{UAH} Ndugu Ocen : Meet the foreign policy advisers of Donald Trump

  

Walid Phares

To his detractors, Phares is a rare combination of lightning rod and dog whistle. His various claims about a creeping, underappreciated jihadi "apocalypse" against the West will find quarter with Trump's broad suspicion of Muslims and his call to ban foreign Muslims from entering the U.S.

In a 2008 essay in the conservative Human Events, Phares warned that in the following four years, "Jihadists may recruit one million suicide bombers" and that by 2016, they would have 10 million and "seize five regimes equipped with the final weapon," referring to nuclear weapons.

This isn't Phares's first time as a presidential adviser.  Phares's work co-chairing the Middle East policy team for then-GOP candidate Mitt Romney—who has recently vowed to fight against Trump's nomination—prompted the Council on American-Islamic Relations to call on the candidate to ditch Phares, whom it called "an associate to war crimes" and a "conspiracy theorist," citing his ties to a violent anti-Muslim militia.

Mother Jones reported that in the 1980s Phares, a Christian who was then active in Lebanese political groups, trained militants in ideological beliefs to justify a war on Muslim and Druze factions, prompting a former CIA official to question why a man with ties to foreign political organizations was advising a U.S. presidential candidate.

Phares has his supporters, chiefly in neoconservative foreign policy circles and among conservative pundits and analysts. But those connections drew scrutiny in 2012 when the group Media Matters for America alleged that Phares's connections to the Romney campaign weren't properly identified when Phares was working as a consultant for Fox News.

Joseph E. Schmit

Joseph E. Schmitz. has served in government, as the Defense Department inspector general. Schmitz was brought in during the first term of President George W. Bush with a mandate to reform the watchdog office, but he eventually found himself the subject of scrutiny.

Schmitz also raised eyebrows for what the paper's sources described as his "unusual" fascination with Baron Friedrich Von Steuben, a Revolutionary War hero who's regarded as the military's first inspector general. Schmitz reportedly replaced the Defense Department IG's seal in its office across the country with a new one bearing the Von Steuben family motto, Sub Tutela Altissimi Semper, "under the protection of the Almighty always.""Schmitz slowed or blocked investigations of senior Bush administration officials, spent taxpayer money on pet projects and accepted gifts that may have violated ethics guidelines," according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times in 2005. Current and former colleagues described him as "an intelligent but easily distracted leader who seemed to obsess over details," including the hiring of a speechwriter and designs for a bathroom.

Gen. Joseph "Keith" Kellogg

 Retired Gen. Joseph "Keith" Kellogg, was among the first U.S. personnel sent in to try and govern Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Kellogg had been employed by U.S. government contractor Oracle Corp. in November 2003 when he went to Baghdad to serve as the Chief Operating Officer of the Coalition Provisional Authority, a position he held for five months.

"He played a key role in the effort to rebuild Iraq and bridge the link between security and critical infrastructure," according to a press release from CACI International Inc., another government contractor that hired Kellogg after his brief stint in Iraq.

The so-called reconstruction of Iraq was a halting effort beset by controversial policy decisions—such as the disbanding of the Iraqi army, a move that is widely seen as helping to fuel an insurgency that later threatened to plunge the country into a civil war—and costly, poorly managed contracts that spawned audits and inspectors general investigations.

Carter Page

Cartier Page, is virtually unknown in high-level circles of national security and foreign policy. Page is an energy industry executive with experience working in Russia. He is the founder and managing partner of Global Energy Capital and spent three years working in Moscow, "where he was responsible for the opening of the Merrill [Lynch] office and was an advisor on key transactions for Gazprom, RAO UES and others," according to his public biography. It says Page was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy but provides no information on any military service.

Page has criticized the Obama administration's policy toward Russia, going so far as to accuse Victoria Nuland, an assistant secretary of state, of "misguided and provocative actions" and "fomenting" the revolution that ousted Ukrainian president and Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych from power in 2014. The former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, has described such notions as paranoid fiction. Nevertheless, he has said, Putin himself believed that the U.S. somehow arranged for the ouster of the Ukrainian leader.

George Papadopoulos

Papadopulos,like Page, is virtually unknown in high-level circles of national security and foreign policy,   He was an adviser to Ben Carson's presidential campaign, according to Papadopulos's LinkedIn page. For the past two months, he's been a director at the London Centre of International Law Practice, which offers training courses on legal issues related to energy and natural resources development.

Papadopoulos, who graduated from DePaul University in 2009, offered a lengthy description of his foreign policy achievements on his LinkedIn page, including being "invited to participate in policy and oil and gas conferences" overseas and "high-level meetings I had" with various heads of government. He worked for nearly five years as a researcher at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington.

One other Trump adviser had previously been reported. Retired Army Gen. Michael Fly who claims that he "met informally" with Trump. Flynn was pushed out of his post as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and has since spoken out publicly about the need for the U.S. to forge closer ties with Russia.

Last December, Flynn sat next to Putin at a dinner celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Kremlin-linked television network RT. His travel to Russia raised concerns among current and former defense and intelligence officials because Flynn still receives classified briefings and is privy to sensitive information about U.S. foreign policy.

Flynn has also tweeted incendiary comments about Muslims and has espoused the view that fear of Muslims is "rational."

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*A positive mind is a courageous mind, without doubts and fears, using the experience and wisdom to give the best of him/herself.

 

 We must dare invent the future!
The only way of limiting the usurpation of power by
 individuals, the military or otherwise, is to put the people in charge  - Capt. Thomas. Sankara {RIP} '1949-1987

 *"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent

revolution inevitable"**…  *J.F Kennedy

 

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