Analysis: Obama crosses own red line with Syrian troop deployment
WASHINGTON — Even when President Barack Obama sent U.S. troops back to Iraq and ordered the military to stay in Afghanistan, he insisted Syria would remain off limits for American ground forces. Now he’s crossed his own red line.
Obama’s announcement Friday that he was deploying up to 50 U.S. special operations troops into northern Syria to assist in the fight against the Islamic State group is the kind of incremental move that has defined his second-term Mideast strategy.
The U.S. military footprint in the region is growing. But each step is on a small scale, so as to reassure Americans that Obama isn’t plunging their country into another large, open-ended conflict.
While the strategy may help ease them back into the realities of war, experts and some of Obama’s political allies say his slow ramp-up may not be enough to defeat the fast-moving militants.
“Deploying a handful of U.S. special operations forces to Syria will not change this situation significantly,” said Frederic Hof, Obama’s former Syria special adviser. “It is a Band-Aid of sorts.”
Georgia prosecutor’s rejection of black jurors is focus of Supreme Court death penalty case
WASHINGTON — Prosecutor Stephen Lanier’s meaning was unmistakable when he urged jurors in north Georgia to sentence the defendant to death in part to deter other people “out there in the projects.”
Almost everyone in the public housing apartments near the scene of the killing of a 79-year-old woman in Rome, Georgia, was black, as was defendant Timothy Tyrone Foster. And after Lanier got through picking a jury of Foster’s peers, all the jurors were white. So was the victim.
Foster has been on death row for nearly 30 years, but his case still is making its way through the courts. The actions of Lanier and his staff will be in front of the Supreme Court on Monday, when the justices will consider whether the exclusion of all the black prospective jurors is a form of racial discrimination in violation of Foster’s constitutional rights under a test the high court laid out in 1986.
Georgia courts have consistently rejected Foster’s claims of discrimination, even after his lawyers obtained the prosecution’s notes that revealed prosecutors’ focus on the black people in the jury pool. In one example, a handwritten note headed “Definite No’s” listed six people, of whom five were the remaining black prospective jurors.
The case arrives at the court a few months after Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the court should consider declaring the death penalty unconstitutional. Foster’s case highlights several issues in the wider debate over capital punishment, including questions about his mental capabilities and the length of time he has lived under a death sentence.
US promises $100M in aid to Syrian opposition
MANAMA, Bahrain — The United States ramped up its support for Syria’s opposition with a pledge of nearly $100 million in fresh aid on Saturday. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s top diplomat described the timing of the departure of Syrian President Bashar Assad and the withdrawal of foreign fighters as top sticking points to finding a lasting resolution to the civil war in Syria.
Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the additional assistance at the Manama Dialogue security conference in the Gulf island nation of Bahrain, where discussion of Syria dominated the gathering of mostly Western and Arab officials.
The American promise of cash, which it says brings to nearly $500 million the amount it has pledged to the opposition since 2012, came a day after the U.S. announced it was intensifying its fight against the Islamic State group in Syria with the deployment of up to 50 special operations troops.
It also coincided with the completion of international talks in Vienna to pursue a new peace effort involving Syria’s Iranian-backed government and opposition groups. The negotiations left open the thorny question of when Assad might leave power, and it was unclear whether he or disparate rebel groups fighting to topple him would sign on to any peace proposal.
A new round of talks was expected to take place within two weeks.
By wire sources