“The violations of this cessation have grown to the point where it just barely exists”, Obama said. States and cities and communities all across the country, they are the ones who set up the voting systems and the voting booths. “That’s ridiculous. That doesn’t make any sense”.
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“Even [Islamic State] leaders know they’re going to keep losing”, he said.
President Barack Obama scoffed Thursday at Republican Donald Trump’s warnings earlier this week that the presidential election in November may be “rigged”. “That doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment”.
The White House is betting that Putin’s preoccupation with Russia’s position on the world stage could lead to a rethink before he travels to the G20 in China and UN General Assembly in NY next month.
Stating that US-led coalition had carried out 14,000 air strikes against ISIS and 100 thousand sorties, he, however, said military force would not be enough to defeat ISIS.
“I don’t even really know where to start on answering this question. In other words, ISIL turns out not to be invincible, they are, in fact, inevitably going to be defeated”.
The president said the United States must do a better job of “draining” the ideology that is behind the attacks.
“They have been told: These are classified briefings”. Some Trump critics have contended that the billionaire’s unrestrained tongue could put U.S. secrets in danger.
In July, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said Democrat Hillary Clinton should be barred from classified information while on the campaign trail after Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey cleared her on charges related to her use of private email servers while acting as secretary of state, going on to call her decision “extremely careless”.
“We go into this without any blinders on”.
He warned against portraying the battle as “a clash of civilizations between the West and Islamic”, which he said would play into the hands of terrorist groups.
While the Islamic State has been losing territory in Iraq and Syria, eroding the self-proclaimed “caliphate” that it wants to expand across a wide swath of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, the group has demonstrated an ability to direct or inspire terrorist attacks in Western countries, including the United States, France and Belgium, as well as in Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally, and war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan.
He warned that there remained a “serious” threat of an ISIS attack on USA soil, that would not be spectacular, like al Qaeda’s assault on 9/11 but could be a smaller scale operations using “small arms, or assault rifles”, or a truck, as happened recently in Nice, France.
Obama typically convenes the National Security Council at the White House, but over the past year he has occasionally held them at other agencies like the State Department and the CIA.
“There’s not a meeting that I don’t end by saying, “Is there something else we can be doing that we haven’t thought of?”
In Syria, the situation is more complex, Obama acknowledged, because ISIL and al-Qaida can hide in the clutter of the civil war going on there.
The US recently stepped up its efforts against IS, bombing one of the group’s strongholds in Libya on Monday after a request by the UN-backed government.
Obama also used the news conference to reject claims that his administration’s payment of $400 million worth of cash to Iran amounted to a ransom in exchange for the release of U.S. prisoners there.
USA officials maintain that no such video exists, and that the only video shown on TV was of the hostages being released in Switzerland.
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“S$3 ome of you may have read the article in The New York Times today – I guess it came out last night online – about this individual in Germany who had confessed, and had given himself up, and then explained his knowledge of how ISIL’s networks worked”, Obama said.
