operation, but part of its “advise and assist” mission. From the Department of Defense press release: U.S. Special Forces supported an Iraqi peshmerga operation earlier today to rescue about 70 hostages from an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant prison near Hawijah, Iraq, Defense Department Press Secretary Peter Cook told reporters at the Pentagon this afternoon. American Special Forces personnel carried out the planned operation at the request of the Kurdistan regional government after learning through intelligence sources that the hostages faced imminent mass execution, Cook said. The Special Forces mission was consistent with Operation Inherent Resolve’s counter-ISIL efforts to train, advise, and assist Iraqi forces, he emphasized. One U.S. service member and four peshmerga soldiers were wounded when ISIL extremists fired on U.S. and Iraqi forces during the rescue, he said, adding the U.S. service member was medically treated but later died.

The recovered hostages were placed with the Kurdistan Regional government, Cook said, adding that no hostages died during the rescue to his knowledge. “The U.S. provided helicopter lift and accompanied Iraqi peshmerga forces to the compound,” where ISIL held the hostages, Cook said. While it appears more than 20 hostages were Iraqi security forces’ members and the remaining hostages were Iraqi civilians, that review remains under way. “Five ISIL terrorists were detained by the Iraqis and a number of ISIL terrorists were killed,” he said. “In addition, the U.S. recovered important intelligence about ISIL.” The Daily Beast’s Nancy Yousef has more on the raid and the Pentagon’s refusal to describe the raid as a combat mission. Additionally, US officials do not seem to know what the importance of the target was:

Even after the raid, Pentagon officials, who once insisted there were no American boots on the ground, continued to call the U.S. effort a “train, advise and assist” mission, not a combat one. It marked the latest game of military semantics in a war defined as much by its messaging as by its tactical results. At a briefing with reporters, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said the U.S. military was “not in an active combat mission” in Iraq. Cook repeatedly called the raid “unique” but refused to say whether the U.S. military had conducted similar mission before this one or whether anyone in the Iraqi government had asked for similar help in the past. Rather he said Secretary of Defense Ash Carter approved putting U.S. troops in harm’s way because the Kurdish forces asked for raid and because both Kurdish and U.S. forces believed hostages had recently been killed; more could die within hours, they feared. The U.S. military was not sure who it was rescuing, Cook said. In a statement, Kurdish officials said there were no Kurds among those rescued; they seem surprised and suggested that Iraqis had been rescued, instead.

As crazy as it sounds, the Saudis are going broke. Of course you wouldn’t know it if you read the account of King Salman’s latest visit to Washington which included booking the entire DC Four Seasons and procuring a veritable fleet of Mercedes S-Class sedans.

You’d also be inclined to think that everything is fine if you simply looked at SAMA holdings (i.e. FX reserves) which still total nearly $700 billion. 

The problem however, is the outlook.  Fighting wars costs money and so does bribing the citizenry to ensure you don’t get some kind of Arab Spring-type uprising. When you endeavor to artificially suppress the price of the export that is the source for your wealth and international prestige (all in an epic attempt to bankrupt the competition and secure geopolitical “ancillary benefits”) you don’t do yourself any favors from a financial perspective and now, the Saudis are staring down a massive budget deficit and a current account that’s in the red for the first time in ages. So while things may look on the up and up from an FX reserve perspective (even as the cushion is at its lowest level since 2013) and while the kingdom has plenty of capacity to borrow with a debt-to-GDP ratio of just a little over 2%, things are about to get ugly very quickly going forward and if Riyadh decides to plunge headlong into Syria’s civil war, it will only get worse. Note that while debt levels are likely to stay low relative to a world where countries like Japan are borrowing so much that the number of decimal places won't even fit into a title, going from basically 0% to ~16% of GDP in the space of just 24 months isn't exactly a good sign:

Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.

From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show. The new disclosures, the result of an ongoing Guardian transparency lawsuit and investigation, provide the most detailed, full-scale portrait yet of the truth about Homan Square, a secretive facility that Chicago police have described as little more than a low-level narcotics crime outpost where the mayor has said police “follow all the rules”. The police portrayals contrast sharply with those of Homan Square detainees and their lawyers, who insist that “if this could happen to someone, it could happen to anyone”. A 30-year-old man named Jose, for example, was one of the few detainees with an attorney present when he surrendered to police. He said officers at the warehouse questioned him even after his lawyer specifically told them he would not speak.

“The Fillmore and Homan boys,” Jose said, referring to police and the facility’s cross streets, “don’t play by the rules.” According to an analysis of data disclosed to the Guardian in late September, police allowed lawyers access to Homan Square for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged over nearly 11 years. That percentage aligns with Chicago police’s broader practice of providing minimal access to attorneys during the crucial early interrogation stage, when an arrestee’s constitutional rights against self-incrimination are most vulnerable. But Homan Square is unlike Chicago police precinct houses, according to lawyers who described a “find-your-client game” and experts who reviewed data from the latest tranche of arrestee records obtained by the Guardian.

The Russian-led military coalition is badly beating Washington’s proxies in Syria which is why John Kerry is calling for a “Time Out”. On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called for an emergency summit later in the week so that leaders from Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan could discuss ways to avoid the “total destruction” of Syria. According to Kerry, “Everybody, including the Russians and the Iranians, have said there is no military solution, so we need to make an effort to find a political solution. This is a human catastrophe that now threatens the integrity of a whole group of countries around the region,” Kerry added. Of course, it was never a “catastrophe” when the terrorists were destroying cities and villages across the country, uprooting half the population and transforming the once-unified and secure nation into an anarchic failed state. It only became a catastrophe when Vladimir Putin synchronized the Russian bombing campaign with allied forces on the ground who started wiping out hundreds of US-backed militants and recapturing critical cities across Western corridor. Now that the Russian airforce is pounding the living daylights out of jihadi ammo dumps, weapons depots and rebel strongholds, and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) is tightening their grip on Aleppo, and Hezbollah is inflicting heavy casualties on Jabhat al Nusra militants and other Al Qaida-linked vermin; Kerry’s decided it’s a catastrophe. Now that the momentum of the war has shifted in favor of Syrian president Bashar al Assad, Kerry wants a “Time out”.

Keep in mind, that Putin worked tirelessly throughout the summer months to try to bring the warring parties together (including Assad’s political opposition) to see if deal could be worked out to stabilize Syria and fight ISIS. But Washington wanted no part of any Russian-led coalition. Having exhausted all the possibilities for resolving the conflict through a broader consensus, Putin decided to get directly involved by committing the Russian airforce to lead the fight against the Sunni extremists and other anti-government forces that have been tearing the country apart and paving the way for Al Qaida-linked forces to take control of the Capital. Putin’s intervention stopped the emergence of a terrorist Caliphate in Damascus. He turned the tide in the four year-long war, and delivered a body-blow to Washington’s malign strategy Now he’s going to finish the job. Putin is not gullible enough to fall for Kerry’s stalling tactic. He’s going to kill or capture as many of the terrorists as possible and he’s not going to let Uncle Sam get in the way. These terrorists–over 2,000 of who are from Chechnya–pose an existential threat to Russia, as does the US plan to use Islamic extremists to advance their foreign policy objectives. Putin takes the threat seriously. He knows that if Washington’s strategy succeeds in Syria, it will be used in Iran and then again in Russia. That’s why he’s decided to dump tons of money and resources into the project. That’s why his Generals have worked out all the details and come up with a rock-solid strategy for annihilating this clatter of juvenile delinquents and for restoring Syria’s sovereign borders. And that’s why he’s not going to be waved-away by the likes of mealy-mouth John Kerry. Putin is going to see this thing through to the bitter end. He’s not going to stop for anyone or anything. Winning in Syria is a matter of national security, Russia’s national security.

“Syrian President Bashar Assad “does not have to leave tomorrow or the next day,” the US State Department (spokesman Mark Toner) has stated. Washington allows that Assad may take part in transitional process, but can’t be part of Syria’s next government… “… this isn’t the US dictating this. This is the feeling of many governments around the world, and frankly, the majority of the Syrian people,” Toner said.

Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders warned on Wednesday that if he wins the White House he will “fix” the Federal Reserve by throwing bankers off its boards and increasing transparency and regulation as a way of reining in Wall Street. Sanders criticized the pivotal decision by America’s central bank a week ago to raise interest rates for the first time in almost a decade. He declared that the move was “the latest example of the rigged economic system”, in an opinion article for the New York Times on Wednesday. “Wall Street is still out of control,” he said in the article.

Why is the U.S. targeting Iran’s central bank? Well, multi-billionaire Hugo Salinas Price told King World News: What happened to Mr. Gaddafi, many speculate the real reason he was ousted was that he was planning an all-African currency for conducting trade. The same thing happened to him that happened to Saddam because the US doesn’t want any solid competing currency out there vs the dollar. You know Gaddafi was talking about a gold dinar. And as I noted in August: Ellen Brown argues in the Asia Times that there were even deeper reasons for the war than gold, oil or middle eastern regime change. Brown argues that Libya – like Iraq under Hussein – challenged the supremacy of the dollar and the Western banks: Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland.

The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr, writing on Examiner.com, noted that “[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.” According to a Russian article titled “Bombing of Libya – Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar”, Gaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Gaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. *** And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:

One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned … Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.