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by Joe Hillshoist » Wed Feb 17, 2016 10:43 am
by 82_28 » Wed Feb 17, 2016 11:06 am
by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 17, 2016 11:11 am
by backtoiam » Fri Feb 19, 2016 4:12 pm
U.S. enlists new recruit in fight against ISIS: Hollywood
The United States is enlisting a new recruit in the fight against ISIS: Hollywood. A photo of Secretary of State John Kerry on his Twitter showed his meeting in Los Angeles Tuesday with about a dozen studio executives and Hollywood insiders.John Kerry
✔
@JohnKerry
Great convo w studio execs in LA. Good to hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative.
6:07 PM - 16 Feb 2016
Kerry said he called the meeting to discuss ideas about how to counter what he calls the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) "narrative," reports CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy. But some are concerned he might be recruiting studio executives to help produce anti-ISIS propaganda.
A video that has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood movie trailer is actually a pro-ISIS propaganda piece produced by the radical Islamic terror group. Now the U.S. government is asking Hollywood for advice on how to counter that message.
"This is not just a military battle. It's a battle of ideas, an it's a battle of ideas between competing narratives," said top Kerry aide Richard Stengel.
Stengel was in Tuesday's closed-door meeting with almost a dozen film studio executives when the secretary of state made his pitch.
"Hollywood is one of the greatest competitive advantages we have as a country. It's revered all around the planet. It's our second largest export," Stengel said.
The film industry grosses tens of billions of dollars worldwide every year. And it's not the first time Hollywood has teamed up with Uncle Sam. The Pentagon worked with producer Jerry Bruckheimer in 1986 for "Top Gun," a box office hit that also became an effective recruiting tool for wanna-be fighter pilots.
Other collaborations have produced mixed results. Some critics felt the advice CIA officials gave to the makers of "Zero Dark Thirty" led to a film that excused controversial torture techniques. Variety's managing editor Ted Johnson said this week's meeting took a different approach.
"The government, from what I understand, is just trying to get ideas. They're trying to get ideas on how they counter the message that ISIS is spreading," Johnson said.
But when the messenger is just the U.S. government, some worry that message can get lost.
"The reason the United States can't be the brand behind the counter-narrative is because we have no credibility when we're talking about Islam," CBS News contributor and former CIA deputy director Michael Morell said.
It's something that Secretary Kerry seems to understand.
"By tweeting out that photo, he's saying, 'Hey, we're on top of it. We're thinking outside the box...not just a military strategy but a strategy of diplomacy, a strategy of soft power,'" Johnson said.
There are reports Kerry's meeting, which lasted roughly 90 minutes, hit on other topics as well including content piracy and how American "show business" is perceived around the world.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hollywood-i ... es-terror/
by Nordic » Sat Feb 20, 2016 5:42 am
by backtoiam » Sat Feb 20, 2016 6:01 am
by IanEye » Sat Feb 20, 2016 10:18 am
Nordic » Sat Feb 20, 2016 5:42 am wrote:They want to counter their own pro-ISIS propaganda with anti-ISIS propaganda.
by Nordic » Sat Feb 20, 2016 3:58 pm
America Is Now Fighting A Proxy War With Itself In Syria
Confusion in the Obama administration’s Syria policy is playing out on the ground as U.S.-backed groups begin battling each other.
posted on Feb. 20, 2016, at 4:03 a.m.
Mike Giglio
BuzzFeed News Middle East Correspondent
Reporting From
Istanbul, Turkey
Delil Souleiman / AFP / Getty Images
A YPG fighter stands near a wall on the Syria-Turkey border.
ISTANBUL — American proxies are now at war with each other in Syria.
Officials with Syrian rebel battalions that receive covert backing from one arm of the U.S. government told BuzzFeed News that they recently began fighting rival rebels supported by another arm of the U.S. government.
The infighting between American proxies is the latest setback for the Obama administration’s Syria policy and lays bare its contradictions as violence in the country gets worse.
The confusion is playing out on the battlefield — with the U.S. effectively engaged in a proxy war with itself. “It’s very strange, and I cannot understand it,” said Ahmed Othman, the commander of the U.S.-backed rebel battalion Furqa al-Sultan Murad, who said he had come under attack from U.S.-backed Kurdish militants in Aleppo this week.
Furqa al-Sultan Murad receives weapons from the U.S. and its allies as part of a covert program, overseen by the CIA, that aids rebel groups struggling to overthrow the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, according to rebel officials and analysts tracking the conflict.
The Kurdish militants, on the other hand, receive weapons and support from the Pentagon as part of U.S. efforts to fight ISIS. Known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, they are the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s strategy against the extremists in Syria and coordinate regularly with U.S. airstrikes.
Yet as Assad and his Russian allies have routed rebels around Aleppo in recent weeks — rolling back Islamist factions and moderate U.S. allies alike, as aid groups warn of a humanitarian catastrophe — the YPG has seized the opportunity to take ground from these groups, too.
In the face of public objections from U.S. officials and reportedly backed by Russian airstrikes, the YPG has overrun key villages in the northern provinces of Aleppo and Idlib. It now threatens the town of Azaz, on the border with Turkey, through which rebel groups have long received crucial supplies. Over the weekend, Turkey began shelling YPG positions around Azaz in response, raising another difficult scenario for the U.S. in which its proxy is under assault from its NATO ally.
Yet as America has looked on while Russia and Syria target its moderate rebel partners, it has failed to stop the YPG from attacking them too. “That is a major problem,” said Andrew Tabler, a Syria specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It’s not just that it’s a nonsense policy. It’s that we’re losing influence so rapidly to the Russians that people just aren’t listening to us anymore.”
Othman, the Furqa al-Sultan Murad commander, said the YPG tried to seize two areas of Aleppo under his control, resulting in firefights that left casualties on both sides. He had captured seven YPG fighters and was holding them prisoner, he added.
Othman’s group receives weapons from the U.S. and its allies, including TOW anti-tank missiles, he said, and fights Assad as well as ISIS. The aid is part of a long-running CIA effort approved by Congress and coordinated from an operations room in Turkey with participation from international allies of the rebellion such as Saudi Arabia. Othman said he was in regular contact with his American handlers about the problems on the ground. “The Americans must stop [the YPG] — they must tell them you are attacking groups that we support just like we support you,” he said. “But they are just watching. I don’t understand U.S. politics.”
Karam Al-masri / AFP / Getty Images
New recruits take part in a training session at a camp in a rebel-held area of Aleppo before fighting along with opposition fighters.
Officials with three other groups — the Northern Division, Jaysh al-Mujahideen and a coalition called Jabhat al-Shamiya — that have received support from the operations room also said they were now battling the YPG in northern Syria. “There are many groups supported by [the operations room] that are fighting the YPG right now,” said the Northern Division’s Col. Ahmed Hamada, who added that some of his fighters had received U.S. training in the past.
An official with the Turkish government criticized the U.S. for what he described as a Syria policy gone awry. “The YPG is taking land and villages from groups that are getting American aid,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject. “These are groups that are not only getting American aid. Some of them also got training from the Americans.”
The official added that U.S.-backed Arab rebel groups had seen their support dwindle of late, while the YPG was benefiting from a surge of interest from both Washington and Moscow. “The Americans are not giving the moderate rebels enough material. They are not providing any political support,” he said. “And they did not stop the YPG from attacking them.”
“They said we are not in control of the YPG in [those areas],” he added. “That’s the official answer. It doesn’t make any sense to us. What can I say?”
In an emailed statement, Col. Patrick J. Ryder, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, which oversees support for the YPG, said he had no information to provide “regarding potential friction between various opposition groups.”
“Syria continues to be a very complex and challenging environment,” he said. “I can tell you that we remain focused on supporting indigenous anti-[ISIS] ground forces in their fight against [ISIS].”
A State Department official acknowledged the increasingly problematic situation. “We’ve expressed to all parties that recent provocative moves in northern Syria, which have only served to heighten tensions and lessen the focus on [ISIS], are counterproductive and undermine our collective, cooperative efforts in northern Syria to degrade and defeat [ISIS]," he told BuzzFeed News, likewise speaking on condition of anonymity.
A spokesman for the YPG declined to comment. Yet the group appears to be battling Islamists and U.S.-backed moderates alike, said Faysal Itani, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “The YPG has also been physically capturing territory [around] Azaz, amid Russian bombing and regime progress further south in Aleppo province,” he said. “I see these moves as opportunistic, capitalizing on the insurgent losses in the province to increase YPG territory.”
The YPG is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, the insurgent force warring with the Turkish government in the country’s restive southeast. Both Washington and Ankara list the PKK as a terror group. Yet to Turkey’s increasing anger, the U.S. has sought to differentiate between the PKK and the YPG, promoting the latter as a key partner. In late January, Brett McGurk, President Obama’s special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, paid a visit to the YPG in the Syrian town of Kobane, which U.S. airstrikes had helped the group defend from ISIS last year.
The YPG fits well with the Obama administration’s growing hesitance to confront Assad: it has long maintained a détente with the Syrian government, focusing instead on pushing back ISIS and other extremists from Kurdish land.
As part of its embrace of the YPG, the Pentagon has propped up a new YPG-dominated military coalition called the Syrian Democratic Front (SDF) and encouraged smaller Arab battalions to join. In October, the U.S. government air-dropped a crate of weapons to the SDF in Syria, and it has also embedded special forces advisors with the group. This is both a bid to give U.S. support to the YPG some political cover and a nod to the reality that driving ISIS from its Sunni Arab strongholds will require significant help from Sunni Arab fighters.
A Department of Defense official sought to distance U.S. efforts from recent YPG offensives around Aleppo. He said the U.S. was supporting the group east of the Euphrates River, in its fight against ISIS, but not in its new campaign against rebel groups to the west. "Some of the Kurdish groups west of the Euphrates" have been "engaging with some Syrian opposition groups," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"What's important here is that we are not providing any direct support to these groups," he added. "Our operations have been focused on the SDF east of the Euphrates as they fight ISIS."
The battle between America’s two proxies reflects the competing impulses of the Obama administration’s Syria policy. “The SDF model is meant to replace the failed [operations room] model,” said Nicholas Heras, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security.
Yet he noted that groups like Furqa al-Sultan Murad are battling ISIS as well as Assad — and still considered a bulwark against the extremists by the U.S. “It is a front-line combatant against ISIS,” he said of the battalion.
The recent clashes could make it difficult for the U.S. to build the crucial Arab component of its ISIS fight, the Washington Institute’s Tabler said. “If this continues, the U.S. is only going to have one option it can work with, which is the YPG. It’s not going to have the Arab option,” he said. “Which would be fine if the Kurds were the majority of the Syrian population, but they’re not. We need Sunni Arabs to defeat ISIS.”
With additional reporting from Munzer al-Awad in Turkey.
by Iamwhomiam » Sat Feb 20, 2016 4:40 pm
by IanEye » Sat Feb 20, 2016 5:29 pm
Antonio Prohías (January 17, 1921 – February 24, 1998), born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, was a cartoonist most famous as the creator of the comic strip Spy vs. Spy for Mad magazine.
In 1946, Prohías was given the Juan Gualberto Gómez award, recognizing him as the foremost cartoonist in Cuba. By the late 1940s, Prohías had begun working at El Mundo, the most important newspaper in Cuba at the time. In January 1959, Prohías was the president of the Cuban Cartoonists Association; after Fidel Castro seized power, he personally honored the cartoonist for his anti-Batista political cartoons. But Prohías soon soured on Castro's actions of muzzling the press. When he drew cartoons to this effect, he was accused of working for the CIA by Fidel Castro's government. Consequently, he resigned from the newspaper in February 1959 .
With his professional career in limbo, Prohías left Cuba for New York on May 1, 1960, working in a garment factory by day and building a cartoon portfolio for Mad by night. Ten weeks later, he walked into Mad's offices unannounced. He spoke no English, but his daughter Marta acted as an interpreter for him. Before he'd left, he had an $800 check and had sold his first three Spy vs. Spy cartoons to Mad. In late 1986, he sold his 241st and last Spy strip before retiring due to illness. Prohias also wrote and drew six paperback collections featuring the Spys. During an interview with the Miami Herald in 1983, Prohías gloated, "The sweetest revenge has been to turn Fidel's accusation of me as a spy into a moneymaking venture."
Two years after Prohias' debut in the magazine, cartoonist Sergio Aragonés made the trek from Mexico to New York in search of work. Because Aragonés' command of English was then shaky, he asked that Prohias be present to serve as an interpreter. According to Aragonés, this proved to be a mistake, since Prohías knew even less English than he did. When Prohías introduced the young artist to the Mad editors as "Sergio, my brother from Mexico," the Mad editors thought they were meeting "Sergio Prohías." Twelve years later, Mad writer Frank Jacobs reported that Prohias' conversational English was limited to "Hello" and "How are you, brother?" Said Aragonés, who speaks six languages, "Even I could not understand him that well."
by Iamwhomiam » Sun Feb 21, 2016 2:59 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 22, 2016 10:28 am
by Nordic » Tue Feb 23, 2016 3:51 am
by AlicetheKurious » Tue Feb 23, 2016 9:04 am
by Nordic » Wed Feb 24, 2016 6:01 am
‘OK, big brother’: Turkish military cooperate with ISIS on border, telephone calls reveal
Published time: 23 Feb, 2016 13:48
© Sertac Kayar
Further proof of ties between the Turkish military and Islamic State fighters operating on the Syrian-Turkish border has been revealed in the Cumhuriyet newspaper, which published more transcripts of telephone calls between the jihadists and officers.
(More at link)
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