police handled the disturbance smartly by separating the antagonists and leaving it to others to sort out culpability and criminality. He said even if the officers didn’t immediately grasp that the guards were potentially immune from arrest, they would have known that a fight outside an ambassador’s residence was more complex than a simple dispute.
“The officers in D.C. are well trained,” Ramsey said. “They are very familiar with these unique kind of circumstances. This is not your typical city.”
.. “Diplomatic immunity can’t be a license to attack people at will. The cops see people beating others into submission, and I think they’re convinced it was above their pay grade to act.”
.. Turkey’s semiofficial news agency cast the melee as a failure of D.C. police, saying they did not stop the anti-Erdogan protest. The government later alleged that its guards had “responded in self-defense” to terrorists it said had joined the protesters.
Embassy Statement Regarding The Incidents That Occurred In Sheridan Circle On May 16, 2017
Groups affiliated with the PKK, which the U.S. and Turkey have designated as a terrorist organization, gathered yesterday without permit in Sheridan Circle in the immediate vicinity of the Ambassador’s Residence, while the President of Turkey was visiting the Residence. The demonstrators began aggressively provoking Turkish-American citizens who had peacefully assembled to greet the President. The Turkish-Americans responded in self-defense and one of them was seriously injured. The violence and injuries were the result of this unpermitted, provocative demonstration. We hope that, in the future, appropriate measures will be taken to ensure that similar provocative actions causing harm and violence do not occur.
The Trump presidency doesn’t seem sustainable
But Trump himself is turning out to be the full-fledged disaster of our worst fears. He understands nothing and is uninterested in learning anything — not just the dreary substance of things such as tax reform but constitutional values, governing norms and the United States’ unique role in the world.
He sees things only through the distorting prism of an all-consuming ego. There is only one Trump instinct — “fight, fight, fight,” he said at the Coast Guard Academy — and one Trumpian dichotomy: friend or foe. He is impervious to embarrassment, no matter how blatant his falsehood.
.. Authoritarianism? Trump summarily fired his FBI director over “this Russia thing”
.. Trump met unapologetically with yet another dictatorial thug, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and remained shamefully silent as Erdogan’s security goons beat up protesters on U.S. soil.
.. No surprise there, from the candidate who urged his crowds to “knock the crap out of” protesters and as president reportedlypressed Comey to jail reporters for obtaining leaks.
.. derided Comey as a “nut job” whose firing relieved “great pressure” on him.
‘Bannon’s War’ Review: Captain Chaos
A ‘Frontline’ documentary looks at the life and career of Trump’s chief strategist.
The subject of this documentary has never yielded in his regard for the infliction of shock and chaos as a political tactic, according to the commentators, mainly journalists, assembled for “ Bannon’s War,” a “Frontline” film on the life and career of Steve Bannon... an enduring belief in the value of chaos and disorder to undermine the establishment, usurp its power... he ran for student body president and won a surprise victory by running on a platform in which he attacked his rivals as tools of the administration—of the establishment—and by claiming for himself the mantle of “an outsider.”.. The young Bannon who emerges from this background is an omnivorous reader—a devourer, especially, of philosophy and history that yielded clues to the future. Future calamities, in particular. No danger preoccupied him more than the one posed by the Islamic world, which would in his view forever be a mortal threat to the West... nothing would have greater impact on him than the Sept. 11 attacks, proof to him of Islam’s continuing war against Western civilization... had lost none of his ingrained belief in the value of disruption... Mr. Bannon and President Trump, the film notes, wanted the ensuing outrage, the protests, the shock and, not least, the media’s cameras. They were sending a message: Change had come; Trump was making good on his promises.