"We Don't Take Orders From Bolton": US Withdrawal From Syria Begins

Contrary to assurances from Trump's National Security Advisor, neocon John Bolton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who suggested earlier this week that US troops would remain in Syria for at least a little while longer, the Associated Press reported on Friday that the US has begun the process of removing the 2,000 soldiers based in northeastern Syria.

Citing information provided by activists with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the withdrawal officially began Thursday night local time. A convoy of about 10 armored vehicles and some trucks left the town of Rmeilan into drove into Iraq. Col. Sean Ryan, spokesman for the coalition fighting the Islamic State group, later confirmed that the US has started "the process of our deliberate withdrawal from Syria."

Trump's abrupt decision last month to order US troops out of Syria angered former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who resigned over the decision, and stoked fears that Trump was abandoning the Kurds to a massacre by Turkish forces, who have vowed to pick up the slack in Syria when it comes to fighting ISIS.

"These have been folks that have fought with us and it’s important that we do everything we can to ensure that those folks that fought with us are protected," Pompeo said of the Kurds while visiting Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, after talks in Baghdad.

After launching a campaign of airstrikes against ISIS in 2014, President Obama deployed troops on the ground the following year to combat ISIS, which at the time controlled large swaths of northeastern Syria. Since then, the group has been beaten back, and now control only 1% of their former territory.

Initially, Trump had said the pullout would be complete within a matter of weeks, but plans became murky after the Pentagon requested four months to complete the withdrawal. Last night, the Wall Street Journal reported that the withdrawal would begin immediately.

Scores of ground troops are headed toward Syria to help move troops out, and a group of naval vessels headed by the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge is headed to the region to back up troops at the vulnerable moment they are leaving the country, the officials said. The Kearsarge carries hundreds of Marines, helicopters and other aircraft.

"Nothing has changed," one defense official said. "We don’t take orders from Bolton."

To account for shifts in plans, the military will stage the personnel and equipment needed for a possible withdrawal, rather than move the U.S. forces out. Troops tasked to help with the eventual withdrawal already are in the area, in places like Kuwait and al-Asad air base in western Iraq.

After expressing his immense displeasure with the US's walk-back of its withdrawal plans, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan - who recently resorted to threatening the US over their plans to linger in Syria - will no doubt be glad to hear about this.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-11/we-dont-take-orders-bolton-us-withdrawal-syria-begins

Huawei sales director arrested in Poland over spying allegations

Poland has arrested a sales director for Chinese telecoms giant Huawei over allegations of working with Beijing’s intelligence services. Huawei is facing increased spying accusations from the US and its allies.

Along with the Chinese national, whose name has been reported as Weijinga W., the Polish counterintelligence service, the Internal Security Agency (ABW), arrested Polish national Piotr D., the ABW’s own former employee, Polish broadcaster TVP reports. Both are accused of espionage.

A Huawei spokesman has said the company is aware of the arrest, but has made no further comment.

Spying, and working in concert with the Chinese government, are the two chief allegations several Western nations are leveling against Huawei, which recently overtook Apple as the world’s second-largest smartphone manufacturer.

The US has been cracking down on Huawei products, accusing the company of building backdoors for spying into its phones. Along with most of its allies in the “Five Eyes” group – Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK – it has barred Huawei from assisting in building 5G networks.

The US-Huawei spat was kicked up a notch with the December arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada. Meng is fighting extradition to the US, where she is wanted on charges of violating sanctions against Iran.

The escalation comes amid an unresolved trade war between Washington and Beijing, and US President Donald Trump has been clear that he is ready to use Meng as a bargaining chip to secure a better deal.

Poland is one of the most devout US allies in Europe. While at odds with Washington’s other European friends over migration, judicial reforms and other issues, Warsaw is constantly seeking to reinforce its ties with the US itself. It has agreed to house a US missile defense installation, and is now reportedly mulling housing an American military base, tentatively dubbed 'Fort Trump.’

https://www.rt.com/news/448567-poland-huawei-arrest-spying/

US government has approved thousands of requests to bring child brides into the country

A new Senate report shows the alarmingly large scope of this problem

A new report released by a U.S. Senate committee reveals that the United States government has approved thousands of applications to bring child brides into the U.S. over the past decade.

Here's what we know

According to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, between fiscal years 2007 and 2017, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services "approved 3,595,447 petitions for spousal or fiancé entry into the United States. Of those, 8,686 involved a minor." Only 1,575 petitions for spousal or fiancé entry that involved a minor during that time period were not approved.

The report continues: "Two minors whose petitions were approved were 13 years old; 38 were 14 years old; 269 were 15 years old; 1,768 were 16 years old; and the remaining 6,609 were 17 years old. Girls were the younger party in 95 percent of the petitions approved by USCIS."

The committee could not tell how many of these petitions were then approved for a visa by the State Department.

Many of these child brides had a significant age difference from their "spouses." According to the report:

The Committee found that USCIS awarded some petitions to people with significant age differences. For example, in 2013, USCIS approved a 71-year-old U.S. citizen's petition for a 17-year-old spouse in Guatemala; in 2011, USCIS approved a 14-year-old U.S. citizen's petition for a 48-year-old spouse in Jamaica; and USCIS approved 149 petitions involving a minor with an adult spouse or fiancé who was more than 40 years old.

The Associated Press reported the case of a woman who was a dual citizen of the U.S. and Pakistan. She said she was betrothed to her first cousin when she was 8 and he was 21, and forced into a marriage with him five years later. At 13, she was petitioning the U.S. to allow her adult husband to enter the country. She ended up running away and spending time in foster care.

"I was a child. I want to know: Why weren't any red flags raised? Whoever was processing this application, they don't look at it? They don't think?" she asked.

What else?

When approving applications for spouses to enter the United States, the government looks at a few factors, including whether the marriage is legal in the country of origin and if it would be legal in the part of the United States where the American spouse is living.

However, according to the AP, every U.S. state allows exceptions where a person can be married under the age of 18, and some, like New York and Maryland, even allow marriage under the age of 16 with approval by a court.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/us-government-approves-child-brides

How the U.S. Immigration System Encourages Child Marriages

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Child%20Marriage%20staff%20report%201%209%202019%20EMBARGOED.pdf

Ominous New ‘Fact Checker’ Approves MSM Lies to Start Wars While Attacking Alternative Media

A new level of “fact checking” and “fake news” counter attacks are coming. This time, however, it won’t just be on Facebook or Twitter or Google, it will be internet and device wide. This fact checking service is being sold to the public under the name “NewsGuard” but the only thing it appears to be guarding is the establishment.

Newsguard attempts to set itself outside of the other allegedly “unbiased” fact checkers like Snopes and Politifact by setting out to monetarily cripple independent media sites by having their ads pulled.

“By licensing the NewsGuard ratings, advertisers limit their advertising, including programmatic advertising, to sites that meet the NewsGuard criteria. Advertisers use this data and related information about sites to craft efficient—and safe—ad campaigns,” their website reads.

But, what this really means is that sites like the Free Thought Project, who are entirely open about the subjective nature of our content (meaning we really love peace and freedom and have disdain for tyrants) will be hit in our only source of substantial revenue.

Newsguard employees contacted TFTP in the middle of last year to conduct a series of interviews in which we answered all of their questions honestly. We were not secret about our pro-freedom and antiwar stance. We also were not accused of ever knowingly publishing anything false and noted how if we got something wrong a retraction was issued and a statement released. However, they still gave us a rating in which their extension warns visitors that they should “proceed with caution.”

More:

https://thefreethoughtproject.com/newsguard-fact-checkers-war-mongers/

‘Just fire him!’: Ron Paul blasts Bolton, Pompeo for undermining Trump

Former Congressman Ron Paul has come out swinging against neoconservative voices in President Trump’s cabinet. John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, he said, should be punished for insubordination.

President Trump’s announcement last month that he would withdraw all US forces from Syria and the news that he was mulling a partial pullout from Afghanistan seemed to be the fulfilment of an often-repeated campaign promise. “I don’t want to be in Syria forever,” Trump said in December. “It’s sand and death.”

Nevertheless, war enthusiasts in both parties and their cheerleaders in the media reacted with shock. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, known in DC as a foreign policy hawk, called the pull-out a “colossal” mistake and a “grave error that’s going to have significant repercussions in the years and months to come.”

However, Trump found resistance coming from within his own cabinet too. First, National Security Advisor John Bolton walked back the initial 60-100 day timeline for the Syria withdrawal. Bolton noted that the withdrawal would only occur after the US had drawn up a contingency plan with its allies in the region to protect Kurdish fighters in Syria from Turkish forces, and to contain Iranian influence in the war-stricken country.

Then, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took off on a whirlwind trip to the Middle East in the new year, assuring allies that the US would remain open to intervention in Syria, and would maintain a “liberating” presence in the region: business as usual.

“When America retreats, chaos follows,” Pompeo said, in a swaggering, cocksure speech in Cairo on Thursday. “America will not retreat until the terror fight is over.”

“I think what Pompeo and Bolton did was insubordinate,” Ron Paul told RT’s Rick Sanchez later that day. “And I don’t know why Trump puts up with it.”

Trump, he continued, “stakes out, politically, a risky position by boldly saying ‘we should come home.’” Paul, a consistent opponent to foreign wars and interventionism, then blasted Trump for backing down to the likes of Bolton and Pompeo.

“These people who really run the show, they come down very hard on him and then he backs down. But if he were to ask me ‘what should I do with this Bolton guy?,’ I would say ‘just fire him, he’s not helping you in any way!'"

Paul also criticized Trump for calling on the Pentagon to keep its watchdog reports secret. In a cabinet meeting last week, Trump criticized the Department of Defense for releasing a report detailing money wasted in the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, and territorial losses by the Afghan government.

While Trump called the release of the report “insane” and an aid to America’s enemies, Paul said it proves the United States should not be in Afghanistan in the first place.

“No matter what kind of a crowd I talk to… the solution is following the rules,” he said. “It’s only the people, through their members of Congress, who decide when you get involved in war, and that’s totally ignored, and it’s ignored by both parties.”

https://www.rt.com/usa/448602-ron-paul-fire-bolton/

>>4712330 How the U.S. Immigration System Encourages Child Marriages

>>4712245 "We Don't Take Orders From Bolton": US Withdrawal From Syria Begins

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