Saturday, January 11, 2020
Mike Pompeo Admits U.S. Did Not Know Where and When Soleimani Attacks Would Happen, Despite Previously Warning of 'Imminent Threat'
Mike
Pompeo admitted U.S. officials didn't know when or where attacks
allegedly planned by Iranian General Qassem Soleimani would take place,
despite previous claiming that the latter posed an "imminent" threat to
American personnel.
The secretary of state said officials did not
know "precisely" when or where the alleged plots would occur, but
insisted the threat "was real" in a Fox News interview on Thursday night.
He
also repeated his claim that there was "no doubt" the former Quds Force
commander was plotting a "series of imminent attacks" on U.S. forces
and diplomats in Iraq and other parts of the world.
Pompeo
revealed that officials had no precise details of when and where the
alleged planned attacks would take place after a Wednesday intelligence
briefing with lawmakers on the Soleimani strike was met with a backlash.
FactChecking Trump’s Iran Address
In this week’s fact-checking video, CNN’s Jake Tapper examines several claims from President Donald Trump’s remarks after an Iranian missile attack on military bases in Iraq housing U.S. coalition forces.
Trump also was wrong when he claimed that as a part of the deal, Iran
was “given $150 billion, not to mention $1.8 billion in cash.” Trump
frequently distorts this point, but as we explained once again last year, the deal unfroze some of Iran’s assets that were held largely in foreign
banks due to U.S. sanctions. A Treasury Department official in 2015
testified that that would allow Iran to access about $50 billion in
“usable liquid assets.”
The $1.8 billion in cash that Trump mentioned is from an unrelated
settlement reached by the Obama administration to resolve a dispute that
dates to 1979, when Iran paid the U.S. $400 million for military equipment it never received. The U.S. agreed in 2016 to repay Iran that sum, with interest, for a total of $1.7 billion.
Finally, Trump made the dubious claim that “The missiles fired last
night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available
by the last administration.” Experts told us that prior to the nuclear
deal, Iran already possessed many of the type of missiles used in the
retaliatory attack. A researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies told us he had “strong
doubts” that Iran’s missile development — which has long been a high
priority for the country’s supreme leader — was “affected too much by
budget fluctuations.”
Iran Admits It Accidentally Shot Down Ukrainian Plane
Iranian officials have admitted to accidentally shooting down a Ukraine International Airlines passenger jet on Wednesday, killing all 176 on board. In a statement released Saturday, the government blamed “human error” for its military firing the missiles that destroyed the Boeing 737-800, the Associated Press reported.
The Iranian government had previously maintained that engine failure caused the crash, which occurred shortly after the airliner took off from Imam Khomeini International Airport outside Tehran, bound for Kyiv. Many of the passengers were due to make a connecting flight to Toronto—82 Iranians, 57 Canadians and 11 Ukrainians were among the dead.
Friday, January 10, 2020
House Approves Measure to Restrain Trump's Military Action Against Iran
https://time.com/5762537/house-approves-measure-trump-iran/
The House passed the measure, 224-194, with almost no Republican support. A similar proposal by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., faces an uphill fight in the GOP-run Senate. Kaine’s efforts received a boost Thursday as Republican Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, an ex-Marine, said he might support the war powers measure. Two other Republican senators said Wednesday they would back Kaine’s plan.
Thursday, January 9, 2020
Malka Leifer declared fit to stand trial
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/274332
Malka Leifer, a former Australian educator accused of sexually
abusing minors at a haredi school in Melbourne, has been declared fit to
stand trial, after having been previously determined to be mentally
unfit.
The decision was announced Thursday afternoon by a three-member
psychiatric panel which had been assembled at the order of the Jerusalem
District Court last September, after a medical committee found evidence that Leifer had faked mental illness
in order to avoid being placed on trial or extradited to Australia,
where she is wanted for 74 charges of sexual abuse against minors.
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