WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says President Trump could be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize after his announcement that the U.S. will stop arming anti-Assad rebels in Syria.
Assange said if Trump could also avoid going to war with Iran that he might have a Nobel Peace Prize.
Assange tweeted out, “At long last we have the first serious steps to peace in Syria. If @realDonaldTrump can avoid attacking Iran he might have a Nobel Prize.”
At long last we have the first serious steps to peace in Syria. If @realDonaldTrump can avoid attacking Iran he might have a Nobel Prize.
— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) July 20, 2017
From The Hill:
President Trump is shutting down the CIA’s program to arm and train rebels fighting the Syrian government, The Washington Post reported Wednesday, a victory for Russia, which has called for the move for years.
Officials told the Post that shutting down the program, begun by the Obama administration in 2013, is a sign of Trump’s attempts to work with Russia, which has viewed the U.S. attempts to force out Syrian President Bashar Assad during that country’s civil war as an attack on its own interests.
The shuttering of the CIA program does not mark the end of U.S. involvement in Syria — Trump signed off in May on a plan to arm the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish rebel group, using Department of Defense funds.
The Post reports that Trump decided to shut down the CIA program last month after meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and national security adviser H.R. McMaster.
Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin struck a deal for a partial cease-fire during their meeting at the Group of 20 summit earlier this month, set for a region of Syria where rebels supported by the CIA are stationed.
[…]
The Nobel committee awarded President Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for nothing soon after he entered office in 2009.
The former director of Norway’s Nobel Institute revealed this week that he regrets the committee’s decision to give the 2009 Nobel Peace award to President Obama, according to The Washinton Times.
Geil Lundestad, director at the institute for 25 years, said in his just-published memoir that he and the committee had unanimously decided to grant the award to Mr. Obama just after his election in 2009 more in hopes of aiding the American president to achieve his goals on nuclear disarmament, rather than in recognition of what Mr. Obama had already accomplished.
Looking back over Mr. Obama’s presidency, Mr. Lundestad said, granting him the award did not fulfill the committee’s expectations.
“[We] thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn’t have this effect,” he told the Associated Press in an interview.
The award so early in his term appeared to take the Obama White House by surprise, and Mr. Lundestad said U.S. officials privately asked if a Nobel Prize-winner had ever skipped the awards ceremony.
[…]
“Even many of Obama’s supporters thought that the prize was a mistake,” Mr. Lundestad said. In the book, he expressed regret that the decision had been based in a hope for the future rather than recognition of past accomplishments, and that their expectations for Mr. Obama were not fulfilled.
Scroll down to leave a comment below.
