- Waroduce
- Aug 5, 2008
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Washington (CNN)Suicides among active duty military personnel assigned to US Special Operations Command tripled in 2018, in a disturbing and as yet unexplained spike, CNN has learned.
Special Operations units saw 22 deaths by suicide in 2018, almost triple the eight cases seen in 2017, according to figures provided to CNN by the command.
SOCOM, as it's known, is the unified combatant command charged with overseeing the various Special Operations component of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force that take on counterterrorism and other specialized missions.
Based in Tampa, Florida, the command includes some of the military's most highly trained and effective fighting forces, including the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's SEAL Team Six.
While sudden spikes in suicide rates have been noted in both the military and civilian populations, military officials who spoke to CNN said what has happened at SOCOM is striking. The surge in SOCOM suicides comes as the Marine Corps and Navy are experiencing 10-year highs in the number of suicide deaths.
SOCOM began tracking suicides in detail in 2012, when there were 23 cases. Self-inflicted deaths steadily declined through 2016, when there were 15 cases, and then dropped to eight in 2017 before spiking last year.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/02/politics/socom-military-suicide-spike-2018/index.html
Also if you still weren't sure the Republican party is dirty, Russia has been following their fund right wing extremist playbook to the loving letter in the United States
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The Players
Leonard Blavatnik is a Ukraine-born American businessman. He made his fortune through diversified investments in myriad companies through his conglomerate company, Access Industries. In 2015, he was named Britain's richest man with an estimated net worth of £17.1 billion as of April 2015. He and a friend from university, Viktor Vekselberg, joined with Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group to form the AAR venture, which in 2011 was responsible for stopping the BP merger with Rosneft Oil, the Russian state-owned petrocorp (1). In March 2013, at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, there was a transfer of nearly $28 billion in U.S. currency from an account controlled by Rosneft, to one controlled by four Russian billionaires: Blavatnik, Vekselberg, Mikhail Fridman, and German Khan (2). Rosneft Chief Executive Igor Sechin, often described as Russia's second-most-powerful man, was the central figure behind the deal.
In addition to funding Trump's inauguration party, Blavatnik has long funded Mitch McConnell's super-PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund; see FEC filings showing donations of $1M in December 2015, $500k in April 2016, and $1M on October 25 2016; note that AI Altep is a shell company of Access Industries (3). Also notice that Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone shows up for more than $2M on the October 25 filing, having also given $370k just one week prior. In October 2016, the dark-money super-PAC One Nation donates $11M to the Senate Leadership Fund, with which they share an office.
Following his election, Trump appointed as Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao -- who is Mitch McConnell's wife and donated $42k to campaigns of Senators who would later vote on her confirmation, including her husband. During the Obama-Trump transition, McConnell had raised doubts about the CIA's report that Russian hacking affected the election, and made clear that "he would consider any effort by the Obama White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics" (4). In mid-2016, McConnell's brother-in-law and billionaire investor Jim Breyer (husband of Chao's sister Angela, who became Independent Non-Executive Director of the Bank of China in November 2016) joined the board of Schwarzman's Blackstone Group. Almost a year later, following a $110B+ arms deal brokered with Saudi Arabia by Jared Kushner, the Saudis subsequently announced a $20B+ investment into Blackstone Group for U.S. infrastructure. Blackstone, especially the real estate arm led by Jonathan Gray, has long been involved with Kushner's enterprises.
A handwritten ledger surfaced in Ukraine in 2016 with dollar amounts and dates next to the name of Paul Manafort, who was then Donald Trump’s campaign chairman. Ukrainian investigators called it evidence of off-the-books payments from a pro-Russian political party. Financial records confirmed that at least $1.2 million in payments listed in the ledger next to Manafort’s name were actually received by his consulting firm in the United States in 2007 and 2009 (5). Manafort's political ties to former Ukrainian PM Viktor Yanukovich have been well documented.
The Timeline
On June 14 2016, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Speaker Paul Ryan have separate meetings with Ukrainian Prime Minister Vladimir Groysman, in which Groysman talks about Russia's financial support of populist politicians and their efforts to undermine democratic governments in Eastern Europe. The next day, McCarthy joked to Ryan and other GOP leaders that he thinks "Putin pays…Trump", after which Ryan laughs and tells the group not to leak the conversation (read the transcript here).
In August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan informs Congressional leadership (the Gang of Eight, as well as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan) that Russia is intervening in the American election on behalf of Trump. On August 4 2016, Brennan confronts the head of Russia's FSB about the matter.
According to the famous "Steele Dossier" that comes to light in December 2016, one of Steele's inside sources describes the July 2016 meeting between Igor Sechin and Carter Page, Trump policy adviser from his campaign and foreign policy team. (In October, Russian experts would conclude that the inside source was probably a former KGB general, Oleg Erovinkin. In late December 2016, Erovinkin is found dead in his car.) According to the dossier, Sechin offers to broker a 19% sale of Rosneft to Trump's associates in return for the lifting of economic sanctions on Russia (image). Page has an audio recording of Trump promising to fulfill his end of the bargain. During the months of the general election, Trump's campaign has at least 18 undisclosed meetings/contacts with Russian officials.
On Election Day 2016, Stephen Schwarzman's housekeeper is pushed under a subway train (image, bottom]).
Following Trump's victory in November, the transition team quickly began moving to develop sanction relief for Russia, causing alarmed State Dept. officials to urge legislation codifying the sanctions. In early December, Kushner has a meeting with the Russian ambassador/spymaster Sergey Kislyak at Trump Tower, in which the men discuss the possibility of a secret back-channel for communications between the Trump team and the Kremlin.
In January 2017, 19.5% of Rosneft Oil is sold to a shell-of-shell-of-shell holding owned by (at the end of the chain) the trust company Intertrust [see the middle of image for holdings flowchart from Reuters, and tracing through shells from QHG to Intertrust]. Intertrust's major shareholder is Blackstone Group and therefore Stephen Schwarzman, who had been named chairman of the strategic and policy forum by Trump in December (he was offered a full-time role in the administration, but declined). Schwarzman now controls around 19% of Rosneft, as promised by Sechin, and has been seen with Trump at Mar-a-lago and many public events (image, bottom]). He remains a constant advisor to Trump.
On January 10 2017, Susan Rice, (Obama’s NSA), consults Michael Flynn about a plan to retake Raqqa from ISIS with the help of Syrian Kurdish forces. (The plan would have been executed under Trump, so Obama’s team wanted Flynn’s approval.) Flynn’s decision is to forestall the attack, an answer that happens to conform to the wishes of the Turkish government, which was benefiting from his lobbying work for which Flynn was paid at least $500,000. While Trump would eventually approve the military plan, Flynn’s decision 10 days before Trump took office delays the operation by several months. Flynn informs the Trump transition team that he is under investigation by the FBI for having been a foreign agent.
On January 27 2017, Donald Trump invites FBI Director James Comey to the White House for a private dinner, in which he asks for Comey's loyalty and assurances that there is no Russia investigation. The memos written by Comey regarding this and other conversations with Trump substantially corroborate his testimony before Congress.
In February, Trump asks Pence and Sessions to leave the Oval Office before pressuring Comey again to drop the Flynn investigation; Comey writes a detailed memo about this conversation. In March, Trump asked the director of national intelligence and the director of the National Security Agency to make statements confirming that the investigation had cleared him.
In late March, Flynn requests immunity from the Senate Intelligence Committee and the FBI in return for his testimony; his lawyer claims he has "a story to tell". On April 1 2017, this request is denied.
On April 27 2017, the "Mayflower Meeting" is held, shortly before Trump's first foreign policy speech, having been organized by his campaign chair Paul Manafort and Kremlin-think-tank coordinator Jacob Heilbrunn. In the room are Jeff Sessions (photo), Jared Kushner, and Manafort, along with ambassadors from Russia, Singapore, and the Philippines, and unidentified representatives from Rosneft. Trump's Secretary of Commerce is Wilbur Ross. He is the former vice-chair of the Bank of Cyprus, of which Vekselberg is the major shareholder. Ross, Schwarzman, Blavatnik, and McConnell/Chao would put together an $1T infrastructure plan that would depend on foreign money, as Chao admitted to Sean Hannity on Fox News on March 1 2017.
On May 9 2017, James Comey is fired as FBI Director, the week after he visited the "rocket docket" in federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia, and just days after he requested more resources for the Trump/Russia investigation. On May 10 2017, Trump meets with Russian FM Sergey Lavrov and Russian ambassador/spymaster Sergey Kislyak, in the Oval Office, without American press allowed but in the presence of Russian state media. At this meeting, Trump divulges code-word classified information from an Israeli intelligence source regarding the ISIS laptop-bomb plot; this source is said to be the most important double agent now working in ISIS, according to the Israeli Directorate of Military Intelligence (Aman). Trump also refers to Comey as a "nut job", and claims to the Russians that the investigation will be over now that Comey is gone (6). The same day of the Oval Office meeting with Russian diplomats, a federal grand jury in EDVA hands down multiple subpoenas for business/lobbying associates of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, regarding his foreign contacts in Turkey (Ekim Alptekin) and Russia (David Zaikin).
On May 11 2017, the Strategic Campaign Group's office is raided in Annapolis by the FBI and U.S. Marshals following the warrants handed down by EDVA from two separate grand juries, corresponding to ~25 indictments regarding money-laundering and many other charges. Less than a week later, former FBI Director Robert Mueller is appointed by the Deputy Attorney General to oversee the Russia investigation. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on May 23 2017, former CIA Director John Brennan verified that in August 2016 he had informed the Gang of Eight and others (including Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan) that Russia was intervening in the election on Trump's behalf. In late May, Jared Kushner is revealed to be among the targets of the FBI's Russia probe.
On June 2 2017, Mueller assumes control over the federal grand jury criminal investigations of Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. James Comey testifies before the Senate Intel Committee on June 8 2017. The following week, Mueller's team confirms that they are investigating the president in part for obstruction of justice with respect to Comey and the Russia probe; as a result, Senate Intel agrees to avoid pursuing that aspect.
References:
1. Yenikeyeff, Shamil, "BP, Russian billionaires, and the Kremlin: a Power Triangle that never was", Oxford Energy Comment, November 23, 2011
2. Vardi, Nathan, "The Four Horsemen of Russia's Economic Apocalypse", Forbes, February 9, 2015
3. SEC statement identifying Al Altep as a shell of Access Industries
4. Entous et al. "Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House", Washington Post, December 9 2016
5. AP Exclusive: Manafort firm received Ukraine ledger payout
6. Apuzzo et al. NYTimes, May 19 2017
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Feb 2, 2019 18:21
