U.S. News
Former US Envoy To Syria Admits Misleading Trump To Keep Troops In Syria
Documents contained in the U.S. National Archives and drawn up by the CIA reveal a plan to destroy the Syrian government going back decades.
In a recent interview with DC-based al-Monitor, former U.S. envoy to Syria, James Jeffrey, revealed what many of us already knew and had been writing about long ago. Namely, that American foreign policy is not directed by the President, but by the military industrial complex and the Deep State itself.
In the interview, Jeffrey, who is supposed to work at the behest of the President, stated that he and his team misled the Trump administration during the course of the war in terms of which direction their “strategy” should take.
One revelation was that, while the Trump administration already viewed Iranian influence in Syria as a problem, Jeffrey and his team convinced the administration that there was no way to deal with ISIS (Trump’s main goal in Syria) without first dealing with Iran. In other words, the Deep State of which Jeffrey was a mouthpiece directed the president to engage in hostility towards Iran under the guise of providing “stability” to the region and “defeating ISIS.”
Nonsensical as the argument may sound to readers of my articles, it apparently worked on the President of the United States.
In the interview, Jeffrey stated,
The Syria strategy was a stepchild since the Obama administration.
The Trump administration saw one of the major flaws in the Obama administration: that it treated Iran as a nuclear weapons problem a la North Korea. They saw Iran as a threat to the regional order. So they wanted a Syria policy building on the bits and pieces of the Obama policy. So the Trump administration came up with that policy in 2017.
Secretary Pompeo and I convinced people in the administration of this: If you don’t deal with the underlying problem of Iran in Syria, you’re not going to deal in an enduring way with IS. We saw this all as one thing.
We then also had the Israeli air campaign. The US only began supporting that when I came on board. I went out there and we saw Prime Minister Netanyahu and others, and they thought that they were not being supported enough by the US military, and not by intelligence. And there was a big battle within the US government, and we won the battle.
The argument [against supporting Israel’s campaign] was, again, this obsession with the counterterrorism mission. People didn’t want to screw with it, either by worrying about Turkey or diverting resources to allow the Israelis to muck around in Syria, as maybe that will lead to some blowback to our forces. It hasn’t.
Basically, first and foremost is denial of the [Assad regime] getting military victory. But because Turkey was so important and we couldn’t do this strategy without Turkey, that brought up the problem of the Turkish gripes in northeast Syria. So my job was to coordinate all of that.
So you throw all those together — the anti-chemical weapons mission, our military presence, the Turkish military presence, and the Israeli dominance in the air — and you have a pretty effective military pillar of your military, diplomatic and isolation three pillars.
So that was how we put together an integrated Syria policy that nestled under the overall Iran policy. The result has been relative success because we — with a lot of help from the Turks in particular — have managed to stabilize the situation.
The only change on the ground to the benefit of Assad has been southern Idlib in two and a half years of attacks. They are highly unlikely to continue, given the strength of the Turkish army there and the magnitude of the defeat of the Syrian army by the Turks back in March.
And of course, we’ve ratcheted up the isolation and sanctions pressure on Assad, we’ve held the line on no reconstruction assistance, and the country’s desperate for it. You see what’s happened to the Syrian pound, you see what’s happened to the entire economy. So, it’s been a very effective strategy.
But Jeffrey alludes to more than simply manipulating the President when he mentions the strategy of supporting Israeli airstrikes inside Syria.
The strategy being implemented by the Western establishment (here, specifically Turkey and Israel) is identical to the one proposed by the Brookings Institution in its document “Middle East Memo #21: Saving Syria: Assessing Options For Regime Change,” where it says,
Turkey’s participation would be vital for success, and Washington would have to encourage the Turks to play a more helpful role than they have so far. While Ankara has lost all patience with Damascus, it has taken few concrete steps that would increase the pressure on Asad (and thereby antagonize Tehran). Turkish policy toward the Syrian opposition has actually worked at cross-purposes with American efforts to foster a broad, unified national organization. With an eye to its own domestic Kurdish dilemmas, Ankara has frustrated efforts to integrate the Syrian Kurds into a broader opposition framework. In addition, it has overtly favored the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood over all other opposition groups. Washington must impress upon Turkey the need to be more accommodating of legitimate Kurdish political and cultural demands in a post-Asad Syria, and to be less insistent on the primacy of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Some voices in Washington and Jerusalem are exploring whether Israel could contribute to coercing Syrian elites to remove Asad. The Israelis have the region’s most formidable military, impressive intelligence services, and keen interests in Syria. In addition, Israel’s intelligence services have a strong knowledge of Syria, as well as assets within the Syrian regime that could be used to subvert the regime’s power base and press for Asad’s removal. Israel could posture forces on or near the Golan Heights and, in so doing, might divert regime forces from suppressing the opposition. This posture may conjure fears in the Asad regime of a multi-front war, particularly if Turkey is willing to do the same on its border and if the Syrian opposition is being fed a steady diet of arms and training. Such a mobilization could perhaps persuade Syria’s military leadership to oust Asad in order to preserve itself. Advocates argue this additional pressure could tip the balance against Asad inside Syria, if other forces were aligned properly.
While Syria is not in conflict with Iraq today, after being destroyed by the United States in 2003, Western Iraq now houses the mysteriously-funded Islamic State on the border between Iraq and Syria.
That being said, this plan is not merely being discussed, it is being implemented as one can clearly see by the fact that Israel routinely launches airstrikes against the Syrian military, Turkey continues to funnel ISIS and related terrorists into Syria through its own territory and has launched an invasion in the northern region of Idlib, and ISIS and the Kurds continue to present itself as an Eastern front militarily. As a result, the “multi-front” war envisioned and written about by the CIA in 1983 and discussed by Brookings in 2012 has come to fruition and is in full swing today.
Documents contained in the U.S. National Archives and drawn up by the CIA reveal a plan to destroy the Syrian government going back decades. One such document entitled, “Bringing Real Muscle To Bear In Syria,” written by CIA officer Graham Fuller, is particularly illuminating.
The author presents a plan that sounds eerily similar to those being discussed publicly by Western and specifically American corporate-financier think tanks and private non-governmental organizations like Brookings who unofficially craft American policy. Fuller writes,
The US should consider sharply escalating the pressures against Assad [Sr.] through covertly orchestrating simultaneous military threats against Syria from three border states hostile to Syria: Iraq, Israel and Turkey. Iraq, perceived to be increasingly desperate in the Gulf war, would undertake limited military (air) operations against Syria with the sole goal of opening the pipeline. Although opening war on a second front against Syria poses considerable risk to Iraq, Syria would also face a two-front war since it is already heavily engaged in the Bekaa, on the Golan and in maintaining control over a hostile and restive population inside Syria.
Israel would simultaneously raise tensions along Syria’s Lebanon front without actually going to war. Turkey, angered by Syrian support to Armenian terrorism, to Iraqi Kurds on Turkey’s Kurdish border areas and to Turkish terrorists operating out of northern Syria, has often considered launching unilateral military operations against terrorist camps in northern Syria. Virtually all Arab states would have sympathy for Iraq.
Faced with three belligerent fronts, Assad would probably be forced to abandon his policy of closure of the pipeline. Such a concession would relieve the economic pressure on Iraq, and perhaps force Iran to reconsider bringing the war to an end. It would be a sharpening blow to Syria’s prestige and could effect the equation of forces in Lebanon.
Thus, Fuller outlines that not only would Syria be forced to reopen the pipeline of interest at the time, but that it would be a regional shockwave effecting the makeup of forces in and around Lebanon, weakening the prestige of the Syrian state and, presumably, the psychological state of the Syrian President and the Syrian people, as well as a message to Iran.
The document continues,
Such a threat must be primarily military in nature. At present there are three relatively hostile elements around Syria’s borders: Israel, Iraq and Turkey. Consideration must be given to orchestrating a credible military threat against Syria in order to induce at least some moderate change in its policies.
This paper proposes serious examination of the use of all three states – acting independently – to exert the necessary threat. Use of any one state in isolation cannot create such a credible threat.
Back to 2020, after several announcements of troop withdrawal from Syria by the Trump administration, through the course of the interview Jeffrey admits (if one is capable of reading nuance) that his team did not follow the President’s orders to withdraw in Syria and that they continually used any rationale they could in order to convince him to keep troops there, sometimes changing that rationale at will. They didn’t want to lose what Jeffrey calls “the gift that keeps on giving.”
Jeffrey stated,
The president was uncomfortable with our presence in Syria. He was very uncomfortable with what he saw as endless wars. This is something he should not be criticized for. We took down the [IS] caliphate, and then we stayed on. Trump kept asking, “Why do we have troops there?” And we didn’t give him the right answer.
If somebody had said, “It’s all about the Iranians,” it might have worked. But the people whose job it was to tell why the troops are there was DOD. And they just gave the [Congressional] Authorization of Use of Military Force: “We’re there to fight terrorists.”
The reason that Trump pulled the troops out was I think because he was just tired of us having come up with all these explanations for why we’re in there. There was an implicit promise to him, ‘Hey boss, nothing’s going to go wrong, we’re working with the Turks, we’re working with the Russians.’ And then he gets these disasters.
I didn’t brief the president on it. Pompeo did, and made arguments along those lines, focused on Iran. But Trump was uncomfortable about those forces, and he trusted Erdogan. Erdogan would keep making these cases about the PKK, and the president would ask people, and they would have to be honest and ‘fess up. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Wars are complicated.
The president was briefed, but he also listens to Erdogan. Erdogan is pretty persuasive.
We at the State Department never provided any troop numbers to the president. That’s not our job. We didn’t try to deceive him. He kept on publicly saying numbers that were way below what the actual numbers were, so in talking to the media and talking to Congress, we had to be very careful and dodge around. Furthermore, the numbers were funny. Do you count the allies that didn’t want to be identified in there? Do you count the al-Tanf garrison? Do you count the Bradley unit that was going in and out?
We were gun shy because the president had three times given the order to withdraw. It was a constant pressuring and threatening to pull the troops out of Syria. We felt very vulnerable and may have been a little bit punch drunk on fear because it made so much sense to us. I understand his concerns about Afghanistan. But the Syria mission is the gift that keeps on giving. We and the SDF are still the dominant force in [northeast] Syria.
But while Jeffrey attempts to put a lot of the blame on Secretary of State Pompeo, a committed Deep State representative in his own right, the truth is that Jeffrey already admitted to misleading the President. Take a look at the Defense One article, “Outgoing Syria Envoy Admits Hiding US Troop Numbers; Praises Trump’s Mideast Record.” Katie Bo Williams writes,
Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.
Once again, Trump has ordered the removal of a specific number of troops from Syria and, once again, we can only speculate as to whether or not those troops are actually leaving the country, particularly with the fate of the presidency at home in question. With four announcements of troop withdrawals by the President and virtually nothing happening, it is scarcely able to be denied that someone other than the President controls foreign policy and what actually takes place in the U.S. military.
U.S. News
New York facing streets without cops because of COVID vaccine mandate
“Today’s ruling sets the city up for a real crisis …”
A New York judge has rejected a union request to suspended the city’s announced COVID-19 vaccination mandate for police officers, meaning within just days there could be crimes to which officers simply cannot respond.
CBS reported the judge rejected the request from the Police Benevolent Association, representing some 24,000 police officers, to hold off on the requirement.
The union had wanted the temporary restraining order because the city has not made clear potential exceptions for medical or religious exemptions, and is refusing to give unvaccinated officers time to apply.
The vaccination rate among officers is about 73% so far, and the union has stated its position that getting the shots of the experimental COVID treatments is a personal medical decision.
“Today’s ruling sets the city up for a real crisis. The haphazard rollout of this mandate has created chaos in the NYPD,” PBA President Patrick J. Lynch said in a statement to CBS. “City hall has given no reason that a vaccine mandate with a weekly testing option is no longer enough to protect police officers and the public, especially while the number of COVID-19 cases continues to fall.”
It was the first such legal action launched against Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to control city employee medical decisions, and an immediate appeal was being submitted.
The city’s demand had been that police officers, firefighters and others get at least their first does by Friday – or be left without pay.
The New York Daily News estimated that the deadline could leave a quarter of the city’s police officers at home without pay.
The publication noted widespread opposition to the mayor’s controlling dictate led to a huge protest in lower Manhattan earlier this week.
De Blasio said he believes in vaccine mandates – and suggests every mayor or governor should require workers to get the shots.
Despite whatever protection the shots provide, they also have been blamed for thousands of fatal side effects.
The New York Post noted that the issue was threatening not only police units, and that the New York Fire Department was preparing to shut down as many as 20% of its fire companies, “and take an equal portion of its ambulances off the streets.”
“The Department must manage the unfortunate fact that a portion of our workforce has refused to comply with a vaccine mandate for all city employees,” Commissioner Daniel Nigro charged.
“We will use all means at our disposal, including mandatory overtime, mutual aid from other EMS providers and significant changes to the schedules of our members. We will ensure the continuity of operations and safety of all those we have sworn oaths to serve.”
Reuters noted the chief of the firefighters’ union told his members to report for duty regardless of de Blasio’s order to get the COVID-19 shots.
Andrew Ansbro, of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, said his members were “insulted” by de Blasio.
“I have told my members that if they choose to remain unvaccinated, they must still report for duty,” Ansbro said. “If they are told they cannot work, it will be the department and city of New York that sends them home. And it will be the department and the city of New York that has failed to protect the citizens of New York.”
De Blasio’s mandate affects some 50,000 workers in New York, who have a deadline late Friday to prove they are vaccinated.
AP said the judge was Lizette Colon, and her ruling said the mandate can take effect as scheduled. But she also ordered city officials to be in court Nov. 12 to defend their demands.
Estimates are that about three quarters of the affected police department employees have taken the shots, while the figure is about 68% for fire department workers.
U.S. News
The Establishment Is Hiding Mass Resistance To Vaccine Mandates With The “Striketober” Farce
The establishment is well aware that these actions are destabilizing the labor market …
It is perhaps a sign of the waning influence of the mainstream media that even though they have been incessantly pumping the concept of “Striketober” for the past month, the majority of Americans rarely mention it. What we do deal with on a regular basis, though, are the constant labor shortages across multiple sectors of the economy as well as the growing supply chain disruptions and stagflationary retail price hikes. The media notion of “labor regaining its power” is a background narrative that they are still struggling to plant in the public subconscious while the majority of people try to adapt to more serious concerns.
That said, the establishment doesn’t really care if the propaganda takes hold, only that they have a useful cover for the very real collapse of the US economy. It’s a kind of vicious perversion of the “fake it until you make it” strategy.
Striketober, like BLM, Antifa, and numerous other Marxist or Cultural Marxist movements has been created from thin air by a combination of news hype and globalist foundation funding. It’s important to first recognize that none of these leftist organizations would have ever been formed had it not been for the ample support of institutions like the Ford Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. BLM, for example, was founded by openly Marxist leaders and got its start using millions of dollars in funding from the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundation.
Many of the “workers unions” involved in various elements of Striktober also enjoy direct or indirect funding from globalist foundations. The Food Chain Workers Alliance, for example, receives funding from the Ford Foundation, and the National Domestic Workers Foundation gets ample money from the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation.
As I have said many times in the past, all the evil people are on the side of the political left. All the billionaire elites and corporations they claim to hate are feeding them endless cash. Leftist labor strikes only exist because globalists want them to exist.
Of course, leftist strikes are actually a minimal problem. In fact, I suspect they are a deliberately fabricated theater meant to obscure the very REAL labor strikes among conservatives over the covid vaccine mandates. Let me explain…
We are all familiar with sensationalist worker walkouts like the Netflix protest over Dave Chappelle’s special “The Closer” which dares to make jokes about trans activists, a highly protected minority of people at the top of the leftist oppression totem pole. Most people have also heard about the workers strike among McDonalds employees over #metoo claims even though there is little to no evidence to support the accusations.
What we don’t hear much about is that the Netflix walkout was actually only a handful of real employees mixed with a mob of career activists that were bused in from elsewhere. We also don’t hear about the fact that the #metoo claims made against McDonalds are actually from back in 2018, and they are now being conveniently dredged up again as the country faces a labor shortage crisis.
These high profile strikes and walkouts are starting to eclipse media coverage of the true culprits behind the labor crisis – Namely the Biden Administration and blue state governments enacting global mandates, vaccine controls and covid stimulus.
The source of worker shortages, supply chain bottlenecks and a lot of our stagflationary issues can be traced directly back to the government’s covid restrictions and the covid welfare programs. Get rid of the restrictions, the mandates and the covid checks and over time the crisis will disappear. It really is that simple. However, the establishment does not want you to see it that way.
Marxist/Socialist groups are working feverishly to make hay with the covid protests and employee strikes in an attempt to attribute them to “worker discontent” over low wages and “mistreatment” rather than the covid mandates. This is nonsense.
First and foremost, wages have been rising exponentially in the past year for what I would call “zero skill workers” in the retail and service industries. When a potential employee with no valuable skills can walk into almost any chain restaurant or retail outlet and get $15 or more an hour on top of a signing bonus of hundreds of dollars just for showing up on the first day, there is no unfair disparity for the working class.
When the average minimum wage across the states is around $9 and most service workers are making nearly double that, there is no legitimate problem for Marxists to complain about. So, they have to make things up. To be sure, $15 an hour is not enough to buy a home or start a family on a single income, but people aren’t automatically entitled to home ownership and no intelligent person expects to launch a career in food service or retail. That’s why decades ago these jobs were filled by teenagers, not people in their 20s or older. Doubling the minimum wage only accomplished one thing int he long run: Much higher prices for everyone.
Workers might feel like they are being abused, but it’s not their paychecks under attack or their managers making sexual advances. These are petty concerns compared to the bigger issue at hand – Their individual civil liberties.
As noted, there are two major factors in worker shortages: The Biden vaccine mandates and state and federal covid stimulus programs which pay people more to stay at home than they would make on the job. THESE are the reasons for worker shortages and anyone that claims otherwise is ignorant or has an agenda.
Federal covid checks are not done yet. Contrary to popular belief the cash is still flowing through various programs including child credit programs. Also, most states continue to pump out covid financial aid on top of existing unemployment benefits. This is essentially Universal Basic Income and it’s not over by a long shot. Businesses cannot find enough labor because the government has bribed millions of workers to stay home. The socialists don’t like to address this problem because it conflicts with their Striketober fantasy, so they deny it exists.
The establishment is well aware that these actions are destabilizing the labor market and I believe the goal is to destroy the small business sector specifically. Small businesses cannot compete with corporations backed by trillions in central bank stimulus. They don’t have the resources to double wage rates for zero-skill workers or to offer large signing bonuses. They also don’t have the resources to police their own employees and customers to ensure these people are complying with vaccine passports and booster shots. Within a year the solid small business foundation of the US will be a hollow shell.
With the death of small businesses, all that will remain are international conglomerates that WILL enforce the mandates and threaten people with poverty and starvation if they refuse the vax. All other legal alternatives will be removed and that is exactly what the elites want. Without defiant small businesses there’s nowhere left for you to work or shop without the vax passport. Corporate monopolies are the tool governments are using to circumvent constitutional protections for individuals.
But as this process plays out the resistance grows. And, as they say, the resistance will not be televised.
The entire premise of Striketober and the rise of the “oppressed proletariat” is a farce, but there is a different kind of revolution brewing. The latest narrative does at least represent something new in the agenda to derail the US economy. For the most part we have been dealing with astroturf protests from Cultural Marxists in the form of crazed social justice warriors funded by globalist foundations. The focus is usually on exploiting cultural taboos or non-existent racism or sexism. The Striketober development is a much more classic rendition of old school Marxist sabotage, and it appears that it was slapped together haphazardly by establishment elites in order to diminish the VERY REAL conservative worker walkouts.
That is to say, from now on expect that if you walk out of a job or get fired from a job for non-compliance on the experimental covid vax you might be lumped in with a fake leftist movement and no one will mention the real reasons for your sacrifice. But what is the point of this psy-op? Don’t the globalists want to identify and demonize the millions of conservatives refusing the vax?
I am reminded of a story I read when I was a child about a conversation between an ancient Roman General and a Roman Senator. The senator tells the general that something needed to be done about separating and delineating the slave class from the free Roman citizens because often they all looked alike and were sometimes dressed alike. The senator suggested that the slaves be forced to wear black arm bands so they could be easily identified. The general disagreed, pointing out that if the slaves were given the arm bands they would finally see how many of them there were, and realizing the sheer size of their population the slaves might then be encouraged to revolt against the empire.
Now, I don’t know if this tale is historically accurate but I treat it as a parable. In the case of the vaccine mandates and the massive worker strikes among airlines, hospitals, police and emergency services, etc., the more the establishment tries to squeeze the US population with forced vaccination efforts the more liberty minded people slip through their fingers and fight back. If mass walkouts and strikes are attributed to conservatives and patriots standing against the mandates, then all the other “slaves” might realize they are actually legion. This would be bad for the globalists and their Reset agenda.
So, they are attempting to co-opt the vaccine walkouts and rewrite history in real time by creating a fake workers movement through Striketober. And no, it will not end in October, the media will be promoting this idea from now on. That way the resistance becomes convoluted and confused and the mainstream media can say the great number of striking workers are actually on the side of the political left battling the “capitalist machine”, not conservatives and patriots on the side of truth and freedom.
We are not supposed to know our numbers. By instituting a two tier society through vax mandates the establishment has made an error. They obviously assumed there would be far less rebellion against the passports. They obviously assumed that there would be a vast majority of support and the 10% or less of the population refusing to comply would be overwhelmed and surrounded by the covid cult. They figured we would be compelled by peer pressure and the fear of standing out, and that we would naturally fall in line. Instead, 30% to 50% of the population depending on the state or city or industry is in revolt and we are starting to see how many of us there really are across the country.
There are three things the covid authoritarians are predominantly afraid of – Liberty groups recognizing their true numbers. Those same groups organizing at the local and state level across the country. And, losing the mainstream narrative that they are the “good guys” and that we are the “evil insurrectionists”.
Striketober is just another desperate attempt by the power elites to manage optics in the face of unexpected opposition. Their efforts to terrorize people that refuse to become guinea pigs for a barely tested mRNA cocktail is backfiring. Eventually, worker strikes due to forced vaccination will culminate in greater acts of rebellion against the system. And, with each escalation of resistance the establishment will strain their weak think-tank brains trying to create new narratives to obscure what is really happening.
U.S. News
NYC Firefighters Union Head Warns Vaccine Mandate Will “Get Residents KILLED”
“When this city goes into utter chaos on Nov. 1, be ready to pick up the pieces that the mayor causes.”
The head of the firefighter’s union in New York City has warned that Mayor Bill De Blasio’s vaccine mandate, which comes into effect next week is going to lead to “utter chaos,” with massive numbers of unvaccinated first responders prevented from doing their jobs and residents losing their lives. as a result.
In an appearance on Fox News Radio, FDNY Firefighter Association President Andrew Ansbro urged that “The response times are going to go through the roof. We’re just not going to be able to get to the emergencies in time.”
“Fires are going to burn longer. Heart attack victims are going to be laying on the floor longer,” Ansbro declared, adding “People in stuck elevators are going to be stuck there for hours if not days.”
Ansbro made the prediction that 30 to 40 percent of firehouses in New York City will be closed down if the mandate remains, with up to 45 percent of the workforce remaining unvaccinated.
“On Friday, when they’re tallying the numbers of who complied and who didn’t, they’re going to be faced with a stark reality that they’re going to have to close firehouses down,” Ansbro explained.
“The mayor is going to be faced with either sending us home or sticking to his guns,” Ansbro continued, adding “And his guns are going to get New York City residents killed.”
“When this city goes into utter chaos on Nov. 1, be ready to pick up the pieces that the mayor causes,” the fire chief further warned.
During a press conference Wednesday, Ansbro also said “I have told my members that if they choose to remain unvaccinated, they must still report for duty.”
He also stated that firefighters in the city feel “insulted” by the mandate and the probability that they will be prevented from working.
“If they are told they cannot work, it will be the department and city of New York that sends them home. And it will be the department and the city of New York that has failed to protect the citizens of New York,” Ansbro said.


