Secretary of State Marco Rubio will need to maintain a lot of energy to operate foreign policy advancement at the “optimal resolution” speed of President Donald Trump.

Rubio departed Israel for his visit to Saudi Arabia where two major topics are on the agenda. The U.S. Secretary was welcomed by Saudi Foreign Minster Faisal bin Farhan and is scheduled to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. On the agenda today is what to do about Gaza, tomorrow the discussion changes direction to address Ukraine.

Saudi Arabia has expressed opposition to the Trump plan for the temporary relocation of Gaza Palestinians while a complete restructuring, revitalization and rebuilding of the region takes place. However, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have not proposed an alternative to the Trump plan.

Saudi Arabia (MbS), Egypt (al-SiSi) and Jordan (King Abdullah II) have balked at the idea of Israeli Prime Mister Benjamin Netanyahu that Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan temporarily host Palestinian refugees; a plan suggested by President Trump. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan do not want more Palestinians to worry about.

Ultimately, Secretary Rubio is in Saudi Arabia to ask Crown Prince MbS directly, if not the Trump plan – then what? What solution can be proposed by the Arabs that creates long lasting stability, peace and the opportunity for residents in Gaza to live without terrorism, Hamas, chaos and war?

♦ Tomorrow the agenda switches to discuss the Russia -v- Ukraine conflict. Secretary Rubio will be joined by Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. The Russian delegation includes Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, President Vladimir Putin’s aide Yuri Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund.

Oddly, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in the region; however, according to most public reporting he is not expected to participate in the U.S-Russia negotiations. I would not be surprised if something in the background is triggered by President Trump that pulls-in Zelenskyy while the Ukraine President is in Saudi Arabia.

(more…)

President Donald Trump and King Abdullah II of Jordan are having bilateral meetings today on the Israel v Hamas war and the subsequent issue with displaced Palestinians.

During the first press availability in the oval office, both President Trump and King Abdullah delivered remarks about the regional challenges, approaches and overall perspectives on the issues.  As expected, both President Trump and King Abdullah noted they await the plan from Egyptian President Fattah al-Sisi who has been tasked with taking the lead on developing a peaceful solution and broader long-term plan for regional stability.

Jordan doesn’t want to take more Palestinian refugees, though King Abdullah did say he was going to take 2,000 sick children for care in the kingdom of Jordan.

President Trump has given Hamas a deadline of Saturday at noon to release all the remaining hostages or, “there will be hell to pay.”  President Trump is willing to take part in rebuilding Gaza in the aftermath of the chaos and rubble as soon as Hamas is removed from the issue.

(more…)

According to Reuters, “Syrian rebels announced they gained full control over the key city of Homs early on Sunday after only a day of fighting, leaving President Bashar al-Assad’s 24-year rule dangling by a thread as insurgents marched on the capital, Damascus.”

Responding to the situation on the ground, President Elect Donald Trump says we should stay out of it.

[Source]

Meanwhile a joint statement was released from officials from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Russia after an emergency meeting in Doha.

(more…)

Following the election of President Donald J Trump, an interesting report surfaces today about Qatar, Hamas (Muslim Brotherhood) and Egypt.

Qatar is asking Hamas leadership to leave the country:

(J Post) – Qatar has reportedly clarified to the terrorist group Hamas, “You are not welcome here,” KAN reported on Friday, citing a source familiar with the matter. This development has reportedly been underway in recent days, three sources told KAN. One source told KAN that this is due to pressure from the US.

According to the report, Qatar had previously explained that Hamas’s leadership in the country was meant to facilitate dialogue during hostage negotiation efforts.

Egyptian sources told the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar that direct talks with senior Hamas officials are ongoing, with recent talks taking place on November 5, the day of the US elections. (Source)

Do you remember what we discussed in July:

(more…)

First, we need background context.

The latter part of 2010 through 2011 was a key period in the Obama presidency.  On the cusp of a midterm election shellacking, with domestic focus on the issues around Obamacare, the Obama team and Hillary Clinton team were also intent on fueling the “Arab Spring” and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya and Egypt.

With background research provided by the U.S. State Dept and Rivkin Project in France, a petri-dish dish experiment to see if French culture could be diluted and enhanced with “brotherhood-style” multiculturalism, Hillary and Barry then fine-tuned the mechanics.  Secretary Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and Susan Rice quickly convinced President Obama to help leverage his Silicon Valley allies.

As a workaround to stop Hosni Mubarak and Muamar Kaddafi from controlling information flow and putting down the protests, the social media platforms of Twitter and Facebook were enlisted to assist the Brotherhood in Egypt and Libya respectively.  The U.S-designated Brotherhood partners were given support, communication and influence through Twitter and Facebook to organize their protests.

In 2011 the official merge of U.S. social media platforms to assist the U.S. State Dept foreign policy agenda was created.  In many ways this merge was the inflection point for government to begin controlling social media, Libya and Egypt were the BETA test for what would later be deployed domestically.

Seeing the success and influence of the Arab Spring experiment, in 2012 President Obama signed HR-5736, with an addition to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013.  The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, contained within the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2013, eased some restrictions so that media produced by the U.S. Agency for Global Media and intended for foreign audiences could be distributed domestically upon request, according to its text. Prior to its passage, the propaganda content was banned from being disseminated in America.

This move made it possible to deploy the same social media tactics domestically.  Within the Twitter Files, you will note how 2012 and 2013 are key periods when the Dept of Homeland Security began exploring their new influence partnership in social media.   For the next ten years, that partnership created various sub-set silos within the government.

(more…)

Today, Wednesday September 11, 2024, is the 1,332nd day of Joe Biden in office. It is also the 12th anniversary of the attack at a U.S. embassy outpost in Benghazi, Libya, and the 10th anniversary of my 2-year research project.

The “Benghazi Brief” remains the most in-depth research report CTH has ever produced. The brief took two years of research to assemble and contains hundreds of very specific citations supporting it.  Ten years after the brief was originally written in 2014, nothing within the outline has ever been identified as inaccurate. The full brief has been updated below adding context depth from current events.

The Benghazi Brief

We know from the Bret Baier interview with Hillary Clinton that she was physically located at her 7th floor office in Washington DC on the night of the attack 9/11/12.

Unfortunately, we also know during the November 2012 Thanksgiving holiday a mysterious fire took place in that building. Well, actually directly above her exact office – cause undetermined.

A “fire” which preceded an unfortunate slip and fall for the Secretary, resulting in a concussion, which led to the discovery of a blood clot, that ultimately delayed her congressional testimony before a Senate Hearing into the events of the night in question.

We know the Libyan uprising began on February 10th of 2011, and we also know that sometime around the end of February 2011 President Obama signed a presidential directive authorizing the State Dept and CIA to begin a covert operation to arm the Libyan “rebels”.

(more…)

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, and Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister/Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi hold a joint press conference at the conclusion of their discussions. The video and transcript are below.

Overall, the Egyptians and Jordanians want a cessation of hostilities, an end to the bombing and Israeli war response against Hamas. In part, they appear motivated by concerns of regional instability; in part, they seem driven toward resolution because they do not want life-long radical Palestinian jihadists crossing into Egypt and Jordan; and in part it’s because their country was not attacked.

I find it interesting that none of the remarks in the group mention the influence of Iran at all.  The U.S. and Israel talk about the influence of Iran when speaking individually and together, but add an Arab country into the discussion and Iran is never brought up.

JORDAN – DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER SAFADI: Good evening to you all. I’ll start in Arabic and then I’ll switch to English if you don’t mind. So —

(Via interpreter) In the name of Allah, Most Merciful, Most Gracious, I welcome Their Excellencies Sameh, Tony and the other colleagues, the foreign ministers of United Arab Emirates and Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the secretary general of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, at this hardship – at this extremely difficult time, a time that reflects that – reflect our interest to protect our peoples from the destruction of war and to work together continuously to stop this disaster that erupted on the 7th of October and actually evolved into the war that Israel is waging against Gaza.

(more…)

I was reviewing a Wall Street Journal article about the Sinai border between Egypt and Gaza and various Western opinion about Egypt’s unwillingness to allow Palestinian refugees to cross the heavily controlled border.

For those who do not know the deep background, the Western media context looks troublesome {GO DEEP}. However, I rise in defense of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, because we have tracked and discussed the issues for a long time. Egypt is in a very difficult position right now, and with Obama/Biden in the White House – the challenge is made even worse. First the WSJ framing of the issue:

TEL AVIV— A diplomatic effort to evacuate U.S. citizens from Gaza faltered after Egyptian officials said they would only allow foreigners to cross the border if aid could pass in the opposite direction.

Egypt’s refusal on Saturday, confirmed by three officials and in an announcement on state television, thwarted the latest U.S. push to evacuate any of the 500 or more Americans in Gaza wishing to leave through the enclave’s southern border with Egypt.

Israel—which has sealed off Gaza’s northern border with a ground invasion by Israeli forces believed imminent—said Saturday that it would give a few hours of safe passage for people in northern Gaza to move southward. A doctor in Gaza said corpses were piling up in the main hospital’s morgue and under rubble from Israeli airstrikes launched in response to Hamas militants’ lightning strike into Israel last Saturday.

[…] Egypt is apprehensive about the prospect of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees being displaced into Egypt, or of getting drawn deeper into the conflict. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, an ardent enemy of Hamas, has also warned that a mass displacement from the enclave could mean an end to the aspirations of a Palestinian state.

(more…)

In the Trump indictment the DOJ is not, repeat NOT, arguing a classified documents case.  The entire legal framework is centered around documents they define as vital to the defense security of the United States.  EVERYTHING is predicated on this 18 U.S. Code § 793(e) violation:

18 U.S. Code § 793 (e) Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it. 

According to the Trump indictment, COUNT #7 – page 29, a document “concerning communication with the leader of a foreign country” is considered a document in violation of US Code 793, vital to national defense interests.

Do you want a historic example of this exact U.S. Code § 793(e) violation taking place?

Whose hands are those? [SOURCE] 

(more…)

In 2010 and 2011 the Hillary Clinton State Department, working with NATO allies (particularly France), triggered a crisis in Libya during the Obama administration’s intentional effort to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power.  This was a key element to the Arab Spring (Islamist Spring or Color Revolution) that flowed from the Cairo, Egypt, speech of President Obama a year prior.

Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samanta Power (R2P) were the architects of the destabilization plan.  After the country was destabilized and thrown into severe violent crisis by the U.S. support for radical Islamists in eastern Libya (Benghazi region), President Obama then signed (Feb, 2011) a national emergency declaration in regard to the destabilized Libya his administration created.

Five years later, in April 2016, President Obama expanded the Libya emergency declaration to extend the 2011 declaration and envelop a larger portion of North Africa, under the auspices of expanded threats from AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb).  This extension allowed the state dept to frame actions in neighboring Egypt, and block any effort to counteract Obama’s mid-east policy which was established to support the Muslim Brotherhood.   In April 2016 it was presumed Hillary Clinton would win the election and continue the policy.

Today, a full twelve years after Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton destabilized Libya throwing it into a tribal civil war, Joe Biden signs an executive order continuing the extension of the U.S. National Emergency with regard to Libya {White House Link}.

(more…)