Last Call For Meanwhile In Syria...

As if things weren't already bad enough in the Middle East this month with the continuing blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the continued diplomatic reverberations from Trump's disastrous trip to Jerusalem that required more than a dozen political operatives from both parties more than a week to stabilize (because State Department? We outsourced that!) it appears now Tehran is causing major problems in Syria.

Iran's military announced on Sunday that it launched several missiles into Syria, targeting Islamic State fighters in retaliation for the attacks in Tehran on June 7. 

The missile strikes are the first reported ground-to-ground attack from Iran into Syria since the Arab country descended into a civil war in 2011. 

"In this operation, several ground-to-ground midrange missiles were fired from IRGC bases in Kermanshah Province and targeted Takfiri forces in the Deir Ezzor region in Eastern Syria," the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on its official news website, Sepah News. The IRGC uses the term Takfiri to describe ISIS. 

Tehran was rocked by two deadly attacks on June 7targeting Iran's Parliament building and a shrine dedicated to the republic's revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini. 

Six assailants killed at least 16 people in the twin attacks, which ISIS claimed. It was the first time that ISIS, a Sunni Muslim group fighting Iranian-backed militias in Syria, has claimed responsibility for an attack in Iran. 

The IRGC had vowed revenge for the attacks and accused Saudi Arabia of supporting ISIS in the operation. 

At this point we're on the edge of an impressively serious regional conflagration in the Middle East, and we barely have a functioning State Department, let alone a real diplomatic corps right now.  Trump is running around attempting to loot the US Treasury and while Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq have been various levels of awful for the last fifteen years, we're close to a full-out royal rumble.

Stay tuned.  Things are about to go from bad to much worse.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Two stories on, well, if you'll excuse the pun, the Russian front today.  The plan as of today for the Trump regime is whataboutism involving the Democrats, and deflection of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's growing list of inquiries.  First comes the most ridiculous of denials...

An attorney for President Donald Trump was adamant on Sunday that the president is not under investigation, despite the president’s tweets this week referring to one as a "witch hunt."

“Let me be clear here,” said Jay Sekulow, a member of the president’s legal team, on NBC's “Meet The Press.” “The president is not and has not been under investigation for obstruction."

On Friday morning, President Trump sent a tweet that seemed to confirm that he was under scrutiny, writing, “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt.”

But Sekulow claimed the president wasn’t referring to an actual investigation in the message, but instead a news report about one.

“The tweet from the president was in response to the five anonymous sources purportedly leaking information to the Washington Post,” he said, referring to the Post’s report this week that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the election now also includes a look at whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice.

Sekulow claimed the president is not spending a lot of time composing the tweets, but defended them as a means of speaking directly to voters, saying "he's responding to what he's seeing in the media in a way in which he thinks is appropriate to talk to those people that put him in office."

"He's not afraid of the investigation — there is no investigation," Sekulow said, adding, "there is not an investigation of the President of the United States, period."

No penalty for Sekulow to lie on TV here, which he's obviously doing and has every reason to continue doing.  Meanwhile, Trump's allies in Congress have locked on to a new target now that their plans to go after former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice failed, and their attempt to discredit Mueller ran into Trump's ham-fisted attempts to float Mueller's firing, prompting calls even from the GOP that such an act would be obviously over the line.

Their new obsession is former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch, briefly mentioned by James Comey in his testimony earlier this month.

The move could allow Republicans to attempt to pivot away from the investigation into Russia's election meddling — which top GOP lawmakers have signaled belongs to the Intelligence Committee — and focus on Lynch, who has long been a target of Republicans.

Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the No. 2 Senate Republican who is a member of both the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, said it “would be very helpful” for Lynch to testify before the Judiciary panel, which oversees the Justice Department.

“Frankly, a lot of what Hillary Clinton was exposed to by Director Comey’s misconduct and the way he handled that was apparently in response to his lack of confidence in the attorney general, and I think there is a lot we could learn from that,” Cornyn said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also wants to hear from Lynch and is pushing for the Judiciary Committee to “get more involved.”

“The accusations now that ... the current and former attorney general were political — that has nothing to do with Russia as much as it has to do with how the Department of Justice is being run,” he said. “I want to find out all about that.”

A spokesman for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Judiciary Committee chairman, stressed that no decisions have been made and staffers needed to first “gather evidence."

But the spokesman said it was “likely” after Comey’s remarks before the intelligence panel that Lynch’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee “will become necessary at some point.”

Republicans are tying anything to get the story off Russia, but every time Trump tweets he shoots his own party in the foot.  I suspect that this will only continue as the Trump camp gets more and more desperate.

Sunday Long Read: Landing A Narc Out Punch

We talk about US wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Korea and Europe, but the most costly and devastating war in US history remains the War on Drugs over the last 50 years. It's important to note that much of the collateral damage from it has fallen on our border neighbor to the south, and the town of Allende, Mexico was one of those tragic casualties.

There’s no missing the signs that something unspeakable happened in Allende, a quiet ranching town of about 23,000, just a 40-minute drive from Eagle Pass, Texas. Entire blocks of some of the town’s busiest streets lie in ruins. Once garish mansions are now crumbling shells, with gaping holes in the walls, charred ceilings, cracked marble countertops and toppled columns. Strewn among the rubble are tattered, mud-covered remnants of lives torn apart: shoes, wedding invitations, medications, television sets, toys.

In March 2011 gunmen from the Zetas cartel, one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in the world, swept through Allende and nearby towns like a flash flood, demolishing homes and businesses and kidnapping and killing dozens, possibly hundreds, of men, women and children.

The destruction and disappearances went on in fits and starts for weeks. Only a few of the victims’ relatives — mostly those who didn’t live in Allende or had fled — dared to seek help. “I would like to make clear that Allende looks like a war zone,” reads one missing person report. “Most people who I questioned about my relatives responded that I shouldn’t go on looking for them because outsiders were not wanted, and were disappeared.”

But unlike most places in Mexico that have been ravaged by the drug war, what happened in Allende didn’t have its origins in Mexico. It began in the United States, when the Drug Enforcement Administration scored an unexpected coup. An agent persuaded a high-level Zetas operative to hand over the trackable cellphone identification numbers for two of the cartel’s most wanted kingpins, Miguel Ángel Treviño and his ​brother Omar.

Then the DEA took a gamble. It shared the intelligence with a Mexican federal police unit that has long had problems with leaks — even though its members had been trained and vetted by the DEA. Almost immediately, the Treviños learned they’d been betrayed. The brothers set out to exact vengeance against the presumed snitches, their families and anyone remotely connected to them.

Their savagery in Allende was particularly surprising because the Treviños not only did business there — moving tens of millions of dollars in drugs and guns through the area each month — they’d also made it their home.

For years after the massacre, Mexican authorities made only desultory efforts to investigate. They erected a monument in Allende to honor the victims without fully determining their fates or punishing those responsible. American authorities eventually helped Mexico capture the Treviños but never acknowledged the devastating cost. In Allende, people suffered mostly in silence, too afraid to talk publicly.

A year ago ProPublica and National Geographic set out to piece together what happened in this town in the state of Coahuila — to let those who bore the brunt of the attack, and those who played roles in triggering it, tell the story in their own words. They did so often at great personal risk. Voices like these have rarely been heard during the drug war: Local officials who abandoned their posts; families preyed upon by both the cartel and their own neighbors; cartel operatives who cooperated with the DEA and saw their friends and families slaughtered; the U.S. prosecutor who oversaw the case; and the DEA agent who led the investigation and who, like most people in this story, has family ties on both sides of the border.

When pressed about his role, the agent, Richard Martinez slumped in his chair, his eyes welling with tears. “How did I feel about the information being compromised? I’d rather not say, to be honest with you. I’d kind of like to leave it at that. I’d rather not say.”

Martinez's story is a hell of a tale, both a cautionary one and a rallying point for those opposed by the senseless ocean of blood that has been spilled over the decades in the name of "keeping our streets safe from drugs."

Give it a read.