10/29/19

The Secret X-37B Just Landed After 2 Years in Space

By: Denise Simon | Founders Code

Though the Air Force doesn’t disclose the X-37B’s precise orbit, keen-eyed amateur astronomers have managed to track the vehicle from the ground — and so can you, thanks to their efforts. Check out Space.com’s satellite tracker to see where the X-37B is overhead during a mission. The view won’t be dramatic; the space plane usually looks like a star of middling brightness moving across the sky. More here.

The U.S. Air Force’s top-secret spaceplane, the Boeing X-37B, landed in Florida early Sunday after 780 days—over 2 years and one month—in orbit around the Earth. And we still have no idea what it was doing while it was up there.

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle-5 (OTV-5) mission was the fifth time that the uncrewed vehicle has flown around the world, beating the duration of the fourth mission, which landed in May of 2017 after 718 days in orbit. This most recent mission launched from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on September 7, 2017.

“The X-37B continues to demonstrate the importance of a reusable spaceplane,” Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said in a statement posted online. “Each successive mission advances our nation’s space capabilities.”

What are those capabilities? We don’t know the specifics. But according to the Air Force, the X-37B has the unique ability to “test new systems in space and return them to Earth” and the mission “successfully completed” all of its objectives.

Military leaders, many of whom were previously skeptical of the need for an entirely new branch of the armed services, appear to be excited about President Donald Trump’s Space Force and the way that the X-37B might play a role in that branch of the military. At least that’s the gist you get reading the Air Force’s press release.

“The safe return of this spacecraft, after breaking its own endurance record, is the result of the innovative partnership between Government and Industry,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein said in a press release. “The sky is no longer the limit for the Air Force and, if Congress approves, the U.S. Space Force.”

This latest mission launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida and landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility on October 27, 2019, at 3:51 a.m. The last time this spaceplane came back to Earth there was video of the landing. This time, however, there was no video, perhaps because the landing took place in the predawn hours.

“This program continues to push the envelope as the world’s only reusable space vehicle. With a successful landing today, the X-37B completed its longest flight to date and successfully completed all mission objectives,” said Randy Walden, Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office director.

“This mission successfully hosted Air Force Research Laboratory experiments, among others, as well as providing a ride for small satellites.”

The Air Force says it plans to launch the sixth X-37B mission from CCAFS in 2020. And you can bet good money we won’t know much about that launch either.

What do you think they were doing up there? A couple of missions ago, something like “aliens” may have been a ridiculous guess. But we’ve sure learned a lot about U.S. military contact with unidentified flying objects since this mission first launched in September of 2017.

I’m not saying they’re flying aliens around in a super-secret Air Force spaceplane. But they’re probably flying aliens around in a super-secret Air Force spaceplane.

10/29/19

Big Warnings of China Military Expansion

By: Denise Simon | Founders Code

McRaven, the former head of Joint Special Operations Command overseeing the U.S. Navy SEAL team that took down Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his Pakistan compound in 2011, noted that Chinese technologies such as 5G commercialization is already beating the United States.

The Chinese military displayed several weapons during its National Day parade, including a new supersonic jet that can reportedly reach speeds faster than Mach 3.3, at more than 2500 miles per hour.

The PLA’s Latest Strategic Thinking on the Three Warfares

The supersonic jet, called the DR-8, could play a key role in a potential conflict with the U.S. military in the South China Sea.

“China has invested a lot of resources into military science and technology development in a bid to enhance its nuclear deterrence capability over the past years, which Beijing believes represents a strategic measure in countering the global military hegemony [of the United States],” Hong Kong-based military analyst Song Zhongping said.

Additionally, China doubled its nuclear arsenal in the past decade and is set to double it again in the next, top U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) officials stated in August.

“China has long had a no-first-use policy, and yet they’ve doubled their nuclear arsenal in about the last decade, and they’re on track to double it again in the next decade,” said Rear Admiral Michael Brookes, director of intelligence for Stratcom.

As noted by Newt Gingrich:

Now, imagine that China launches a campaign against Taiwan with the help of Russian air forces.

This would entirely change the dynamic, making it much more difficult and costly (in blood and treasure) – and much less likely for any sort of U.S. victory. Now, instead of a focused conflict with China over a specific piece of territory, the U.S. would have to decide whether it wanted to risk engaging with a cooperative China and Russia at the same time.

For many years, China and Russia were like two estranged communist relatives, but that is changing. In recent years, China and Russia have cooperated in a number of military exercises – and their first long-range joint air patrol in the Asia-Pacific region this past summer.

Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has met with Russian President Vladimir Putin 24 times since 2013, while he has only met with his U.S. counterpart 16 times during that period.

This activity creates a real potential for a China-Russia strategic alliance which would turn much of our national security planning and strategy on its head.

Republic of China, Taiwan | Operation World

China considers Taiwan one of its own provinces yet Taiwan is independent which China is fighting. Known as the ‘one-China policy’, Western nations including the United States are not to have any kind of relationship with Taiwan but the United States does and this is one of the causes in the trade negotiations.

After decades of China’s veiled threats to invade and a long-running campaign to get Taiwan’s allies to shift their diplomatic allegiance to Beijing, researchers, government officials, and lawmakers in Taipei all say that China is pursuing a new tactic in the runup to Taiwan’s Jan. 11 presidential vote: election meddling. “China is following the steps from Russia,” says Tzeng Yi-suo, head of cyberwarfare at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, which is advising Taiwan’s government on ways to counteract the interference. “In our election campaign periods, there is a most striking influence campaign coming from the Chinese Communist Party.”

China’s disinformation apparatus goes well beyond what it considers its borders, according to an analysis published by Harvard researchers in April. Using proxies around the world and some of the same social media platforms it bans at home, the government in Beijing posts 448 million comments a year aimed at promoting a pro-China agenda or sowing discord, the researchers found. In August, Twitter Inc. suspended 936 mainland Chinese accounts, part of a larger network of 200,000 spam accounts it disabled because of what it called a “significant state-backed operation” working to undermine Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations. On Sept. 20 it suspended an additional 10,000. Facebook Inc. and YouTube have disabled accounts for similar reasons. In December, new foreign-influence laws went into effect in Australia aimed at blocking China’s efforts to sway politics and key decision-makers in that country.

Chinese agencies have been launching an estimated 30 million cyberattacks against Taiwan a month, according to the government’s director general of cybersecurity, Jyan Hong-wei. The patterns indicate Chinese state involvement, he says. Read the full detailed summary here.

10/29/19

Importing Middle East Terrorism

By: Cliff Kincaid

Obama bureaucrats in the CIA are still stinging over President Trump’s dramatic decision to both withdraw U.S. forces from northern Syria and take down the leader of ISIS. The decision was a win-win, as the communist terrorist PKK/YPG Kurds in northern Syria were dealt a military defeat by Turkey, and the ISIS terrorist leader was sent to hell, as a result of U.S. military might and canine expertise.

But now, American and other ‘volunteers” who went to the Middle East to fight for a Kurdish utopia known as Rojava are coming back to America to continue their revolutionary struggle here.

It never made sense for the U.S. to back one set of terrorists, the PKK/YPG, against another, ISIS. But that was Obama’s conscious and deliberate policy. Trump decided he would pursue a pro-American foreign policy that respected our ally Turkey and would leave both terrorist groups in ashes. In another masterstroke, Trump wisely decided to withhold details of the anti-terrorist operation from the leakers and liars on Capitol Hill.

Now, the Kurds are whining to their Obama handlers, many still in the national security bureaucracy. Hence, the same CIA bureaucrats who engineered Obama’s no-win policy are now retaliating with smears of Trump in the fake news media. They placed an anti-Trump article in the Tuesday New York Times, under the long title, “As Kurds Tracked ISIS Leader, U.S. Withdrawal Threw Raid Into Turmoil.” The theme was that Trump betrayed the Kurdish “allies” who had helped locate the ISIS leader by stealing his underwear.

Here’s how the Times put it: “…even as the Syrian Kurdish fighters were risking their lives in the hunt that led to Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death this weekend, Mr. Trump abruptly shattered America’s five-year partnership with them.”

That “partnership” was initiated by the previous Obama Administration, which has blood on its hands for funding various terror groups in an effort to initiate “regime change” in Syria and Libya.  Let’s remember that Obama’s legacy was up to 500,000 dead in Syria, Libya became a disaster as well, and Germany welcomed a Muslim invasion of Europe.

The PBS Newshour ran an interview with Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, in which he called the outcome “regrettable.”

How does Obama’s CIA director get away with simply saying that the human misery and suffering in Syria spilling over into Europe are “regrettable?” Where is the accountability for this debacle? And on what legal and constitutional basis did Obama take America to war in Syria anyway?

Perhaps this is why Brennan and his comrades conceived Russia-gate. It was a largely successful effort to divert public attention from the bloody policies they pursued in the Middle East.

It’s not as if the media didn’t understand what Obama’s CIA was doing. The Washington Post and the New York Times both reported that a secret CIA operation to train and arm “rebels” in Syria had cost $1 billion by the middle of 2015. The Post said the CIA program set up in 2013 was “to bolster moderate forces.” But according to Brennan on PBS, more radical groups joined the fight, leading to a “regrettable” situation.

Those groups joining the fight included the Kurdish PKK/YPG. But they were supported overtly by the Obama Administration, using the CIA and the Pentagon to create a new nation-state of Rojava in northern Syria. Members of Antifa, anarchist, and communist groups in the U.S. went there to fight for this new socialist paradise. They formed an “International Freedom Battalion,” a “socialist fighting group of foreign volunteers fighting ISIS and Turkey in Syria.”

Like the CIA and Pentagon war in Syria, Obama’s intervention in Libya was also illegal and unconstitutional. But the media failed to acknowledge the facts. Under the War Powers Act, a president can go to war on his own only if there is an imminent threat to the U.S., and there is a 60-day deadline for the withdrawal of forces. Obama violated both provisions of the law. There was no direct or immediate threat to the U.S. from Libya or Syria, and Obama ignored the 60-day deadline for approval from Congress.

Back in 2007, then-Senator Obama had loudly declared that: “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

One result of Obama’s Libya intervention was the Benghazi massacre of four Americans.

Obama’s intervention in Syria could result in “blowback” on American soil.

Consider the fact that Americans and others fighting for the PKK in Syria produced a film, “We Need to Take Guns,” about their effort. A masked fighter in the film says “this is how internationalism works,” and that those who came to the region would take their experiences “back home.”

Earlier this year, the Times had actually featured an article about some of the “American volunteers.” These were among the “hundreds of civilians from Western nations” fighting for the new Marxist state of Rojava in the PKK/YPG military units. “I’ve always hated capitalism and materialism,” said one American from Texas. “What the Kurds are doing fits with what I believe.”

In fact, in the wake of the PKK/YPG defeat against the Turks, many of these fighters may be returning to the U.S. as hardened communists with military skills, including bomb-making.  A “Solidarity With Rojava” organization in the U.S. claims affiliates in several American cities and has announced a “World Resistance Day” against the U.S. and Turkey.

The theme of Trump “betraying” the PKK/YPG terrorists serves to further radicalize left-wingers in love with the mythical state of Rojava. There was never an “alliance” with the Kurds, as the paper claimed. Obama used them against ISIS, based on their expectation they would eventually get their own state in northern Syria. It was a fiction that Obama’s CIA dangled in front of them. But Trump was having none of it.

Whatever the Kurds did, they did on their own behalf. But Trump was under no obligation to them. Instead, he had a commitment through NATO to NATO member Turkey, which has been attacked by the PKK/YPG for decades, losing thousands of their citizens to terrorism. In Syria, these units called themselves the Syrian Democratic Forces. Their presence on Turkey’s border was a clear and present danger.

Instead of sticking by the Kurdish Marxists, who always had their own terrorist agenda, the United States had and has an obligation to NATO member Turkey to turn over alleged YPG/PKK terrorist leader Ferhat Abdi Sahin, codenamed Mazloum Kobani. The Turkish Embassy says he has killed 41 Turkish civilians and wounded more than 400 in his 28 years in the PKK terrorist organization.

Indeed, Turkey has requested the extradition of Mazloum Kobani under the Treaty on Extradition and Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters between the US and Turkey.

But several U.S. senators are moving in the opposite direction, asking the Trump Administration to expedite a visa for Kobani to enter the U.S. They are Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut)

This is a dangerous time and we can expect more of the same “betrayal of the Kurds by Trump” stories since they conveniently divert attention from Obama’s illegal and immoral policy of arming them in the first place without Congressional approval. Many Obama bureaucrats in the intelligence community and the Pentagon are implicated in this bloody and disastrous policy. They hate Trump for putting a stop to the endless war.

But now, the carnage could come to America.

The February Times article noted that some of the PKK/YPG volunteers “have returned to the United States, where they are often detained on arrival for questioning about their activities,” but that none so far have been prosecuted. However, “…that could change if Turkey — a NATO ally — goes to war with the Kurdish forces in Syria,” the paper said.

As a result, the communist and anarchist hotheads may now be returning to the United States, to take up arms against Trump, who engineered the perceived “betrayal” of their comrades.

America’s new Civil War could be taking an ominous turn.