President Trump has decided to end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.
The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later. Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump’s interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests.
The shuttering of the program is also an acknowledgment of Washington’s limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power.
Officials said Trump made the decision to scrap the CIA program nearly a month ago, after an Oval Office meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster ahead of a July 7 meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
If that were not troubling enough, we also have this bit of troubling news, courtesy of Bloomberg:
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is shutting down an office that coordinates cyber issues with other countries, according to two people familiar with the plan, in a move that critics said will diminish the U.S. voice in confronting hackers.
The Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, established under President Barack Obama in 2011, will be folded into the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, according to the people, who asked not to be identified in advance of an announcement. The coordinator will no longer report directly to the secretary of state, going instead through the bureau’s chain of command as Tillerson pushes ahead with a department-wide reorganization, they said.
“It’s taking an issue that’s preeminent and putting it inside a backwater within the State Department,” said Robert Knake, a senior fellow for cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington who was director of cybersecurity policy at the National Security Council under Obama. “Position to power matters both within the U.S. government and within the international community.”
If somebody actually believe this move will help protect us from the next cyber attack, or that it is NOT playing right into the hands of the Kremlin, then they have not been paying attention at all.
As far as I am concerned Tillerson is likely just as compromised as Donald Trump and allowing him oversight of this crucial government department is like putting the fox in charge of guarding the door to the hen house.
These are of course only a few of the things that Putin clearly demanded of Trump, and the Russian government has now become so used to getting their way in Washington that when there is a hiccup they get pissed off.
Courtesy of the LA Times:
Russia said Tuesday that it is losing patience over the return of properties that the United States seized as penalty for Moscow's election interference, as tense talks between the two countries have yielded no resolution.
In Moscow, officials threatened to take "retaliatory measures" if the United States continued to "hinder" their government's diplomatic mission, and the spokesman for President Vladimir Putin said the Kremlin's patience "is expiring."
"We are still counting on the reasonableness of our American counterparts to at least bring the situation into the legal framework in accordance with the international law," said the spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.
To be clear the Russian government has done NOTHING to deserve the return of these compounds, which were taken from them in response to their very aggressive interference in our last presidential election, for which they have not yet even admitted responsibility, and yet they feel empowered to make threats?
Let's face it if America were one of Trump's casinos the roulette wheel would be rigged to land on whatever number Putin picked and the slot machine would pay off for every Russian's pull of handle.
Source http://ift.tt/2uB72m5
