Octopus Overlords

pr0ner wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:35 am

Max Peck wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2019 12:30 pm

pr0ner wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:35 am

I'm a little surprised that the Iranians haven't been learning lessons from how North Korea played Trump. Instead of insulting him, the smart move would be to stroke his ego while laying blame for the escalation on the advisors surrounding him.

A former senior commander with Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps has warned it would be Tehran's "duty" to seize a British oil tanker if the Iranian tanker being held in Gibraltar is not released.

The vessel was stormed by British Royal Marines and Gibraltar port and law enforcement agencies in the early hours of Thursday morning as it was believed to have been carrying oil to Syria, in possible violation of European Union sanctions.

Mohsen Rezaee, who is currently Secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council -- an advisory body to Iran's Supreme Leader -- tweeted that "if the UK does not release the Iranian oil tanker, our officials are duty-bound to reciprocate and seize a British oil tanker."

Rezaee previously served as commander of the IRGC and it is unclear if he's currently involved in military decision making.
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Gibraltar's government said in a statement Friday that it is extending the detention of the supertanker by 14 days after obtaining an order from the British territory's Supreme Court.
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While several online shipping trackers say the vessel was sailing under the flag of Panama, the Panama Maritime Authority (PMA) said in a statement that Grace 1's registry was canceled on May 29 after it was notified the ship may be participating or linked to financing terrorism.

European powers took their first step on Tuesday towards punishing Iran for breaking its nuclear agreement, triggering the deal’s mechanism to resolve breaches.

The foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany, plus the foreign affairs chief of the European Union, said in a statement that Iran was “pursuing activities inconsistent with its commitments” under the deal, known as the JCPoA.

“These compliance issues must be addressed within the framework of the JCPoA, and a Joint Commission should be convened urgently,” they said.

The three European powers are the remaining Western signatories to Iran’s 2015 nuclear agreement, which was abandoned by the United States last year.

Convening a joint commission of signatories - the Europeans plus Russia and China - is the first step in a process foreseen in the agreement that could eventually lead to a “snapback”, bringing back the international sanctions lifted by the deal.
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The future of the pact has been in doubt since last year when the United States pulled out of it and reimposed unilateral sanctions. Iran has said it wants to continue to abide by the agreement but cannot do so indefinitely if U.S. sanctions prevent it from receiving any of the promised economic benefits.

The deal’s fate has come to a head in the past 10 days, after Iran announced steps that were in violation of its central commitments - it announced that it had amassed more enriched uranium than allowed under the agreement and said it had refined uranium to a higher purity.

The House voted Friday to prevent President Trump from launching into war with Iran without getting Congress’ approval first, after more than two dozen Republicans joined Democrats to include the provision in the House’s annual defense authorization bill.

The move sets up a likely showdown with the Senate over whether the Iran restriction, which includes an exception for cases of self-defense, will be included in the final bill negotiated between the two chambers. Republican leaders in the House and Senate have argued that the language would send a bad message to Tehran that the United States is divided, complicating the president’s ability to manage escalating tensions.

Donald Trump abandoned the Iran nuclear deal to spite Barack Obama, according to a leaked memo written by the UK's former ambassador in the US.

Sir Kim Darroch described the move as an act of "diplomatic vandalism", according to the Mail on Sunday.

The paper says the memo was written after the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson appealed to the US in 2018 to stick with the deal.

The latest leak came despite the Met Police warning against publication.

The first memos criticising President Trump's administration, which emerged a week ago, prompted a furious reaction from the US president and resulted in Sir Kim resigning from his role.

malchior wrote:The situation in the Gulf sure seems to be deteriorating quickly.

What started as a protest over a surprise increase in gasoline prices turned into widespread demonstrations met with a systematic repression that left at least 180 people dead.

Altogether, from 180 to 450 people, and possibly more, were killed in four days of intense violence after the gasoline price increase was announced on Nov. 15, with at least 2,000 wounded and 7,000 detained, according to international rights organizations, opposition groups and local journalists.

Iran's top judiciary has ordered the United States to pay up $130 billion in damages about a year after the United Nation's top court ruled that President Donald Trump's administration should ease sanctions against Tehran to ensure the continued flow of humanitarian goods.

Iranian Judiciary spokesperson Gholam Hossein Esmaeili told a press conference Tuesday that the country's courts responded to up to 360 complaints filed by ordinary Iranian citizens who have allegedly suffered from the tight restrictions imposed on the Islamic Republic since the U.S.' decision last year to exit a 2015 multilateral nuclear deal. He accused Washington of having committed "crimes against the nation," according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

In the five days prior to launching a strike that killed Iran’s most important military leader, Donald Trump roamed the halls of Mar-a-Lago, his private resort in Florida, and started dropping hints to close associates and club-goers that something huge was coming.

According to three people who’ve been at the president’s Palm Beach club over the past several days, Trump began telling friends and allies hanging at his perennial vacation getaway that he was working on a “big” response to the Iranian regime that they would be hearing or reading about very “soon.” Two of these sources tell The Daily Beast that the president specifically mentioned he’d been in close contact with his top national-security and military advisers on gaming out options for an aggressive action that could quickly materialize.

“He kept saying, ‘You’ll see,’” one of the sources recalled, describing a conversation with Trump days before Thursday’s strike.
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Administration representatives didn’t provide specifics. Instead, they reiterated that the U.S. seeks to de-escalate tensions with Iran after killing one of its top military officials —a major emphasis for Pompeo in his calls to foreign dignitaries Friday. How the Trump administration plans to do that remains unknown, particularly now that the Pentagon confirmed the 82nd Airborne’s Immediate Response Force brigade will deploy to Kuwait. Administration officials provided instead “a vague expression of wanting to de-escalate but no clarity on what de-escalatory steps look like,” according to the Senate aide.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Fri Jan 03, 2020 10:22 pm The Daily Beast

In the five days prior to launching a strike that killed Iran’s most important military leader, Donald Trump roamed the halls of Mar-a-Lago, his private resort in Florida, and started dropping hints to close associates and club-goers that something huge was coming.

According to three people who’ve been at the president’s Palm Beach club over the past several days, Trump began telling friends and allies hanging at his perennial vacation getaway that he was working on a “big” response to the Iranian regime that they would be hearing or reading about very “soon.” Two of these sources tell The Daily Beast that the president specifically mentioned he’d been in close contact with his top national-security and military advisers on gaming out options for an aggressive action that could quickly materialize.

“He kept saying, ‘You’ll see,’” one of the sources recalled, describing a conversation with Trump days before Thursday’s strike.
...
Administration representatives didn’t provide specifics. Instead, they reiterated that the U.S. seeks to de-escalate tensions with Iran after killing one of its top military officials —a major emphasis for Pompeo in his calls to foreign dignitaries Friday. How the Trump administration plans to do that remains unknown, particularly now that the Pentagon confirmed the 82nd Airborne’s Immediate Response Force brigade will deploy to Kuwait. Administration officials provided instead “a vague expression of wanting to de-escalate but no clarity on what de-escalatory steps look like,” according to the Senate aide.

Drazzil wrote: ↑Fri Jan 03, 2020 11:11 pmDIDN'T a Soviet Professor call this decades ago? We're ripping ourselves asunder like the old SU!!

Jaymann wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2020 12:29 am Iran - it's the new Afghanistan.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal
‏Deeply disturbed by reports that Iranian Americans, including U.S. citizens, are being detained at the Canadian border with WA State.

In all this, two things stand out for this political historian First, Trump is continuing to press his insistence that he can act unilaterally, this time bringing American close to-- and possibly into-- a hot war. Until he provides solid information and a clear plan for moving forward, we should see this attack as part of his growing authoritarianism.

Second, the president chose a maximally distracting response to the attack on the American embassy in Baghdad, surprising even his advisors, who apparently had laid out the assassination as a far out option to increase the attractiveness of more measured responses. The evidence does not suggest that there was any need for this extreme a response right now… which suggests that he chose it to distract from impeachment.

And distract it has. Headlines around the country are all about the assassination, and Trump supporters, fed heavily by bots and trolls, are swamping public media with support for the president. They are trying to overawe all debate over the wisdom of the attack, and over Trump’s decision to launch it without informing Congress, both of which are quite legitimate concerns. If you have been watching, you will see that this Facebook page, even, which is generally remarkably free of trolls, has been so swamped that it took me more than an hour tonight to clean up the comments on a single post. This is a colossal waste of my time, as it is intended to be, so that pro-Trump trolls will eventually make it impossible to cull them, and thus they can swing public debate away from what had been growing support for his removal from office.

Russia has offered Iraq their S-400 air defense system to protect their airspace, RIA Novosti reported this week, citing the Russian Ministry of Defense.

According to the report, the Iraqi military may purchase the Russian S-400 system after it was offered to them to “ensure the country’s sovereignty and reliable protection of airspace.”

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Tue Jan 07, 2020 10:50 am When Turmp assassinates a window, Russia opens a door:

Russia has offered Iraq their S-400 air defense system to protect their airspace, RIA Novosti reported this week, citing the Russian Ministry of Defense.

According to the report, the Iraqi military may purchase the Russian S-400 system after it was offered to them to “ensure the country’s sovereignty and reliable protection of airspace.”

US and Iraqi sources confirmed six rockets landed in Assad base, on the American side, Mahdi Bakhtiari from Iranian tanseem news agency is saying they were Ballistic missile revenge for Soleimani.