Good day and welcome to the briefing. Events are still not important enough for the MSM to pre-empt the SAG awards because we Americans need to know…..we cannot live without such knowledge…..SAD but true!
Item 1–New US base opens in Iraq……..
The fourth US military training camp has become “operational” in Erbil, Kurdistan Region to train 100 Peshmerga troops, Pentagon Press Secretary said Friday.
“But the fourth one (military site), which became active today, was in Irbil, and there’s about 100 Peshmerga forces right now there that are beginning — just beginning to do some training,” Pentagon Press Secretary Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby told reporters.
The US has three other military training camps, including Ein al-Asad in Anbar province, Camp Taji and Bismayah near Baghdad where American military experts train Iraqi security and Sunni tribal forces to counter the Islamic State (ISIS).
Our involvement becomes more and more entangled in the future of Iraq…..yet again.
Item 2–US continues to taunt the successes in Iraq and Syria…..but they seem to ignore the elephant in the room……
Five months and 1,800-plus strikes into the U.S. air campaign against ISIS, and not a single civilian has been killed, officially. But Pentagon officials concede that they really have no way of telling for sure who has died in their attacks‚—and admit that no one will ever know how many have been slain.
“It’s impossible for us to know definitively if civilians are killed in a strike. We do everything we can to investigate. We don’t do strikes if we think civilians could be there. But we can’t have a perfect picture on what’s going on,” one Pentagon official explained to The Daily Beast.
Stuart Jones, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told al Arabiya that U.S. and coalition strikes in Iraq and Syria have killed 6,000 ISIS fighters. That no civilians could be among that figure strikes observers and even military officials as all but impossible.
Why ignore civilian deaths……the propaganda war is in full swing…..cannot keep support if there are reports of women and children being killed…..ask Israel!
This week, 1,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne will be sent to Iraq on what is being called a “training mission” for the Iraqi Army. The troops will join 250 from the same brigade already there. This deployment was announced back in December as part of the 1,500 additional troops President Obama approved for the ISIS war at the time. Officials have refused to say where these troops will exactly deploy.
SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: The American people do not want another war. There’s been two Iraq Wars, one Afghan war, they don’t see it, it is in a foreign land, it is far and apart from them, so this is very difficult. I do think that we need to look more deeply and br.ly into what we’re doing and how we are doing it…I don’t know whether 6,000 ISIS people have been killed or not, but that is the figure that has been floating around, but that isn’t going to do it. So where McCain is right, I do think we need some special operations in these countries on the ground, more than just advisers. I think we need to protect our allies: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan. And be more pronounced about it.