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The Belize-born MC—who was deported out of the United States after being released from prison in 2009 following a nine year sentence for his part in the 1999 Club New York shooting—is unable to vote in the upcoming election given his current predicament.
That conclusion, of which President Obama and other senior officials are aware from classified assessments of the Syrian conflict that has now claimed more than 25,000 lives, casts into doubt whether the White Houses strategy of minimal and indirect intervention in the Syrian conflict is accomplishing its intended purpose of helping a democratic-minded opposition topple an oppressive government, or is instead sowing the seeds of future insurgencies hostile to the United States. The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we dont want to have it, said one American official familiar with the outlines of those findings, commenting on an operation that in American eyes has increasingly gone awry.
The United States is not sending arms directly to the Syrian opposition. Instead, it is providing intelligence and other support for shipments of secondhand light weapons like rifles and grenades into Syria, mainly orchestrated from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The reports indicate that the shipments organized from Qatar, in particular, are largely going to hard-line Islamists. The assessment of the arms flows comes at a crucial time for Mr. Obama, in the closing weeks of the election campaign with two debates looming that will focus on his foreign policy record. But it also calls into question the Syria strategy laid out by Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger.
In a speech at the Virginia Military Institute last Monday, Mr. Romney said he would ensure that rebel groups who share our values would obtain the arms they need to defeat Assads tanks, helicopters and fighter jets. That suggests he would approve the transfer of weapons like antiaircraft and antitank systems that are much more potent than any the United States has been willing to put into rebel hands so far, precisely because American officials cannot be certain who will ultimately be using them. But Mr. Romney stopped short of saying that he would have the United States provide those arms directly, and his aides said he would instead rely on Arab allies to do it. That would leave him, like Mr. Obama, with little direct control over the distribution of the arms.
American officials have been trying to understand why hard-line Islamists have received the lions share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition through the shadowy pipeline with roots in Qatar, and, to a lesser degree, Saudi Arabia. The officials, voicing frustration, say there is no central clearinghouse for the shipments, and no effective way of vetting the groups that ultimately receive them. Those problems were central concerns for the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus, when he traveled secretly to Turkey last month, officials said.
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Will support for Syrian rebels come back to bite us on the butt?...
Rebel Arms Flow Is Said to Benefit Jihadists in Syria
October 14, 2012 WASHINGTON Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats.
Retired Brig. Gen. Akil Hashem, a supporter of the Free Syrian Army and a staunch advocate of Western intervention, calls the embattled regime of President Bashar al-Assad "a paper tiger." He claims that there's widespread disaffection within the Syrian officer corps, but tight internal security by Assad's all-pervasive intelligence services make it difficult for senior officers to defect. According to U.S. analyst Michael Weiss, who spoke with Hashem in London recently, the general claims that the U.S. administration of President Barack Obama has "purposefully overestimated the regime's fighting capability and underestimated the opposition's" to reject military intervention to bring about regime-change.
Hashem argues that a no-fly zone could be imposed over the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, within reach of the Turkish border over which men and weapons are infiltrated to the rebels, because the FSA and other insurgent factions are well-entrenched there and taking on regime forces all the time. They've been hitting at least two of the seven airbases in that region, destroying weapons systems and equipment. At the Abu Duhur facility, they allegedly knocked out 8-12 helicopters on the ground and shot down two others. "One U.S. aircraft carrier with 80 or 85 sophisticated air fighters, plus the Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey, is enough to do the job," Hashem says.
With a 75-mile-deep no-fly zone, in which U.S. jets would shoot down any marauding Syrian aircraft -- similar to the operations conducted by U.S.-led forces in southern and northern Iraq during the 1990s to neutralize Saddam Hussein "you can control that entire area with air-to-air missiles from F-16 or F-18 fighter jets. "These missiles have a range of 80 kilometers, so Western or Turkish aircraft would only need to enter 40 kilometers of Syrian airspace to maintain air supremacy," Hashem argued.
The regime's increasing use of fighter-bombers and helicopter gunships against rebel forces across the country, including the capital Damascus and Aleppo, Syria's commercial heart, would seem to indicate how Assad and his inner circle are becoming deeply worried about the rebels' growing military capabilities and coordination. But air power has its limitations. Hashem, who fought against Israel in the 1967, 1973 and 1982 wars, recalled how the Israeli air force savaged Syrian air defenses during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon in a lop-sided victory achieved through high-tech weapons systems and innovative doctrine that totally flatfooted the Soviet-trained Syrians, hamstrung by a rigid operational system.
Read more: 'Syria's air defenses a joke': defector - UPI.com
Uhh... what? Who is Shyne? Who cares?
You know... black people have the capability to make decisions and have political minds all of their own you know.
I think that's all this thread is, to try and point out that, "Oh my gosh, a slave has been freed! If only the rest weren't such mindless drones!"
The Belize-born MCwho was deported out of the United States after being released from prison in 2009 following a nine year sentence for his part in the 1999 Club New York shootingis unable to vote in the upcoming election given his current predicament.
This is funny though... you can have him.
Shyne, whoever he is, supports Romney. And...so does Lindsay Lohan.
Looks like ol' Mittens is picking up the cream of the crop when comes to endorsements, doesn't it?
