11-19-2016, 11:04 AM
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#4411 (permalink)
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Toasted Poster
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: SoCal by way of Boston
Posts: 11,332
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I can't decide who is scarier. Darth Bannon for obvious reasons, creationist Spence who's going to want to shove Bibles down everyone's throat, Sessions turning the civil rights clock back 30 years, or Flynn, the hawkish hothead with questionable ties to Russia and Turkey:
Quote:
Flynn has been heavily criticized for attending a gala last year in Moscow celebrating the 10th anniversary of the state-sponsored news agency Russia Today. Flynn has appeared on and been interviewed by Russia Today more than once, and he has said he "absolutely agrees" that the US and Russia need to work together to defeat ISIS.
Russia intervened in Syria on behalf of Syrian president Bashar Assad in September 2015, nearly five years into the country's brutal civil war. Though Russia touted its involvement as an anti-ISIS operation, the vast majority of its airstrikes over the past year have targeted rebels fighting Assad in western Syria who have no association with the jihadist group.
Rep. Adam Schiff, of California, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement Friday that he was "deeply concerned" about Flynn's views on Russia, which, he said, "over the last twelve months have demonstrated the same fondness for the autocratic and belligerent Kremlin which animate President-elect Trump's praise of Vladimir Putin."
A consulting firm Flynn founded with his son after he retired, Flynn Intel Group — a registered lobbying organization — also has ties to Turkey's increasingly authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, through one of its clients, Kamil Ekim Alptekin.
Alptekin chairs the Turkish-American Business Council, whose members are chosen by Turkish government officials, and helped organize Erdogan's visit to Washington earlier this year.
Alptekin told The Intercept on Thursday that his company, Inovo BV, which is based in the Netherlands, paid Flynn's firm thousands of dollars for analysis beginning in August — the same month Flynn began sitting in on classified intelligence briefings with Trump, the News reported on Thursday.
Alptekin insisted that Flynn Intel Group had not been lobbying for his company, but the firm is registered as a lobbyist for Inovo BV, as The Intercept reported.
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__________________
“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
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