Saudi Arabia's Dream of Domination Has Gone Up in Flames
PATRICK COCKBURN • JANUARY 8, 2017 •
The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
As recently as two years ago, Saudi Arabia’s half century-long effort to establish itself as the main power among Arab and Islamic states looked as if it was succeeding. A US State Department paper sent by former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in 2014 and published by Wikileaks spoke of the Saudis and Qataris as rivals competing “to dominate the Sunni world”.
A year later in December 2015, the German foreign intelligence service BND was so worried about the growing influence of Saudi Arabia that it took the extraordinary step of producing a memo, saying that “the previous cautious diplomatic stance of older leading members of the royal family is being replaced by an impulsive policy of intervention”.
An embarrassed German government forced the BND to recant, but over the last year its fears about the destabilising impact of more aggressive Saudi policies were more than fulfilled. What it did not foresee was the speed with which Saudi Arabia would see its high ambitions defeated or frustrated on almost every front. But in the last year Saudi Arabia has seen its allies in Syrian civil war lose their last big urban centre in east Aleppo. Here, at least, Saudi intervention was indirect but in Yemen direct engagement of the vastly expensive Saudi military machine has failed to produce a victory. Instead of Iranian influence being curtailed by a more energetic Saudi policy, the exact opposite has happened. In the last OPEC meeting, the Saudis agreed to cut crude production while Iran raised output, something Riyadh had said it would always reject.
In the US, the final guarantor of the continued rule of the House of Saud, President Obama allowed himself to be quoted as complaining about the convention in Washington of treating Saudi Arabia as a friend and ally. At a popular level, there is growing hostility to Saudi Arabia reflected in the near unanimous vote in Congress to allow families of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government as bearing responsibility for the attack.
Under the mercurial guidance of Deputy Crown Prince and Defence Minister Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the most powerful figure in Saudi decision making, Saudi foreign policy became more militaristic and nationalistic after his 80 year old father Salman became king on 23 January 2015. Saudi military intervention in Yemen followed, as did increased Saudi assistance to a rebel alliance in Syria in which the most powerful fighting force was Jabhat al-Nusra, formerly the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda.
Nothing has gone well for the Saudis in Yemen and Syria. The Saudis apparently expected the Houthis to be defeated swiftly by pro-Saudi forces, but after fifteen months of bombing they and their ally, former President Saleh, still hold the capital Sanaa and northern Yemen. The prolonged bombardment of the Arab world’s poorest country by the richest has produced a humanitarian catastrophe in which at least 60 per cent of the 25 million Yemeni population do not get enough to eat or drink.
The enhanced Saudi involvement in Syria in 2015 on the side of the insurgents had similarly damaging and unexpected consequences. The Saudis had succeeded Qatar as the main Arab supporter of the Syrian insurgency in 2013 in the belief that their Syrian allies could defeat President Bashar al-Assad or lure the US into doing so for them. In the event, greater military pressure on Assad served only to make him seek more help from Russia and Iran and precipitated Russian military intervention in September 2015 which the US was not prepared to oppose.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman is being blamed inside and outside the Kingdom for impulsive misjudgments that have brought failure or stalemate. On the economic front, his Vision 2030 project whereby Saudi Arabia is to become less wholly dependent on oil revenues and more like a normal non-oil state attracted scepticism mixed with derision from the beginning. It is doubtful if there will be much change in the patronage system whereby a high proportion of oil revenues are spent on employing Saudis regardless of their qualifications or willingness to work.
Protests by Saudi Arabia’s ten million-strong foreign work force, a third of the 30 million population, because they have not been paid can be ignored or crushed by floggings and imprisonment. The security of the Saudi state is not threatened.
The danger for the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other Gulf states is rather that hubris and wishful thinking have tempted them to try to do things well beyond their strength. None of this is new and the Gulf oil states have been increasing their power in the Arab and Muslim worlds since the nationalist regimes in Egypt, Syria and Jordan were defeated by Israel in 1967. They found – and Saudi Arabia is now finding the same thing – that militaristic nationalism works well to foster support for rulers under pressure so long as they can promise victory, but delegitimises them when they suffered defeat.
Previously Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states had worked through allies and proxies but this restraint ended with the popular uprisings of 2011. Qatar and later Saudi Arabia shifted towards supporting regime change. Revolutions transmuted into counter-revolutions with a strong sectarian cutting edge in countries like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain where there were Sunni and non-Sunni populations.
Critics of Saudi and Qatari policies often demonise them as cunning and effective, but their most striking characteristic is their extreme messiness and ignorance of real conditions on the ground. In 2011, Qatar believed that Assad could be quickly driven from power just like Muamar Gaddafi in Libya. When this did not happen they pumped in money and weapons willy-nilly while hoping that the US could be persuaded to intervene militarily to overthrow Assad as Nato had done in Libya.
Experts on in Syria argue about the extent to which the Saudis and the Qataris knowingly funded Islamic State and various al-Qaeda clones. The answer seems to be that they did not know, and often did not care, exactly who they were funding and that, in any case, it often came from wealthy individuals and not from the Saudi government or intelligence services.
The mechanism whereby Saudi money finances extreme jihadi groups was explained in an article by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times in December on how the Saudis had bankrolled the Taliban after their defeat in 2001. The article cites the former Taliban Finance Minister, Agha Jan Motasim, as explaining in an interview how he would travel to Saudi Arabia to raise large sums of money from private individuals which was then covertly transferred to Afghanistan. Afghan officials are quoted as saying that a recent offensive by 40,000 Taliban cost foreign donors $1 billion.
The attempt by Saudi Arabia and Gulf oil states to achieve hegemony in the Arab and Sunni Muslim worlds has proved disastrous for almost everybody. The capture of east Aleppo by the Syrian Army and the likely fall of Mosul to the Iraqi Army means defeat for that the Sunni Arabs in a great swathe of territory stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean. Largely thanks to their Gulf benefactors, they are facing permanent subjection to hostile governments.
(Reprinted from The Independent by permission of author or representative)
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Monday, January 09, 2017
If you White, Get Out of Sight :: The Absurdity of Multiculturalism
University of London students demand ‘white philosophers’ like Plato, Kant be removed from syllabus
RT
Published time: 9 Jan, 2017 10:49
University of London students are demanding that thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Voltaire, and Immanuel Kant be banned from the philosophy syllabus... because they are white.
UK media quotes students from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) as saying that “the majority of philosophers on our courses” should be from Africa and Asia.
A statement from the students’ union added that banning white philosophers should be part of a wider campaign to “decolonize” the university and “address the structural and epistemological legacy of colonialism.”
“White philosophers” should be on the syllabus only “if required,” and their work should be studied from a “critical standpoint,” the statement said, as cited by British media.
“For example, acknowledging the colonial context in which so-called ‘Enlightenment’ philosophers wrote within,” it elaborated.
Many scholars have been outraged by the demand, warning that the situation could spiral out of control.
“You can’t rule out a whole area of intellectual endeavor without having investigated it, and clearly they haven’t investigated what they mean by white philosophy,” Sir Roger Scruton told The Daily Mail.
“If they think there is a colonial context from which Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason arose, I would like to hear it,” he added.
The vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, Sir Anthony Seldon, told The Daily Mail that it looks like “a real danger” of “political correctness getting out of control.”
Opinions within the university are also divided, however. The head of SOAS’s Religions and Philosophies department, Erica Hunter, was surprised by the students’ statement, calling it “rather ridiculous.”
“I would firmly resist dropping philosophers or historians just because it was fashionable,” she added, as cited by The Telegraph.
However, Pro-Director (Learning and Teaching) Dr. Deborah Johnston sees the students’ initiative to question the syllabus as positive, explaining that “informed and critical debate and discussion about the curriculum we teach” is “a healthy and proper part of the academic enterprise.”
Sunday, January 08, 2017
“CIA intelligence reporting stating that the Russian government hacked the presidential election in order to elect Donald Trump is false. It is merely a political attack against Donald Trump with the goal of delegitimizing his presidency.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified at a hearing on “Russian
interference” in the election that there’s a difference between “skepticism”
of the intelligence community’s assessment and “disparagement”
of said community. While stopping short of asking for a “safe space,” this
admitted liar used the opportunity to cry on the shoulders of Donald Trump’s
assembled enemies: “We’re not perfect,” he burbled, but hey everybody makes
mistakes.
Clapper’s remarks were clearly aimed at Trump, who has tweeted his contempt for the effort by the CIA and allied agencies to conjure up a Russian conspiracy to put him in the White House. Citing Julian Assange’s statement to Sean Hannity that a teenager could’ve hacked the Podesta emails, Trump’s tweets evoked the rage of the Washington Establishment – how dare he question those who failed to prevent 9/11, told us Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” and failed to foresee the rise of ISIS, which they (through President Obama) characterized as “the JV team”!
The hearing quickly degenerated into a “Hate Assange” session, with McCain asking Clapper "if any credibility should attached to this individual” given WikiLeaks’ “record of leaking materials that put U.S. lives in direct danger.”
"Not in my view," Clapper replied.
Only in Washington would this exchange not be followed by howls of jeering laughter. It was Clapper, after all, who lied under oath to Sen. Ron Wyden and the Senate when asked about the extent of spying on US citizens engaged in by the National Security Agency, and later was forced to apologize for it.
And of course it is a brazen lie that anything published by WikiLeaks in its decade-long history has ever resulted in a single death – except, perhaps, the death of the US government’s credibility.
What will go down in history as the John McCain-Lindsey Graham dog and pony show featured plenty of thunder and lightning. McCain pressed Clapper to declare that Russia’s alleged actions were an “act of war,” but the DNI demurred, saying it’s not the intelligence community’s job to make such judgments. Sen. Graham opined that he’d like to start “throwing rocks” at the Russkies, whereas President Obama has been lobbing mere “pebbles.” While the spectacle of Graham trying to go all macho had its comic aspects, as far as serious additions to the intelligence community’s case went there were none. There was rhetoric aplenty, but no new facts.
Indeed, facts were notably absent: while Clapper declared that the intelligence community “stands ever more resolutely” behind the conclusions reached in a report issued earlier this week, he gave no indication that the many holes in that report would be filled any time soon – at least in public. And so the question that has plagued the new cold warriors – where is the evidence? – goes unanswered. But then again, evidence is something that the McCain-Democrat anti-Trump alliance has absolutely no use for: they’ve already reached their conclusion, and it is this:
Trump, in their view, is an illegitimate President: he was elected by the Russians, and is for all intents and purposes a Russian agent. That is what the McCain “hearing” was all about, and the Arizona Senator will continue to harp on this, along with his Democratic allies, until the cows come home. It is unlikely, however, that he will get much of a platform outside of his own Armed Services Committee and CNN: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said there will be no select committee investigation, as McCain is demanding, and that the Senate Intelligence Committee is “quite capable” of investigating what needs to be investigated.
At one point, Graham got up on his hind legs and directly addressed Trump: “What I don’t want you to do is undermine those who are serving our nation in this area until you’re absolutely certain they need to be undermined.” These underminers certainly need to be undermined, at least as far as the President-elect is concerned. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump is planning a major revamp of the intelligence services:
“One of the people familiar with Mr. Trump’s planning said advisers also are working on a plan to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the world. The CIA declined to comment.
“’The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world has become completely politicized,’ said the individual, who is close to the Trump transition. ‘They all need to be slimmed down. The focus will be on restructuring the agencies and how they interact.’”
That the CIA, in particular, has become a thoroughly politicized cadre of desk jockeys whose intelligence-gathering abilities have seriously atrophied is borne out by the remarks of one “Ishmael Jones,” a former CIA officer writing under a pseudonym: he is the author of The Human Element: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. Jones writes:
“CIA intelligence reporting stating that the Russian government hacked the presidential election in order to elect Donald Trump is false. It is merely a political attack against Donald Trump with the goal of delegitimizing his presidency.
“The depth and quality of the CIA reporting is too good to be true. A December 16 NBC report states, for example: ‘Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used.’ … Such a conclusion would require access to Putin’s inner circle and knowledge of Putin’s plans and intentions. Any spy that close to Putin would be one of the best intelligence sources of all time.
“If such a source existed, he doesn’t exist any more. The leaked reporting would have put him in grave danger, and he would already have been imprisoned or executed.”
What Jones has to say about the culture of the CIA – its politics – tells us why we are seeing this remarkable public spat between an incoming President and the intelligence community he will (ostensibly) command:
“The reporting instead reflects the political opinions and agendas of bureaucrats. CIA bureaucrats are a big blue voting machine with a long record of creating information harmful to Republican presidents. The danger to Mr. Trump is ratcheted up because the recent election influenced many people at the CIA to believe that Trump is the second coming of Hitler. And to stop Hitler, anything is ethical, even treason. CIA bureaucrats have chosen to attack Mr. Trump before he even takes office.”
These are the Praetorian Guards of a decadent and corrupt empire: comfortably ensconced in the swamp Trump has vowed to drain, they long ago lost touch with their alleged mission: gathering intelligence overseas. As Jones relates:
“The CIA is meant to spy upon foreign countries. The secrets we seek are located in foreign countries. Yet the bloated CIA bureaucracy exists almost entirely within the United States. CIA bureaucrats appear to find foreign service disagreeable. They enjoy their lifestyle and will fight with aggressive passivity to keep it that way. More than 90% of CIA employees spend their careers living and working entirely within the United States….
“The incoming CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, will be astonished by how many of his senior leaders have not had an overseas assignment in decades. Brief junkets and TDY’s to foreign countries do not count. CIA boss John Brennan’s 40-plus years of CIA service have occurred almost entirely within the Headquarters building….
“Today, we have more employees working in encouraging diversity, and as of recently, more transgender employees, than we do case officers operating under cover in Russia, China, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and North Korea combined.”
As usual with these hypocrites, in claiming that Russia “interfered” with the election, they are merely projecting their own sins on to Vladimir Putin. The entire agency, as presently constituted, represents a threat to the Republic. Forget “reform” of the CIA: what’s needed is a thoroughgoing top-to-bottom purge.
President Trump must not back down from his reported plans to do just that. The alternative is having to battle these parasites for the next four years as they work to undermine his agenda in alliance with the Democrats and the hawkish wing of the GOP.
Let the purges begin!
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).
You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.
Clapper’s remarks were clearly aimed at Trump, who has tweeted his contempt for the effort by the CIA and allied agencies to conjure up a Russian conspiracy to put him in the White House. Citing Julian Assange’s statement to Sean Hannity that a teenager could’ve hacked the Podesta emails, Trump’s tweets evoked the rage of the Washington Establishment – how dare he question those who failed to prevent 9/11, told us Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” and failed to foresee the rise of ISIS, which they (through President Obama) characterized as “the JV team”!
The hearing quickly degenerated into a “Hate Assange” session, with McCain asking Clapper "if any credibility should attached to this individual” given WikiLeaks’ “record of leaking materials that put U.S. lives in direct danger.”
"Not in my view," Clapper replied.
Only in Washington would this exchange not be followed by howls of jeering laughter. It was Clapper, after all, who lied under oath to Sen. Ron Wyden and the Senate when asked about the extent of spying on US citizens engaged in by the National Security Agency, and later was forced to apologize for it.
And of course it is a brazen lie that anything published by WikiLeaks in its decade-long history has ever resulted in a single death – except, perhaps, the death of the US government’s credibility.
What will go down in history as the John McCain-Lindsey Graham dog and pony show featured plenty of thunder and lightning. McCain pressed Clapper to declare that Russia’s alleged actions were an “act of war,” but the DNI demurred, saying it’s not the intelligence community’s job to make such judgments. Sen. Graham opined that he’d like to start “throwing rocks” at the Russkies, whereas President Obama has been lobbing mere “pebbles.” While the spectacle of Graham trying to go all macho had its comic aspects, as far as serious additions to the intelligence community’s case went there were none. There was rhetoric aplenty, but no new facts.
Indeed, facts were notably absent: while Clapper declared that the intelligence community “stands ever more resolutely” behind the conclusions reached in a report issued earlier this week, he gave no indication that the many holes in that report would be filled any time soon – at least in public. And so the question that has plagued the new cold warriors – where is the evidence? – goes unanswered. But then again, evidence is something that the McCain-Democrat anti-Trump alliance has absolutely no use for: they’ve already reached their conclusion, and it is this:
Trump, in their view, is an illegitimate President: he was elected by the Russians, and is for all intents and purposes a Russian agent. That is what the McCain “hearing” was all about, and the Arizona Senator will continue to harp on this, along with his Democratic allies, until the cows come home. It is unlikely, however, that he will get much of a platform outside of his own Armed Services Committee and CNN: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said there will be no select committee investigation, as McCain is demanding, and that the Senate Intelligence Committee is “quite capable” of investigating what needs to be investigated.
At one point, Graham got up on his hind legs and directly addressed Trump: “What I don’t want you to do is undermine those who are serving our nation in this area until you’re absolutely certain they need to be undermined.” These underminers certainly need to be undermined, at least as far as the President-elect is concerned. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump is planning a major revamp of the intelligence services:
“One of the people familiar with Mr. Trump’s planning said advisers also are working on a plan to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the world. The CIA declined to comment.
“’The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world has become completely politicized,’ said the individual, who is close to the Trump transition. ‘They all need to be slimmed down. The focus will be on restructuring the agencies and how they interact.’”
That the CIA, in particular, has become a thoroughly politicized cadre of desk jockeys whose intelligence-gathering abilities have seriously atrophied is borne out by the remarks of one “Ishmael Jones,” a former CIA officer writing under a pseudonym: he is the author of The Human Element: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. Jones writes:
“CIA intelligence reporting stating that the Russian government hacked the presidential election in order to elect Donald Trump is false. It is merely a political attack against Donald Trump with the goal of delegitimizing his presidency.
“The depth and quality of the CIA reporting is too good to be true. A December 16 NBC report states, for example: ‘Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used.’ … Such a conclusion would require access to Putin’s inner circle and knowledge of Putin’s plans and intentions. Any spy that close to Putin would be one of the best intelligence sources of all time.
“If such a source existed, he doesn’t exist any more. The leaked reporting would have put him in grave danger, and he would already have been imprisoned or executed.”
What Jones has to say about the culture of the CIA – its politics – tells us why we are seeing this remarkable public spat between an incoming President and the intelligence community he will (ostensibly) command:
“The reporting instead reflects the political opinions and agendas of bureaucrats. CIA bureaucrats are a big blue voting machine with a long record of creating information harmful to Republican presidents. The danger to Mr. Trump is ratcheted up because the recent election influenced many people at the CIA to believe that Trump is the second coming of Hitler. And to stop Hitler, anything is ethical, even treason. CIA bureaucrats have chosen to attack Mr. Trump before he even takes office.”
These are the Praetorian Guards of a decadent and corrupt empire: comfortably ensconced in the swamp Trump has vowed to drain, they long ago lost touch with their alleged mission: gathering intelligence overseas. As Jones relates:
“The CIA is meant to spy upon foreign countries. The secrets we seek are located in foreign countries. Yet the bloated CIA bureaucracy exists almost entirely within the United States. CIA bureaucrats appear to find foreign service disagreeable. They enjoy their lifestyle and will fight with aggressive passivity to keep it that way. More than 90% of CIA employees spend their careers living and working entirely within the United States….
“The incoming CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, will be astonished by how many of his senior leaders have not had an overseas assignment in decades. Brief junkets and TDY’s to foreign countries do not count. CIA boss John Brennan’s 40-plus years of CIA service have occurred almost entirely within the Headquarters building….
“Today, we have more employees working in encouraging diversity, and as of recently, more transgender employees, than we do case officers operating under cover in Russia, China, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and North Korea combined.”
As usual with these hypocrites, in claiming that Russia “interfered” with the election, they are merely projecting their own sins on to Vladimir Putin. The entire agency, as presently constituted, represents a threat to the Republic. Forget “reform” of the CIA: what’s needed is a thoroughgoing top-to-bottom purge.
President Trump must not back down from his reported plans to do just that. The alternative is having to battle these parasites for the next four years as they work to undermine his agenda in alliance with the Democrats and the hawkish wing of the GOP.
Let the purges begin!
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).
You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.
Read more by Justin Raimondo
- The Abolition of Foreign Policy – January 3rd, 2017
- Is Trump About to Debunk the Media’s ‘Putin-gate’ Conspiracy Theory? – January 1st, 2017
- Do You Suffer From Trump Derangement Syndrome? – December 27th, 2016
- Death in Ankara – December 20th, 2016
- Tripwires on the Way to the Inauguration – December 18th, 2016
Friday, January 06, 2017
How did NBC get leaked breifing details and report on them before Trump?
US Intel Chief Cites Phantom Evidence on ‘Russian Hacking’
Narrative Continues to Rest on Unsubstantiated Allegations
by Jason Ditz, January 06, 2017 ANTIWAR
The new, and apparently seminal report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on putative Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election has finally been released, providing a 25-page glimpse into the thinking that underpins an allegation which remains the sum total of US electoral politics in recent months.
This appears to be the report that the Obama Administration was heavily pressured to proffer by Congressional Democrats as a way to end public skepticism of the allegations, and attempts to do so, as officials have been for weeks, by declaring Russian intervention, hacking, and what have you as an absolute confirmed fact.
But like the previous reports, evidence to substantiate the claims is wholly lacking. The big difference in the new report is an acknowledgement that they aren’t providing any evidence of what they are alleging, complete with a disclaimer at the top of every page that as a declassified report it “does not include the full supporting information” that some secret other report might.
The evidence-free version was still sufficient to get ample media coverage once again echoing the claims unquestioned, declaring that Putin was driven by “hatred” and warned to “denigrate Secretary Clinton.” The report’s claims largely amount to a collection of the myriad allegations in an easy-to-follow form, but break no new ground.
Once again, the report claims the DNC hacker Guccifer 2.0 was actually the Russian military, providing no evidence for this, and claims DCLeaks.com was the military as well. They claimed the military directly gave WikiLeaks the documents because Putin thought WikiLeaks’ history of accuracy was valuable. No evidence for any of this, but the report did at the very least note that all the WikiLeaks documents appear to have been authentic.
Beyond a very brief rehash of the narrative, and a claim that Putin was bent on destroying the Western liberal order simply to spite Hillary Clinton, the report then gets into by far the deepest section, alleging state-funding media outlet RT America “disparaged” Clinton and wanted Trump to win.
Interestingly in that it’s the part with the most meat, this “propaganda” section is also the part with the most glaring contradiction, arguing on the one hand that Putin was just anti-Clinton and warmed to Trump relatively late in the campaign while at the same time arguing that Russia had hired a bunch of “social media trolls” and that they were all pro-Trump from before the primaries began.
The report also faults RT for covering the Clinton email leaks so extensively, presenting that as proof of their “consistently negative” attitude toward the candidate. US media outlets, of course, largely focused on Clinton’s allegations of Russian plots above the actual email releases.
As has often been the case in previous reports, this one begins with its conclusion and then figures out ways in which the facts could conceivably fit that conclusion. For example, the report notes that Putin did not publicly praise Trump ahead of the election, and then concludes this was a savvy move on the part of the Kremlin because they thought it would “backfire” and hurt Trump’s election chances.
With no existing publicly available evidence for the allegations, and no new evidence emerging from today’s report, it’s not clear that anyone new will be convinced, and President-elect Donald Trump appears to have the same doubts he always did. Ultimately, the only ones likely to be happy with the report are those who were already sold on the allegations before.
Thursday, January 05, 2017
McCain Needs to be Institutionalized and Clapper Investigated
The Lie
On March 12th, 2013, during a United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Senator Ron Wyden asked Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper the following question:"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
Director Clapper responded "No, sir."
Incredulously, Senator Wyden asked "It does not?"
Director Clapper responded "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertantly perhaps collect, but not wittingly."
So that he would be prepared to answer, Senator Wyden gave these questions to Director Clapper's office a day in advance of the hearing. Upon the hearing's completion, he also gave the Director a chance to amend his answer. He opted not to do so.
The Revelations
On June 6th, 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the world that the NSA was engaged in a secret program to collect tens of millions of Americans' phone call records. Further revelations would unveil NSA programs collecting Americans' web browsing histories, chat logs, email usage and even their physical locations.The NSA had been collecting data on hundreds of millions of innocent Americans, and continues to do so.
Finally forced to acknowledge his remarks as "erroneous", Director Clapper claimed that he "misunderstood" the question (which he had been sent a day in advance) and that he had simply "forgotten" the relevant section of the Patriot Act covering these programs.
This Site
If you or I had given this testimony before Congress and lied as Director Clapper has, using the same excuses that he provided when caught, we would be charged with perjury. Until such time as the Director is indicted for this crime, as Americans we can only assume that there are two sets of laws: One for the architects and enablers of the NSA surveillance state and another for the public at large.This site will continue as a monument to this fact until such time that this disparity in justice is resolved.
Others
We are far from alone.Others across the political spectrum are demanding that Director James Clapper resign, be fired and/or be prosecuted for perjury.
- Patriot Act author: Obama's intel czar should be prosecuted
- Rand Paul slams James Clapper over NSA "lying"
- KEENE: James Clapper should resign for lying to Congress
- Obama Urged to Fire DNI Clapper
- James Clapper must go
- Huge majority wants Clapper prosecuted for perjury
- Justin Amash calls for James Clapper to quit
- Fire James Clapper
- Reps. Conyers & Massie on Bipartisan Campaign Against NSA Spying; Call for James Clapper to Resign
- Obama puts James Clapper, who should be in jail, in charge of returning "trust" to NSA spying
- Sen. Carl Levin: Only way to hold James Clapper accountable is to "fire him"
- Sen. Graham: Intelligence chief James Clapper should resign
- James Clapper Should Resign, or be Fired
- Why James Clapper Must Resign
- Fire James Clapper, then put him in the dock
- To Repair the Damage Done in NSA Blowup, Start With Clapper
Wednesday, January 04, 2017
Nothing Worse or More Dangerous Than a Pussy That Plays Bad Ass
US sends special forces to RUSSIAN BORDER as Nato is poised to strike back against Vladimir Putin’s ‘aggression’
PRESIDENT Obama has deployed US special forces troops along Lithuania’s border with “aggressive” Russia.
Tensions between Washington and the Kremlin have reached Cold War levels amid reports Vladimir Putin is deploying nuke-ready missiles in the Russian province of Kaliningrad – which borders Poland, Belarus and Lithuania.
And Lithuanian Defence Ministry spokeswoman Asta Galdikaite confirmed America has offered additional military support following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
She said: “The United States was the first to offer additional safety assurance measures to the Baltic countries following the deterioration of the security situation in the region after the annexation of the Crimea.”
She added: “US Special Operations Forces presence in Lithuania is one of the deterrents” against military threats by Putin’s aggressive regime, reports the Express.
US military chief General Raymond T Thomas told the New York Times that America has a “persistent” presence in the Baltic states bordering Russia.
He added that many former Eastern Bloc countries are “scared to death” of Russia and the vulnerable states are “desperate” for America’s leadership.
The US and its Nato allies will send battalions of up to 1,200 to each of the three Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – and Poland by spring this year, reports the New York Times.
Lithuania’s foreign minister Linas Linkevicius confirmed Russia’s military activity in Kaliningrad is terrifying the region.
He said: “Iskander missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads have been deployed. There are S-400 missiles and modernised jets.”
Linkevicius branded Russian behaviour in the region “military hooliganism” and called on Nato to take action and offer more support to beleaguered Ukraine.
He said: “Russia likes to create problems, conflict and then suggest some ideas how to mitigate, how to mediate - and some of our colleagues say ‘look they are cooperating’.”
In November, Putin’s naval forces unveiled their latest super-stealth submarine which has been deployed in the Black Sea as a shocking new report revealed Russia is "taking over" the region.
Kremlin bosses promised Russia would never allow the sea to become a “Nato lake” and they firmly believe the military alliance would crumble if, as feared, the Americans pull out.
Relations between the outgoing Obama administration and Russia have souredfollowing allegations that Putin ordered the email hack which helped scupper Hillary Clinton's presidential bid.
The White House has since expelled 35 Russian diplomats and has shut down two "spy" compounds in New York and Maryland in response to what it claims is acampaign of harassment by Russia against American diplomats in Moscow.
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Monday, January 02, 2017
The Bush and Blair Created Disaster of Iraq - The Killing Continues
ISIS Will Lose the Battle of Mosul, But Not Much Will Remain
Patrick Cockburn
COUNTERPUNCH
Winners and losers are beginning to emerge in the wars that have engulfed the wider Middle East since the US and UK invaded Iraq in 2003. The most striking signs of this are the sieges of east Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, which have much in common though they were given vastly different coverage by the Western media. In both cities, Salafi-jihadi Sunni Arab insurgents were defending their last big urban strongholds against the Iraqi Army, in the case of Mosul, and the Syrian Army, in the case of east Aleppo.
The capture of east Aleppo means that President Bashar al-Assad has essentially won the war and will stay in power. The Syrian security forces advanced and the armed resistance collapsed more swiftly than had been expected. Some 8,000 to 10,000 rebel fighters, pounded by artillery and air strikes and divided among themselves, were unable to stage a last stand in the ruins of the enclave, as happened in Homs three years ago, and is happening in Mosul now.
But what gives the rebel defeat in east Aleppo its crucial significance is not so much the battle itself, but the failure of their foreign backers – Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – to come to their aid. Ever since 2011, the advance and retreat of government and rebel forces in Syria has been decided by the quantity of arms, ammunition and money they could extract from their outside backers. President Assad always looked to Russia, Iran and Shia paramilitaries from Lebanon and Iraq.
The decisive moment in the Syrian war came in September 2015 when the Russian air force intervened on President Assad’s side. The US did not like it, but they were not prepared to oppose it militarily. Russia may not be a global superpower, but it is seen as a superpower in the Middle East. Come the assault on east Aleppo, the rebels’ old allies in Ankara, Riyadh and Doha proved incapable or unwilling to raise the stakes unless backed by the US.
If the rebels’ traditional allies did not help them when they still held east Aleppo, it is unlikely that they will do so after they have lost it. This does not mean that the US is the fading power in the Middle East as Mr Obama’s critics claim, but the White House has been very careful not to be dragged into a war in Syria to serve somebody else’s agenda. Getting the US to overthrow Assad was at the heart of the Syrian opposition’s policy since 2011, when they believed they could orchestrate regime change in Damascus along the lines of what had just happened in Tripoli with the overthrow and killing of Muammar Gaddafi.
US policy is more proactive than it is given credit for. Obama gave priority to defeating Isis and it is unlikely that Donald Trump will change this. Isis is proving a tough opponent in Iraq and Syria and in December was able to recapture Palmyra, which the Syrian Army, strongly backed by Russia, had taken amid self-congratulatory celebrations in March. An important event that did not happen in 2016 was the defeat of Isis, whose continuing ability to set the political agenda was bloodily demonstrated when a stolen lorry mowed down people at a Christmas fair in Berlin on 18 December.
A more substantive sign of Isis’s strength is the ferocity and skill with which it has fought for Mosul. The Iraqi army and Kurdish offensive started on 17 October, and Mosul city was reached on 3 November. Since then progress has been slow and at the cost of heavy casualties. The Iraqi security forces, including the Shia paramilitaries, lost 2,000 dead in November according to the UN. Isis is using hundreds of suicide bombers, snipers and mortar teams to slow their enemy’s advance, which has so far only taken 40 per cent of east Mosul. Some of the battalions in the elite 10,000-strong “Golden Division” are reported to have suffered 50 per cent losses.
In the longer term, the Iraqi government will probably take Mosul, though by then it may not look much different from east Aleppo. One of the few items in Trump’s foreign policy that was made clear in the campaign was that there will be total priority given to eliminating Isis. This will have important consequences for the region: the great Sunni Arab revolt in Syria and Iraq aiming at regime change, which seemed to come close to success several times between 2011 and 2014, is faltering and is likely to go down to defeat. Assad and the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad are going to survive.
Russia was a big gainer in 2016 as other powers began to view it, perhaps to an exaggerated extent, as a superpower reborn. President Putin is demonised by Western governments and media, but this is a backhanded recognition of his global influence. At the same time, the US had suffered no great defeat and is repairing relations with Iran. Obama’s goals may have been modest, but, unlike those of George W Bush, they were attainable.
Syria has become the battlefield in which confrontations and rivalries that had little to do with Syria are fought out. This is why the war became so intractable. Iran has come out ahead because the Shia alliance it leads is winning in Iraq and Syria. It may look more powerful than it really is because the US destroyed the Taliban in 2001 and Saddam in 2003, the two Sunni powers that had previously hedged Iran in to the east and west. It will soon see if its more positive relationship with the US will be reversed by a Trump administration.
The Arab Spring of 2011 saw revolution, but also counter-revolution: Saudi Arabia and Qatar, followed by the oil-rich Sunni monarchies of the Gulf, sought to take over the leadership of the Arab world that had once been dominated by Egypt, Iraq and Syria. The Gulf states have proved incapable of fulfilling their new role and their various initiatives have produced or exacerbated calamitous wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen.
Saudi Arabia’s more proactive and aggressive policies since King Salman succeeded to the throne in January 2015 have generally ended in frustration. Saudi intervention in Yemen has not ended a stalemated war and air strikes have brought the country to the verge of famine.
The biggest loser of all in 2016, aside from the Syrian and Iraqi people, has been Turkey. It helped stoke the war in Syria only to find that the main beneficiaries were the Syrian Kurds, whose political and military leadership was drawn from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that has been fighting a guerrilla war in Turkey since 1984. The country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is devoting his greatest efforts to thwarting the creation of a de facto Kurdish state in northern Syria, and the displacement of Assad has become a side issue.
Erdogan is creating a more authoritarian state as he tightens his grip on state institutions and media in the wake of the failed military coup of 15 July. He justifies his actions as reactions to crises, such as the Turkish Kurd insurgency, that are in large part his own creation. Isis, whose volunteers were once allowed to cross the Turkish-Syrian border with little trouble, are now creeping back to carry out suicide bombings in Turkey.
Donald Trump may try to change existing US policy in the Middle East, but not if he wants to carry out his domestic agenda. On the other hand, the Middle East is the region of perpetual crises which sucks in outside powers whether they like it or not. What the last five years have shown is that violence bred in the Middle East cannot be contained, and it impacts on the rest of the world in the shape of desperate migrants seeking new homes or savage terrorist attacks
Sunday, January 01, 2017
US Military is turning up the heat on Chinese computer hackers but where is Obama?
rt.com
Political retribution? Trump press sec questions Russia sanctions, brings up unanswered ‘China hack’
The incoming White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, said it
makes him wonder if President Obama’s anti-Russian measures were
“political retribution,” given that a massive hack of federal data in
2015 linked to China saw “not one thing happen” in response.
Spicer brought into question
the magnitude of the new sanctions approved by Barack Obama, which
included the expulsion of 35 diplomats and the closing of two diplomatic
facilities while speaking to ABC’s This Week program hosted by Jonathan Karl and aired on Sunday.
READ MORE: 'I always knew he was smart' – Trump responds to Putin's reaction to sanctions
“I think one of the questions that we have is, ‘Why the magnitude of this?’ I mean you look at 35 people being expelled, two sites being closed down, the question is, ‘Is that response in proportion to the actions taken?’ Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t – but you have to think about that,” Spicer said, adding later, “If you look at our history, you haven’t seen a response like that in modern history for any action.”
Donald Trump’s team member then went on to contrast Obama’s decision with the apparent lack of action on what has been branded the biggest security breach in US government history, when millions of federal employees had their unique fingerprint records stolen. While US officials have accused China of being behind the hack that made headlines in June 2015, the furthest Obama went was to warn Beijing of economic sanctions as President Xi Jinping was visiting the US.
“Hold on let's look at this, in 2015, China took over a million records, sensitive data of people like me who had worked in the government at any time, classified or personal information, where we lived, things we had written down on our applications, our security clearances and… a White House statement wasn’t even issued. No action publicly was taken. Nothing, nothing was taken when millions of people had their private information, including information on security clearances [compromised],” Spicer said.
China has denied it has anything to do with the hacks. After meeting Xi in Washington, DC in September 2015, Obama claimed US and China had agreed not hack each other’s intellectual property.
“Not one thing happened. So, there is a question about whether there's a political retribution here versus a diplomatic response,” he added, alluding to the fact that it was the Democratic National Committee’s servers that the White House says “state-sponsored” Russian hackers intruded, and that the information leaked was ultimately damaging to the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Spicer was cautious when assessing if the incoming
president, Donald Trump, should reverse the sanctions, echoing Trump’s
promise to get a separate intelligence briefing on the hacking
allegations.
“The President-elect needs to sit down with the heads of the intelligence communities next week and get a full briefing on what they knew, why they knew it, whether or not the Obama administration's response was in proportion to the actions taken,” Spicer said.
When pressured by Karl with a question about whether the new FBI/DHS report made Trump “accept the fact that Russia was behind the DNC hack,” Spicer responded that the report did not actually talk about the Russian government being responsible for the hack.
“While the media played it up as this report about the hacking, what it actually is, if you look through it, and its available online, is a series of recommendations that should be taken, like changing passwords, changing administrative rights. What it shows is that by all measures the Democratic National Committee had a very lax IT support,” Spicer pointed out.
READ MORE: Report on ‘Russian hacking’ offers disclaimers, barely mentions Russia
Despite being menacingly titled “GRIZZLY STEPPE – Russian Malicious Cyber Activity,” the December 29 report did not provide any evidence the hacking groups described there had any connection to Moscow. The details of the hack itself remained vague, with the target being described as only “a US political party” and no indication given to which batch of leaked emails it referred – DNC’s or Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta’s. The 13-page report does provide nine pages of security improvement recommendations, as well as a disclaimer saying the DHS “does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.”
Elsewhere in US mainstream media, where the story of the “Russian hacking” has been aggressively pushed, the Washington Post had to walk back on its story alleging that “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility” which posed a risk “to US electrical grid security.”
The article cited unnamed officials, but the company in question, Burlington Electric, then publicly clarified that there was only “suspicious internet traffic” detected on a laptop not even connected to the grid.
The Post added an editorial note saying, “An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the US electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far.” The headline, however, was still claiming that, “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility,” as of late Sunday, accompanied by a picture of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) building in central Moscow.
READ MORE: 'I always knew he was smart' – Trump responds to Putin's reaction to sanctions
“I think one of the questions that we have is, ‘Why the magnitude of this?’ I mean you look at 35 people being expelled, two sites being closed down, the question is, ‘Is that response in proportion to the actions taken?’ Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t – but you have to think about that,” Spicer said, adding later, “If you look at our history, you haven’t seen a response like that in modern history for any action.”
Donald Trump’s team member then went on to contrast Obama’s decision with the apparent lack of action on what has been branded the biggest security breach in US government history, when millions of federal employees had their unique fingerprint records stolen. While US officials have accused China of being behind the hack that made headlines in June 2015, the furthest Obama went was to warn Beijing of economic sanctions as President Xi Jinping was visiting the US.
“Hold on let's look at this, in 2015, China took over a million records, sensitive data of people like me who had worked in the government at any time, classified or personal information, where we lived, things we had written down on our applications, our security clearances and… a White House statement wasn’t even issued. No action publicly was taken. Nothing, nothing was taken when millions of people had their private information, including information on security clearances [compromised],” Spicer said.
China has denied it has anything to do with the hacks. After meeting Xi in Washington, DC in September 2015, Obama claimed US and China had agreed not hack each other’s intellectual property.
READ MORE: China repeatedly hacked US, stole data on nukes, FBI & war plans – security report
Spicer, however, argues that following the hack the only thing the White House did was to “send everyone who had worked in the government a letter saying that you get free monitoring of your credit.”“Not one thing happened. So, there is a question about whether there's a political retribution here versus a diplomatic response,” he added, alluding to the fact that it was the Democratic National Committee’s servers that the White House says “state-sponsored” Russian hackers intruded, and that the information leaked was ultimately damaging to the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
“The President-elect needs to sit down with the heads of the intelligence communities next week and get a full briefing on what they knew, why they knew it, whether or not the Obama administration's response was in proportion to the actions taken,” Spicer said.
When pressured by Karl with a question about whether the new FBI/DHS report made Trump “accept the fact that Russia was behind the DNC hack,” Spicer responded that the report did not actually talk about the Russian government being responsible for the hack.
“While the media played it up as this report about the hacking, what it actually is, if you look through it, and its available online, is a series of recommendations that should be taken, like changing passwords, changing administrative rights. What it shows is that by all measures the Democratic National Committee had a very lax IT support,” Spicer pointed out.
READ MORE: Report on ‘Russian hacking’ offers disclaimers, barely mentions Russia
Despite being menacingly titled “GRIZZLY STEPPE – Russian Malicious Cyber Activity,” the December 29 report did not provide any evidence the hacking groups described there had any connection to Moscow. The details of the hack itself remained vague, with the target being described as only “a US political party” and no indication given to which batch of leaked emails it referred – DNC’s or Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta’s. The 13-page report does provide nine pages of security improvement recommendations, as well as a disclaimer saying the DHS “does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.”
Read more
Elsewhere in US mainstream media, where the story of the “Russian hacking” has been aggressively pushed, the Washington Post had to walk back on its story alleging that “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility” which posed a risk “to US electrical grid security.”
The article cited unnamed officials, but the company in question, Burlington Electric, then publicly clarified that there was only “suspicious internet traffic” detected on a laptop not even connected to the grid.
The Post added an editorial note saying, “An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the US electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far.” The headline, however, was still claiming that, “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility,” as of late Sunday, accompanied by a picture of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) building in central Moscow.
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