Summer Quarterly 2018
Nuclear Shorts
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said in 2016 that the US was then “bombing seven countries.” Politifact rated the statement “True”on Dec. 31, 2016, identifying the target countries as Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Libya. NBC News re-confirmed the claim on Jan. 9, 2017. A December 2015 report to Congress from the Obama Administration on presidential war powers named 14 countries with varying levels of ongoing US military combat, including warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Somalia, Yemen, Djibouti, Libya, Cuba, Niger, Cameroon, Egypt, Jordan, and Kosovo. Cuba was included because the military personnel operating the off-shore penal colony at Guantánamo Bay are combat troops. A legal analysis by lawfareblog.com which includes links to all of the Obama-era “War Power Letters to Congress 2009-2015” notes: “The most recent report, from December 2015, explicitly refers to ongoing operations of variable intensity in 14 countries.”
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