Group items tagged

the Pentagon is going where before it feared to tread. And it is some of the very same people — Democrats — who have in the past warned against a muscular response to past protests, now pushing for an armed military.

the acting police chief in Washington, Robert J. Contee III, announced Wednesday that an additional 5,000 National Guard troops would be deployed to the city to support local law enforcement providing security for Mr. Biden’s inauguration,

More than 3,000 National Guard troops, rotating in 12-hour shifts, will provide security in and around the Capitol at any given time.

Foreign interference that may be masked as domestic unrest is another point of concern

law enforcement officials expressed concern that the police and National Guard troops had inadequate time to coordinate and fully understand the complicated chains of command in Washington’s overlapping local and federal jurisdictions.

need for good planning and coordination

Members of the Guard at the Capitol will be equipped with M9 sidearms and some will carry automatic rifles and shotguns.

The planning has gone beyond Washington, officials say, as Mr. Biden’s aides try to understand the plans for the capitals of all 50 states, where there is also fear of violence or attacks on State Capitol buildings or federal facilities.

the goal of the police and National Guard should be “prevention and de-escalation” of any violence.

Department of Homeland Security officials are worried they may turn to cyberinterference, in an effort to black out Mr. Biden’s first words to the nation, and the world.

similar concerns about infrastructure attacks,

vast majority of military forces in Washington will be National Guard

Pentagon officials express deep worry about protests that are planned for the inauguration. Some 16 groups

law enforcement agencies are planning for a range of outcomes, including a worse-case scenario in which people with firearms try to attack dignitaries, “suicide type aircraft”

try to fly into the Capitol’s restricted airspace and even remote-controlled drones that could be used to attack the crowd.

Pentagon leaders have been concerned Trump may invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty troops as well as civilian law enforcement to quell protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in June.

"Those who suggest that the military would have any role in transition, they are being equally irresponsible," he added, saying "the military should have nothing to do with partisan politics and nothing to do even with any talk of a transition between administrations."

While Trump has not suggested he'd call on the military to decide the election, his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, has publicly floated the idea of top military leaders playing a role in ousting Trump should he refuse to leave office following an electoral defeat, a suggestion that drew pushback from Pentagon officials and experts on civilian military relations.

While the Insurrection Act does empower a president to deploy armed forces in certain situations to restore law and order, some experts believe doing so would be problematic in the event of an electoral dispute.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper made the Pentagon's position on the Insurrection Act clear in a June press conference. "The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act," he told reporters.

"While the President could invoke the Act on his own relating to an election dispute, that invocation would be immediately subject to legal challenge and, barring drastic and completely unforeseen circumstances, would be struck down in the courts," Elie Honig, a CNN legal analyst, said.

"All this bulls--- about how the president is going to stay in office and seize power? I've never heard of any of that crap. I mean, I'm the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it," Barr told the Chicago Tribune earlier this month.

"Our laws and history make clear that the military has no formal role in resolving electoral disputes; that job falls in various manifestations to voters, the states, Congress, and the courts, and if there is any need for enforcement of electoral procedures or security, that is the job of civilian law enforcement in the first place, not the military," Honig said.

"It is not entirely certain that the president holds power to declare martial law -- particularly relating to his own election -- and any such attempt by a president almost certainly would be challenged in court and deemed illegal hence, not recognized by the military," Honing said.

"There is the mechanism of governing, I have spoken to our defense leaders about this issue," the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Democrat Rep. Adam Smith, told CNN's Erin Burnett Thursday.

"No matter what, President Trump is going to be President until January 20.

In his closing remarks during a virtual town hall Thursday, Milley encouraged US troops to remain apolitical.

Aides have told Mr. Trump that he would face stiff resistance from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to firing General Milley, who is in the middle of a four-year term as the military’s top officer.

The Pentagon, more than other departments, has resisted Mr. Trump’s directives, slowing the withdrawal of troops from Syria and Afghanistan, a breach that led to the resignation of Jim Mattis as defense secretary.

In 1971, Americans could still be shocked by the fact that their leaders could be duplicitous. The Afghanistan debacle has conditioned us to expect this.

The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock delivered a devastating suite of articles about Afghanistan.

Based on a tranche of thousands of documents obtained by the Post in litigation, as well as some previously released memos, the report shows that for nearly two decades, America’s leaders—Democrat and Republican; civilian and military; elected, appointed, and career civil servant—have lied to us about how the war in Afghanistan is going.

The Post, courting the comparison with the Pentagon Papers, is billing its stories as “a secret history of the war.”

In exhausting detail, Whitlock shows how Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, their Cabinet officials, and military commanders told Americans that the U.S. had a clear strategy and was effectively executing it—even though, in private, they said that the U.S. had no idea what it was doing, and no idea how to do it.

Most think that the war doesn’t have a clear objective. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these views are often even stronger among veterans—the people who have been sent to fight the war and have seen how little progress the American effort is making, and at what cost.

Polls have long shown majorities or pluralities of Americans saying that they don’t think the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting and that it is failing. Fewer than half now believe fighting the war was the right decision in the first place

The GOP candidate also has more broadly criticized the US strategy toward ISIS; suggested bringing back torture; called for a drastic rethinking of American military alliances; and floated the possibility of shifting America's nuclear policy to allow for greater proliferation

Clinton, too, has taken positions that appear at odds with some of the public positions of the military, particularly regarding the imposition of a no-fly zone in Syria

Not only has President Barack Obama opposed such a move, military leaders have also expressed concerns

For weeks, Trump has lambasted the coalition effort, calling the undertaking a "total disaster" and saying the US and its allies were "bogged-down" there even as defense officials say they are encouraged by the progress being made

Trump also hinted that he might replace a significant number of senior military leaders not to his liking

The services are betting that Mr. Trump will eventually win a large enough chunk of the money so that they can do a bit of everything, like reversing recent declines in the number of soldiers and Marines and breaking logjams over how many high-tech jets and ships they can afford to build.

“In the end, I think the budget caps will be adjusted upward again,” he said, “and we might get an uneven deal where the caps are higher for defense than for the domestic programs.”

Fadavi blamed the incident on the American navigation system. “Investigation shows that [the] entry of American sailors into Iran’s territorial waters was due to mechanical problems in their navigation system and that issue is being resolved,” he said.

The two small craft briefly went missing on Tuesday after transiting the Gulf from Kuwait to Bahrain. The Pentagon said the crews ended up in Iranian custody, sparking immediate fears of escalating tensions during a week when Iran is expected to receive the first wave of sanctions relief from the landmark nuclear accords.

Plans were in place for Iran to return the crew to a US Navy vessel in international waters early on Wednesday, during daylight hours when it would be safer, a US defence official told the Associated Press. The exchange was reportedly set for 10.30am local time (7am GMT), but is yet to have happened.

Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported that 10 Americans – including one woman – were arrested by the naval forces of the country’s powerful Revolutionary Guards after entering Iranian waters.

Fars said the two American boats were 2km inside Iranian waters when they were detained close to Farsi island, which is home to a Revolutionary Guards base.

The agency claimed GPS data on the American ships – reported to be on a training mission – also indicated they were on the Iranian side. Pentagon officials told the Associated Press the two boats drifted into Iranian waters after facing mechanical problems. Fars reported the Americans were carrying semi-heavy weaponry on board their craft.

The episode comes amid heightened regional tensions, and only hours before Barack Obama was set to deliver his final State of the Union address.

Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio reacted swiftly to the reports, calling on Iran to release the US sailors and navy boats immediately. “If they are not immediately released, and the boats are not immediately released, then we know something else is at play here,” Rubio said in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.

Paul Ryan, House speaker and the top Republican in Washington, withheld judgment, saying in a statement: “Our top priority is the safety and security of our servicemembers detained by Iran.

A US defense department official played down the incident, saying the Iranians had sent indications of the “safety and wellbeing” of the sailors.

Pentagon and Navy officials did not identify the naval craft, the number of detained sailors, their mission or a timetable for their release.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards patrol Iranian waters in the Gulf, especially near the strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway where a fifth of the world’s oil passes in tankers.

UFOs may have mundane identities, like weather balloons or drones. But some sightings don't have accepted explanations.

Incidents of UFOs have captured the public imagination for decades. The revelations in the upcoming report from federal agencies are likely to show there has been considerable interest in UFOs throughout government agencies as well. 

In March, former President Donald Trump's director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe said that the intelligence community was aware of many incidents of “unidentified aerial phenomena” and that such events occurred “all over the world," he said during a Fox News interview.

The report is likely to add further details to the findings of a 2017 New York Times report that revealed multiple Navy pilots had seen UFOs while in flight. The Pentagon later declassified video of the incidents, which showed high-speed objects with no clear propulsion outpacing the officers' jets.

Lawmakers included an order for the UFO report in the December omnibus spending and coronavirus relief package.

Officials have cautioned that analysts did not immediately speculate that aliens were responsible for the phenomena. Instead, Pentagon and intelligence officials are most concerned that such objects are next-generation technology from American competitors such as China and consequently pose a national security concern.

Rubio, the ranking member and former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, continued that many of his Senate colleagues are “very interested in this topic and some kinda, you know, giggle when you bring it up." The senator, however, doesn't think the question is a laughing matter. "I don’t think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.”

he program began in 2007 and was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time. It was officially shut down in 2012, when the money dried up, according to the Pentagon. But Luis Elizondo, who ran the program at the time, said that he continued it until 2017. After the publication of a New York Times article later that year about the program and criticism from program officials that the government was not forthcoming about reports on aerial phenomena, the Pentagon restarted the program last summer as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

Officials briefed on the report said it also examined video that shows a whitish oval object described as a giant Tic Tac, about the size of a commercial plane, encountered by two Navy fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Nonetheless, the government began a classified study, called Project Sign, out of concern that such objects could be advanced Soviet weapons. That was followed by Project Blue Book, which reviewed about 12,000 cases from 1952 to 1969, 701 of which could not be explained. It ended with a report saying U.F.O.s were not worth further study

Other cases include a spinning disk that was seen hovering above O’Hare Airport in Chicago in 2006, and two “sunlight-colored” objects reported by a professional pilot in England in 2007, as The New Yorker reported.

Senior administration officials who had been briefed on the report’s contents told The Times that the report still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, but that it concludes a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology.

"I kind of, you know, like professionally I'm like, wow, they're doing pretty well, and they're using a lot of irregular warfare concepts, information, all this stuff, in a way that, you know, like ... good on them," he said.

Miller was also asked what he had learned about Russian activity below the threshold of war. "Good on them" was his surprising response.

Miller became the acting secretary of defense when Trump fired Mark Esper via Twitter on November 9, two days after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the Presidential election.

On Friday, Miller touted the ongoing contentious troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan to 2,500 personnel in each country, despite opposition from Capitol Hill and Esper.

"Armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols from 16 January through at least 20 January, and at the US Capitol from 17 January through 20 January," the bulletin states.

Speaking at a news conference Monday, Bowser, a Democrat, stressed that she was concerned about more violent actors potentially coming to the city in the run-up to the inauguration, saying, "If I'm scared of anything, it's for our democracy, because we have very extreme factions in our country that are armed and dangerous."

The agency has been instructed to begin its preparations for the inauguration ahead of schedule.

Law enforcement is using a huge amount of surveillance, including monitoring phones and other communications, in an all-out effort to track individuals to ensure they do not travel to Washington, according to law enforcement officials.

Some extremists are so suspicious and obsessed with anti-government conspiracies that they're telling associates they don't trust some of the planned protests, fearing they are actually FBI plots to try to frame them, according to one official.

Security officials also have shared information citing specific concerns about vehicles that could be used to breach security, the source said. The information adds to the already heightened alert in the capital as authorities try to protect a central area of the city where the transfer of power will take place on January 20.

"I can assure the residents of the District of Columbia that the Metropolitan Police Department and federal partners are in a posture to respond to the information that's out there thus far that we've heard," Contee said.

One way European allies could help in Iraq, he said, was to provide ballistic missile defense systems at bases that house troops from the American-led coalition that has been fighting the Islamic State.

About 200,000 United States forces are stationed abroad, a similar number to when President Trump took office with a promise to conclude the nation’s “endless wars.”

The Pentagon says that the overhaul of African deployments will be followed by one in Latin America and that drawdowns will occur in Iraq and Afghanistan, as it has outlined in recent months.But the killing of General Suleimani, which has sharply exacerbated tensions between Washington and Tehran, could undermine the Pentagon’s plans. Since that killing, it has sent thousands of additional troops to the region to protect against possible strikes from Iran.