Saudi Arabia accuses Lebanon of being ‘kidnapped’ by Hezbollah & ‘declaring war’ on Riyadh
RT | November 7, 2017
Riyadh has accused Lebanon of “declaring war” on Saudi Arabia by allowing Hezbollah “aggression” against the Gulf Kingdom. Earlier, the Lebanese militant group accused the Saudis of forcing Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri out of office.
Hariri unexpectedly announced his resignation on Saturday in a televised statement recorded in Saudi Arabia. In his resignation speech, Hariri accused Iran and Hezbollah of a “desire to destroy the Arab world.” The next day, the leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, accused Saudi Arabia of forcing the premier out of office and writing his resignation statement for him. Tehran meanwhile firmly rejected Hariri’s accusations, saying that Iran only seeks “peace and stability” and pointing out its “excellent” relationship with Beirut.
Amid the political uncertainty, on Monday the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya news network reported that King Salman had met with Hariri in Riyadh, where the monarch shared the details of Hezbollah’s alleged aggression against Saudi Arabia.
According to the Saudi Minister of State for Gulf Affairs, Thamer al-Sabhan, Hezbollah is accused of smuggling drugs and providing terrorist training to Saudi youngsters. During the meeting, King Salman allegedly accused the Lebanese militant group of being involved in “every terrorist act that threatens Saudi Arabia,” Al-Arabiya reported. The ruler of the kingdom also allegedly vowed to use “all political and other means” to confront Hezbollah, which he called the “Party of Satan.”
“We will treat the government of Lebanon as a government declaring war because of Hezbollah militias,” Al-Sabhan told al-Arabiya. “Lebanon is kidnapped by the militias of Hezbollah and behind it is Iran.”
“We expect the Lebanese government to act to deter Hezbollah,” the minister said. “The Lebanese must all know these risks and work to fix matters before they reach the point of no return.”
Al-Sabhan did not clarify what actions Saudi Arabia might take against Lebanon. There was also no immediate reaction from Beirut, where Lebanese President Michel Aoun is yet to accept the prime minister’s resignation. Aoun plans to decide on the issue after Hariri returns to Lebanon from Saudi Arabia, presidential spokesman Nabih Berri told reporters Monday.
READ MORE: Saudi Arabia blames Iran for missile launched from Yemen, warns it could be considered ‘act of war’
Deconstructing the Climate Demagoguery of the Wine Country Wildfire Tragedies
By Jim Steele | Landscapes and Cycles | October 25, 2017
As sure as the winds will blow, climate demagogues hijack every human tragedy to amplify fears of rising CO2 concentrations. Despite that fact other critical factors were keys to understanding the devastation of the Wine Country fires, politicians like Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and Governor Jerry Brown were quick to proclaim climate change had made the fires worse than they would have been.
Climate researcher Kevin Trenberth has long tried to undermine the foundations of science by discarding the null hypothesis. Without formal testing whether a tornado, hurricane or wildfire event is within the expectations of natural variability, Trenberth simply asserts every tragedy is made worse by rising CO2. Accordingly, he is interviewed by climate change propagandists after every weather tragedy. In an interview with InsideClimateNews a few months before the Wine Country wildfires Trenberth continued to proselytize his views, “Whatever conditions exists, they’re always exacerbated by climate change. There’s always that heat variable, the increased risk.”
Indeed heat is always a variable, but usually it has nothing to do with CO2. Sadly, due to his extreme beliefs Trenberth often confuses climate with weather.
Similarly, Daniel Swain who authors a good California Weather Blog, unfortunately strays when he tries to interject CO2-climate change into an otherwise good weather analysis. Writing the fires should also be looked at from “the long-term climate context,” he argued the “record-hottest summer” dried out the vegetation exacerbating the fire conditions. But he too failed to separate natural climate and weather events from his hypothesized contributions from CO2. As will become clear from a more detailed analysis, climate change played no part in the wildfire devastation.
The Ignition Component
Fire danger rating systems analyze 1) an ignition component, 2) a fuel component and 3) a spread component to determine how to allocate fire-fighting resources and when to issue public alerts. Natural fires are caused by lightning, and so good weather models can forecast the short-term probability of lightning fires. Lightning fires are also more likely during warm and moist seasons enhancing their window of predictability. Unfortunately, Cal Fire reports 95% of California fires are unpredictably ignited by humans.
Climate alarmists like Dr. Trenberth have blithely suggested global warming is increasing the fire season stating, “In the West, they used to talk about a fire season, the fire season used to be 60 days, then 90 days, and now they think it’s year-round. There’s no pause.” Tragically that uncritical belief in a climate-related extended fire season has been parroted by lay person and scientists alike. But the facts show the observed extended fire season is due to human ignitions. Blaming climate change is fake news!
In a 2017 paper researchers reported that across the USA from 1992 to 2012, “human-caused fire season was three times longer than the lightning-caused fire season and added an average of 40,000 wildfires per year across the United States. Human-started wildfires disproportionally occurred where fuel moisture was higher.” Furthermore “Human-started wildfires were dominant (>80% of ignitions) in over 5.1 million km2, the vast majority of the United States, whereas lightning-started fires were dominant in only 0.7 million km2.”
We can reduce some human caused ignitions. The Wine Country fires were not ignited by lightning but all observations suggest they were started by downed power lines in high winds. A year ago, California legislators introduced a bipartisan bill aimed at reducing wildfire ignitions from powerlines. Although governor Brown hypes the unsubstantiated dangers of climate change, he vetoed the bill which would have promoted real action to prevent well-known human causes of wildfires. Preventing powerline ignition could have prevented the Wine Country tragedy.
The Fuel Component
Fire ecologists will estimate a fire’s potential intensity by calculating the Energy Release Component (ERC), a measure of the potential heat energy per square foot. ERC is a function of the biomass both dead and alive, and the biomass moisture content. As fuels increase and as fuels dry the ERC increases. Live fuels are modeled such that maximum moisture content coincides with the peak growing season, and declines thereafter as the plants go dormant. Moisture content of dead fuels are modeled according to their diameters.
Depending on their diameters, dead fuels will lose moisture as they equilibrate with their dry surroundings at rates that vary from 1 hour to 1000 hours or more. To aid in firefighting management decisions, fuels are categorized into 4 groups as described in Gaining an Understanding of the National Fire Danger Rating System published by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group
1-Hour Time-lag Fuels “consist of herbaceous plants or round wood less than one-quarter inch in diameter. Also included is the uppermost layer of litter on the forest floor.” The ERC of these fuels and thus the fire danger, can change throughout the day. Dead grass as well as twigs and small stems of chaparral shrubs are 1-hour fuels, and those fine fuels sustained the rapid spread of the Wine Country fires. Assertions that recent and past summer droughts or decades of climate change had dried the fuels and exacerbated the Wine Country fire danger have absolutely no scientific basis. The approach of the hot, bone-dry Diablo Winds would have extracted all the possible moisture from the dead grasses and chaparral twigs within hours, regardless of past temperatures. Trenberth and Swain simply confused rapid weather changes with climate change.
The critical “long-term context” they never discussed is that a century of fire suppression allowed destructive levels of fuel loads to develop, increasing the biomass component of the ERC estimate. As populations grew, so did the demand to suppress every small fire that could threaten a building. Natural small fires reduce the fuel load, whereas fire suppression allows fast drying fuels to accumulate. Unfortunately, fire suppression only delays the inevitable while stocking more fuel for a much more intense blaze. Local officials and preservationists have long been aware of this problem, and controlled burns to reduce those fuels were being increasingly prescribed. Tragically, it was too little too late.
Figure 1: A prescribed control burn in Wine Country
10-Hour Time-lag Fuels are “dead fuels consisting of round wood in the size range of one quarter to one inch in diameter and, very roughly, the layer of litter extending from just below the surface to three-quarters of an inch below the surface.” The fuel moisture of these fuels vary from day to day and modeled moisture content is based on length of day, cloud cover or solar radiation, temperature and relative humidity.
100-Hour Time-lag Fuels are “dead fuels consisting of round wood in the size range of 1 to 3 inches in diameter and, very roughly, the forest floor from three quarters of an inch to four inches below the surface.” Moisture content of these fuels are also a function of length of day (as influenced by latitude and calendar date), maximum and minimum temperature and relative humidity, and precipitation duration in the previous 24 hours.
Much of the chaparral shrubs produce twigs and stems in size ranges of the 1-hr, 10-hr and 100-hr fuels. These fuels were most likely the source of burning embers that high winds propelled into the devastated residential areas. Again, these dried out fuels are the result of a natural California summer drought and short term weather conditions such as the bone-dry Diablo Winds that arrive every year.
Figure 2 Moisture content of 3-8 inch diameter fuels from March to December
1000-Hour Time-lag Fuels are “dead fuels consisting of round wood 3 to 8 inches in diameter or the layer of the forest floor more than about four inches below the surface or both”. These larger fuels are more sensitive to drought conditions that existed months earlier, so it could be rightfully argued that a hotter drier July and August made these fuels more flammable in October and exacerbated the fires.
Fire ecologists planning prescribed burns to reduce fuel loads, wait until the 1000-Hr fuels’ moisture content is reduced to 12% or lower. If these larger fuels are dry, it is certain the smaller fuel categories are dry as well, so that all fuels will be highly flammable. As seen in the graph above (Figure 2) 1000-hr fuels reach that critical dryness threshold by July 1st and remain below that threshold until mid-October when the rains begin to return. Contrary to Trenberth’s blather, California’s fire season has always lasted 90+ days. Undoubtedly the unusually hot and dry 2017 summer would have lowered 1000-hr fuel moisture content even further. Nonetheless those fuels become naturally flammable every summer. Furthermore, these larger fuels were less often burned and thus insignificant factors in regard to the fires rapid spread. The rapid spread of the fires was due to consumption of the rapidly drying fuels.
Swain is fond of finding a “record setting” metric to bolster his climate change assertions. As such, he noted the “record-hot summer had dried out vegetation to record levels” and linked to a graph tweeted by John Badoglio showing October ERC values for the past 30 years were at a record high in 2017 (in part because of delayed rains). However, that “record” was also largely irrelevant. The ERC calculation is heavily biased by the greater biomass of the larger 1000-hr fuels that would indeed get drier as the autumn continued without rain. Still those larger fuels were insignificant contributors to the rapidly spreading fire. As seen below (Figure 3), the grasses have been entirely burnt while the larger shrubs and trees, as well as the woody debris near the base of the trees (in the upper left) have not been consumed. In fact many of the trees are still alive. The potential energy estimated by the “record ERC” was only partially realized. It was the fast-drying dead grass and chaparral shrubs that turned potential ERC into meaningful fiery heat.
Figure 3
The Spread Component
“The spread component is defined as “the theoretical ideal rate of spread expressed in feet-per-minute.” Wind speed, slope and fine fuel moisture are key inputs in the calculation of the spread component, thus accounting for a high variability from day-to-day.” Thus, a combination of dry fuels and high winds typically result in fire-watch and red-flag warnings one day and no warnings days later as the winds subside. Forest rangers are well aware that September and October bring the powerful Diablo Winds of Santa Rosa as well as the Santa Anas of southern California, and with those winds comes the highest fire danger.
Cliff Mass is an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington and author of the superb Cliff Mass Weather and Climate blogs. An October 16th post provides an excellent summary of the metorological conditions that created the fierce winds driving the Wine Country fires. In essence, a strong approaching wind flow (the Diablo Winds) coupled with a thermal inversion near the top of the mountains that border the Santa Rosa valley, accelerated winds into a 60 to 90 mile per hour downslope wind event, a phenomenon known as a mountain wave. Those high winds snapped power line poles and ignited fires. The regional topography also funneled the winds and fire down the valley, taking dead aim at the heart of Santa Rosa. The topography had guided a similar fire in 1964, the Hanley fire, which was started by a carelessly discarded cigarette. Unfortunately without much concern, most of the burnt homes in the Tubbs fire had been built on top of the burnt grounds of that previous Hanley fire, despite public protests.
Were those high winds perhaps exacerbated by climate change? Highly unlikely!
The Diablo Winds affecting Santa Rosa or the Santa Annas of southern California are driven by cooling seasonal temperatures in the high deserts to the east. The inner continent cools faster than the oceans, setting up a pressure gradient driving the winds toward the coast. The winds then heat adiabatically rising 5 degrees Celsius for every 1000 feet of elevation descent. An adiabatic rise in temperature means no added heat from any source and basic physics tells us temperatures can rise adiabatically simply due to compression. Thus an air mass that originated near Flagstaff Arizona at a 6,900 foot elevation, could adiabatically warm by 30 degrees as it reaches sea level.
The flow direction of winds are largely driven by unequal seasonal changes in temperatures. During the summer the interior heats faster than the oceans, such that a cooling onshore wind reduces interior temperatures. This pattern reverses in the autumn as the interior lands cool faster than the ocean creating an inland high pressure that drives the Diablo and Santa Anna winds toward the coast. Despite declining solar insolation, this autumn wind flow causes coastal California to experience some of its hottest days of the year in September and October, commonly referred to as Indian summer. Similarly a pressure system that inhibited the cooling onshore winds around San Francisco, resulted in a record hot summer temperature. By simultaneously opposing cooling sea breezes while bringing warm winds that were adiabatically 5 to 10 degrees warmer, temperatures rise and relative humidity falls. The result is bone-dry hot Diablo winds that suck the moisture from land and vegetation wherever the winds pass.
To restate the forces driving the winds, the Diablo winds are the result of a pressure gradient resulting from an interior that cools cooler faster than the ocean. If CO2 is warming the earth to any significant extent, then we would expect that warming to prevent the inner continent from cooling as quickly as it did decades ago. Thus CO2-global warming would predict a decline in that pressure gradient and a weakening of these winds.
To summarize, none of the fire components- ignition, fuels, or spread – had been affected by climate changes.
Finally, keen observers will notice that entire blocks of houses, and entire neighborhoods were completely burnt to the ground, in contrast to neighborhood trees that often remained relatively unscathed. This suggests that the high winds rapidly carried burning embers from the grassland and chaparral into these developments. While the trees did not trap the embers, the buildings did. I would expect we will soon hear about investigations inquiring into why these residences were not required to erect more fire safe structures, especially when built in a known fire-prone habitat in a high wind corridor. The simple requirement of constructing eaves in such a manner that prevents the trapping of burning embers and fire-proof roofs may have saved many homes.
Indeed there are many lessons that will allow us to prevent such wildfire disasters in the future if we have accurately determined the causes of these fires. Cliff Mass notes that our short-term weather models had accurately predicted the time and place of the fiercest winds. That information could be used to temporarily shut down the electrical grid where power lines are likely to ignite fires. We can bury power lines below ground. We can remove the high fuels loads that accumulated during a century of misguided fire suppression. Insurance companies can demand higher rates unless proven precautions are undertaken. It is those lessons that Gore, Clinton, Brown should be promoting to inform the public. Trenberth and Swain should be informing the people of the natural weather dangers that are inevitable. There is no evidence that climate change, whether natural or anthropogenic, exacerbated the ignition, fuels or spread components of these deadly fires. And worse, their obsessed belief that rising CO2 concentrations worsen every tragedy only distracts our focus from real life-saving solutions.
Jim Steele is Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
Scientists and media continue to spread misinformation about polar bears & walrus
BY Susan Crockford | Polar Bear Science | November 5, 2017
“Lies” might be a better word to characterize the misinformation that scientists and the media have been busy spreading to the public over the last few weeks. The information is either known to be false (by scientists whose job it is to relay facts honestly) or is easily shown to be false (by journalists whose job it is to fact-check their stories).
Polar bear misinformation
Earlier this month, biologist Nick Lunn was interviewed by the CBC and for the news program The National. He stated outright, without qualification, that Western Hudson Bay polar bear numbers have dropped from about 1200 (in 1987) to about 800 now (a 33% decline).
However, it is not scientifically appropriate to compare these figures because they were based on different types of surveys conducted over different portions of the region (they are also statistically insignificant). Lunn should know better because the published reports (Dyck et al. 2017; Stapleton et al. 2014; Lunn et al. 2016) make it clear these numbers are not comparable.
The official Western Hudson Bay estimate accepted by the PBSG in 2014, and by the IUCN in 2015, is 1030 bears (range 754-1406), based on the survey conducted by Stapleton and colleagues in 2011. Environment Canada considered the subpopulation ‘likely stable’ in 2014, an assessment upheld by the 2016 survey.
Because even the 2011 and 2016 Western Hudson Bay aerial surveys used somewhat different methods, the only population size numbers (subsets of each total) that can be compared are these:
2011 (949, range 618-1280)
2016 (842, range 562-1121)
The slight apparent decline over 5 years (11%) was not statistically significant (Dyck et al. 2017, pg. 3, 37) and is therefore equivalent to no change.
Similarly, when differences in methodology and statistical significance are taken into account, the estimate for 2016 cannot be said to be different from the 2011 estimate of 1030 bears (Stapleton et al. 2014), which was not statistically different from the estimate of 935 (range 794-1076) calculated in 2004 (Regehr et al. 2007).
‘Likely stable’ is probably the best way to characterize this result.
However, biologist Andrew Derocher has also been guilty of misrepresenting the facts on the Western Hudson Bay population status over the last few weeks:
Western Hudson Bay #polarbears decline >30% & Nunavut increases harvest quota. “almost impossible, to recommend” says Wildlife Director. pic.twitter.com/ogdqZ14HhW
— Andrew Derocher (@AEDerocher) November 3, 2017
And…
Aerial surveys ==> large confidence intervals & we'd need > 50% decline for statistical significance. Not precautionary management to wait https://t.co/cMw61Rwg71
— Andrew Derocher (@AEDerocher) September 14, 2017
— Andrew Derocher (@AEDerocher) September 14, 2017
And…
Western Hudson Bay #polarbear population dropped from 1030 bears to 842 over 2011-2016. 18% decline. Not “slight”. https://t.co/AoVSqWSQjw pic.twitter.com/tmlgYlZ3a1
— Andrew Derocher (@AEDerocher) September 14, 2017
Bottom line: The 2011 estimate of 1030 cannot be compared to the 2016 estimate of 842 (or to the 1987 estimate of 1200) because these numbers were generated using different methods. Lunn and Derocher know this: it’s their job to know. But it’s their job to honestly relay scientific facts to the public, not an interpretation of those facts they’d prefer to be true.
Ironically, all this hype is being promoted as Hudson Bay seems gearing up for the earliest freeze-up in decades (here, here, and here).
In the chart below, grey ice (dark purple) is thick enough for an adult male polar bear to walk on. The new ice could still get blown out into the bay if the wind is right (from the south) but that does not seem likely under conditions of freezing cold temperatures, snow, and west and northwest winds at Churchill (for 5-8 November).
Walrus misinformation
Here is Christopher Booker (The Telegraph, 4 November 2017) on the walrus nonsense being told by the BBC via its news body and its documentary series, “Blue Planet II”.
“… the BBC yet again [claimed] that Arctic ice is rapidly vanishing, supported on BBC News by a clip from David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series, intoning that, among species most “seriously affected” by global warming, are walruses, showing hundreds of them desperately squeezing on to a melting ice floe.
But there are one or two little problems with this BBC version of the facts. First, far from Arctic ice vanishing, there has been no further downward trend in the extent of its summer melting since 2006. Its lowest point this September was higher than in seven of the past 11 years.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has found that there are so many more of them than there were 30 years ago that last month that it decided not to list Pacific walruses on its endangered species list.
Secondly, far from walruses being “seriously affected”, an exhaustive survey by the US Fish and Wildlife Service has found that there are so many more of them than there were 30 years ago that last month that it decided not to list Pacific walruses on its endangered species list.
Thirdly, what produced that 2016 spike in CO2 and global temperatures was not “human activity” but the unusual warming of the Pacific Ocean by an abnormally strong El Niño. It is this warming that causes the oceans to “outgas” more CO2, not the CO2 that causes the warming: as even the BBC was told when, in July last year, its website quoted the Met Office under the heading “El Niño likely to boost CO2 in 2016”.
Since that El Niño ended, however, the latest Met Office data show that ocean temperatures have dropped sharply, with global surface temperatures back to where they were in 2002. Which is why the BBC’s reporting of all this last week could scarcely have been a better example of what it likes to scorn as “fake news”.
I couldn’t have said it better myself, except to add that Atlantic walrus, which the Blue Planet II folks filmed for their documentary, also show no evidence of being negatively impacted by climate change or sea ice loss so far.
Such disgraceful journalist practice is no better than the reaction of the CBC Radio here in Canada last month (4 October) to the news that the USFWS would not list walrus as ‘threatened.’
Instead of getting a scientist on to explain to listeners the science backing the decision, it had a spokesperson from the litigious Centre for Biological Diversity advocacy organization on the show to present a boring and quite predictable rant about why she disagreed with the decision. Of course she’s disappointed: she authored the document that forced the USFWS to consider the listing!
Bottom line: Have journalists forgotten how to do their jobs or do they really believe their opinions on certain subjects give them free license to ignore the ethics of their profession?
Actually, I could ask the same question about the polar bear specialists.
References
Dyck, M., Campbell, M., Lee, D., Boulanger, J. and Hedman, D. 2017. 2016 Aerial survey of the Western Hudson Bay polar bear subpopulation. Final report, Nunavut Department of Environment, Wildlife Research Section, Iglolik, NU. http://www.gov.nu.ca/environnement/information/wildlife-research-reports#polarbear
Lunn, N.J., Servanty, S., Regehr, E.V., Converse, S.J., Richardson, E. and Stirling, I. 2016. Demography of an apex predator at the edge of its range – impacts of changing sea ice on polar bears in Hudson Bay. Ecological Applications, in press. DOI: 10.1890/15-1256
Regehr, E.V., Lunn, N.J., Amstrup, S.C. and Stirling, I. 2007. Effects of earlier sea ice breakup on survival and population size of polar bears in Western Hudson Bay. Journal of Wildlife Management 71:2673-2683.
Stapleton S., Atkinson, S., Hedman, D., and Garshelis, D. 2014. Revisiting Western Hudson Bay: using aerial surveys to update polar bear abundance in a sentinel population. Biological Conservation 170:38-47. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320713004618#
Iran slams Saudi lies over Yemen missile strike
By Adam Garrie Adam Garrie | The Duran | November 5, 2017
Saudi Arabia and Donald Trump have both accused Iran of providing Yemen’s Houthi rebels with the missile that was launched at the Saudi capital Riyadh yesterday evening.
Saudi Arabia in particular, has accused Iran of supplying the Houthis with new missiles capable of longer distances than those previously thought to be in their possession.
However, Saudi’s accusation is inconsistent with the fact that Yemen is totally besieged from both land and sea.
Yemen is bordered by Saudi Arabia and fellow Gulf Cooperation Council Oman, a state which would never allow shipments of Iranian weapons to Houthis and could not easily do in any case as Oman borders areas of Yemen controlled either by the pro-Saudi Hadi government or by anti-Iranian al-Qaeda and ISIS fighters.
Yemen’s north-west maritime borders have been cut off from the world, including from crucial medical and food supplies by a Saudi naval blockade that has caused a man-made famine and a cholera epidemic.
If the UN cannot even get foodstuffs past the Saudi blockade, it goes without saying that Iran could not get ballistic missiles to Houthi controlled areas.
The Houthis themselves claimed that they modified their missiles to achieve longer ranges, a claim which Iran acknowledges as the most likely scenario in respect of yesterday’s launch. Others have stated that the launch was a Saudi false flag, but as the Houthis themselves took credit for the launch and with video emerging which appears to back up Houthi claims, the only remaining credible scenario is that the Houthi fighters were indeed able to modify their missiles to reach Riyadh.
In any case, it would appear that Saudi’s US made defensive missile systems shot the Houthi rocket down, although some reports on social media from the Arab world contradict this.
At the end of the day, the facts hardly matter to the spokesmen and leaders of Saudi, Israel and United States who have all accused Iran of having a direct hand in the missile launch.
The fact of the matter is that while Iranian sympathies and limited support are certainly with the Houthis, the blockade means that this support amounts to very little in terms of material support, including and especially military support.
The facts on the ground and more important on the sea, dictate that accusations of Iran meddling in Yemen are de-facto baseless.
Unlike Syria, in which militants could be supplied on virtually all sides from ISIS controlled Iraq to the large Turkish border as well as the borders with Jordan and Israel, Yemen’s Houthis are not in any such position to be so easily supplied.
The fact that many in the media have conspired to hide this patently obvious reality means that one either is not engaging in honest journalism or one is simply repeating mythical Saudi claims.
Shameless, ridiculous CIA 9/11 falsification aimed at saving US allies in Mideast: Iran
Press TV – November 4, 2017
Iran’s Foreign Ministry has dismissed new “shameless” falsification of 9/11 records by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to incriminate the Islamic Republic, saying such a futile propaganda campaign is meant to protect some of Washington’s allies in the Middle East.
“The fresh US allegations and claims against Iran are a clear example of shameless falsification to corroborate remarks by the country’s president and are for domestic consumption inside the US,” Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said on Saturday.
Qassemi made the remarks after the release of a 19-page al-Qaeda report in Arabic, which claimed Iran had supported the extremist group before the 9/11 attacks.
The document was part of nearly 47,000 documents recently released by the CIA.
The US government’s 9/11 Commission has made similar allegations, saying Iranian officials met with al-Qaeda leaders in Sudan in either 1991 or early 1992.
Ignoring the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the 9/11 attacks were Saudi nationals, the US government’s 9/11 Commission mad yet another wild claim, alleging that eight of the hijackers who kept passengers on the hijacked flights under control passed through Iran before arriving in the US.
Qassemi said US officials have yet to comment on these documents, but added that the country’s government and intelligence agency had a grim record of falsification and deception of world public, even the American people, to achieve their own political and strategic goals.
He emphasized that conscientious minds in the international community have no doubt about the US role in creating and intellectually and ideologically nurturing terrorist groups over the past two decades.
The publication of such fake and delusional documents would not change the internationally-acknowledged facts about the countries that are the intellectual breeding ground of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and those who have had a role in creating them and providing them with military, political and logistic support, the Iranian spokesperson pointed out.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Thursday dismissed US allegations about Iran’s support for the al-Qaeda terror group, describing the claims as an attempt to “whitewash” the truth about the role US allies had in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Iran’s foreign minister says instead of making false allegations against Iran, the US must stop covering up its allies’ role in the 9/11 attacks.
“A record low for the reach of petrodollars: CIA & FDD fake news w/ selective AlQaeda docs re: Iran can’t whitewash role of US allies in 9/11,” Zarif wrote on his Twitter account.
RussiaDidIt: Cheap Meddling, Closet Marxists and Racial Tensions
By Ricardo Vaz | Investig’Action | November 2, 2017
Are you a western journalist or analyst with an issue you cannot explain? Do your symptoms include an unwillingness to learn anything from history and an unconditional embrace of western exceptionalism? Then we have just the thing for you: RussiaDidIt! Taken in the appropriate dosage, RussiaDidIt can be used for just any issue, small and large, old and new, near and far. Call your local US embassy or EU office and order your RussiaDidIt talking points. Side effects may include total paranoia, loss of credibility and a desire to wear the EU flag as a cape.
It seems like all the evils that plague the western world these days have a common cause. Brexit, Catalonia, Trump, racial tensions, the lack of credibility of the EU, all of these have a simple explanation, if we are to believe the mainstream media and pundits: Russia is behind it. And not just Russia, but Putin himself. He must be the busiest villain in history.
True journalists like Robert Parry have analysed and exposed the rise of this new McCarthyism, and how uncorroborated, or sometimes outrightly false, allegations gradually become unquestionable facts.(1)
Screenshots from the Washington Post and Politico
In this piece we examine three articles that have different angles of this RussiaDidIt approach. They have the paranoia of Russian meddling in US elections as a background, but everything applies just as well to similar stories about the EU. Inevitably it all ties back to an inability, or unwillingness, to learn anything from history, and this disgusting myth that everyone should look up to the West as a beacon of superior values. We start of course with the ineffable Guardian.
Cheap journalism and cheap meddling
One day journalism students will study the spiral of lowering standards that took hold of the Guardian. One can sense the denial taking hold of the newspaper as their liberal centrist paradise crumbles. They yearn for a knight in shining armour who can come and save them from Brexit, even if it is Tony Blair, because, believe it or not, the idea of the EU has been here since the Renaissance!(2)
As expected, the Guardian has embraced the idea that the Russians “hacked” the 2016 US elections (whatever that means) wholeheartedly. And it recently reported on new, ground-breaking revelations:
“Russian trolls posing as Americans made payments to genuine activists in the US to help fund protest movements on socially divisive issues […]
[…] the newspaper RBC published a major investigation into the work of a so-called Russian “troll factory” since 2015, including during the period of the US election campaign, disclosures that are likely to put further spotlight on alleged Russian meddling in the election.”
So far it sounds very serious. We then learn that the main “socially divisive issue” was race relations.
“RBC counted 16 groups relating to the Black Lives Matter campaign and other race issues that had a total of 1.2 million subscribers. The biggest group was entitled Blacktivist and reportedly had more than 350,000 likes at its peak.
Last month, CNN also reported that US authorities believed the Blacktivist Facebook group and Twitter account were the work of Russian impostors.”
The liberal media have often thrown these outrageous suggestions that activism like Black Lives Matter is part of a foreign agenda, as opposed to a reaction to the structural racism that exists in the US (more on this later). But the main point that needs to be addressed about this cunning plan is the following: how much did the Russians spend in these devious activities of inflaming tensions in the US? A whopping… 80,000 dollars! The Guardian thinks the activities of some alleged troll factory engaging in social media activity and paying activists a grand total of $80,000 represents unacceptable Russian “meddling”!
Billboard accusing Martin Luther King Jr. of being a communist
Let us put this number in perspective. Hillary Clinton made $3 million out of 12 speeches to big banks. The entire spending in the US presidential election was almost $2 billion. And the Guardian is worried about $80,000 worth of meddling. For comparison USAID spent $4.2 million advancing US interests in Venezuela in 2015 alone. Even if these $80,000 had been spent in a single year, it would still be 50 times smaller than what one of the US empire’s foreign policy branches spent only in Venezuela.
The Guardian piece closes by mentioning that the evil Russians also bought ads on Google and Facebook for “tens of thousands of dollars” and “$100,000”, respectively. So in essence, the Guardian is reporting that it found suspicious grains of sand in the desert.(3) It would seem Putin is not just an evil mastermind, he is also a legendary bargain hunter. It should also be clear that the tech giants are more than happy to play their part in the witch-hunt and the crusade against “fake news”, which is nothing but an attempt by the dominant classes to monopolise their control over information.
Trump is a closet Marxist!
Next we look at an opinion column which has got to be one of the most ludicrous texts ever written. At first glance it could be mistaken for satire, but it was actually written by Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard and former member of the Obama administration, for Bloomberg News. The title is “Russia Is Using Marxist Strategies, and So Is Trump”!
While the entire piece should be framed for posterity, we will just quote some of the highlights:
“Karl Marx and his followers argued that revolutionaries should disrupt capitalist societies by “heightening the contradictions.” Russia used a version of that Marxist idea in its efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential campaign. […]
What is more surprising, and far more important for American politics, is that President Donald Trump is drawn to a similar strategy.
Marx contended that as the conditions of workers started to improve, they would cease to be content with their lot, or to regard their alienation as inevitable. Lenin seized on this idea and transformed it into a revolutionary strategy. […] The job of the communist revolutionary was to “heighten” or “accelerate” those contradictions.
During the 2016 campaign, Russians did something very much like that, not to produce a revolution, but to deepen and intensify social divisions (and to help elect Donald Trump).
In short, the Russians tried to foster a sense of grievance and humiliation on all sides. […] Lenin would have been proud.”
The Russian actions that Sunstein is talking about are none other than the buying of social media ads and fostering of activism that we described in the previous section. But how about that for a deep understanding of Marx and Lenin? Sunstein does try to shield himself with a footnote that says:
“I am giving a brisk summary of some famously complex and ambiguous arguments from both Marx and Lenin.” (my emphasis)
Marx, Engels, Lenin… and Trump? Cass Sunstein of Harvard University and Bloomberg News is on the maximum dosage of RussiaDidIt !
There is nothing ambiguous about Marx and Lenin. Sunstein’s argument, on the other hand, is unambiguously idiotic. The fundamental contradiction in capitalist society is that one (large) group, the working-class, sells its labour, while another one, the bourgeoisie, profits from it because it owns the means of production. These two groups have fundamentally different interests and are irrevocably at odds, this is called class struggle. Marx’s work is monumental because it was the first truly scientific analysis of the capitalist system, which meant it also explained how it could be destroyed.
The “accelerating of these contradictions” means accelerating this class conflict in order to do a little more than “disrupting” capitalism. The goal is to overthrow capitalism altogether, have the workers seize power and the means of production, and have a society free of exploitation(4) and where production is directed to satisfy human need and not the profit of capitalists. In other words, socialism.
Lenin’s contributions to Marxism, both in theory and practice, are of course way beyond the childish arguments in this piece, from his understanding of capitalism’s inevitable development into imperialism, to his development of the role of the vanguard party. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were responsible for the October Revolution of 1917, the first time that capitalism was overthrown, and the starting point for all the liberation movements that followed.
The whole argument, if it were taken seriously, would be about the strategy to “divide and conquer”, which has nothing to do with Marxism. Just like Trump, the real-estate mogul and reality-TV star, has nothing Marxist about him. If anything, Trump is the highest embodiment of western capitalism.
Surely among the vast libraries at Harvard there must be a “Marx for dummies” book that Professor Sunstein can read. But of course, writing these disingenuous pieces is much easier. The goal of course is to simultaneously push the RussiaDidIt argument and discredit a true alternative to the (capitalist) system, which has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton and a lot (or everything!) to do with Marx and Lenin.
Black Power and Red Baiting
The final article we wish to examine appeared in The Atlantic magazine, and it focuses on the long history of Russia’s “involvement in America’s race wars”. First of all, for a country with a history of slavery and segregation of African-Americans, not to mention the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2, the term “race wars” seems like an awful understatement. One thing that actually has not changed is the red-baiting practices of the mainstream media, accusing anyone who deviates from the approved narrative of being a Soviet/Russian agent.
The article explores the history of the Soviet Union taking advantage of racial injustice in the United States for propaganda purposes. How dare those commies bring up the plight of black people in the US? Anyone who knows a bit of history knows that this is not entirely out of place. For example, in the struggle against apartheid, notably in the war in Angola, the US was on the side of apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union was on the side of the Angolans (and of black South Africans), even if their hand might have been forced by the Cubans.
Soviet posters about the struggle against colonialism: Left: “Capitalism is doomed!” (Artsrunyan, 1966); Right: “People of Africa Will Overpower the Colonizers!” (Kukryniksy, 1960)
There is plenty to be said about the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, but the fact is that there was not a single liberation struggle in the Third World in which the Soviet Union was on the side of the oppressor/colonist and the US on the side of the liberation movement. In fact it is the opposite that was true in most cases, if not all.
This takes us to the crux of the matter. According to historian Mary Dudziak, quoted in this piece,
“Early on in the Cold War, there was a recognition that the U.S. couldn’t lead the world if it was seen as repressing people of color,”
Dudziak and all these analysts and journalists take for granted that the US, and the west in general, are supposed to lead the world. According to them, these issues of treating black people as second class citizens are a problem mainly because they make the US look bad, and its noble mission of spreading freedom and democracy becomes much harder! It would seem that if racism was a little more polite (or if the Soviets did not bring it up!), then the Sandinistas would have been happy with Somoza, the Viet Cong would have had nothing to fight for, etc.
This unquestioned embrace of US exceptionalism, coupled to a complete ignorance of history, is what ensures that these analysts completely miss the point. For them, people rejecting and resisting US imperialism, or rejecting the EU after years of austerity policies, is just a misunderstanding, which needs to be explained by nonsense such as RussiaDidIt. Had these people actually read Marx and Lenin, as opposed to spewing these idiocies, they would understand that backlash against neoliberalism, or resistance against US imperialism, is to be expected. And there is no amount of fancy speeches by the likes of Obama, saying “freedom” and “democracy” in every other sentence, that will fix that.
The loyal flag-bearers of the imperial establishment are outraged at the idea of someone paying $80,000 to US activists, but the US spending tens of millions funding NGOs and political parties all over the world is more than natural. They are outraged that RT reports on Occupy Wall Street or Ferguson, but Voice of America and Radio Martí are supposed to be welcomed by the rest of the world. Because they stand for the better values… Apart from all the death and misery that is caused by US imperialism, it is this belief in American exceptionalism that makes the US so despised around the world.
Finally, we should stress that our argument is not whataboutism. We are not saying that this issue in place X should not be discussed because there is this other issue in the US. Outlets like RT and Sputnik should have their editorial lines and journalism standards analysed and criticised. The same holds true for Russia’s foreign policy. But, paraphrasing someone who was also accused of being a Soviet agent, it cannot be the greatest purveyor of meddling in the world and media outlets with ever lowering standards bringing these charges forward and pretending to be the Guardians of truth.
Notes
(1) We have also written on the ridiculous report published by the CIA, FBI and NSA on the Russian “hacking” of US elections.
(2) One wonders why the EU is symbolised by the Medici paying Leonardo da Vinci or by Erasmus and Thomas More being friends and not, for example, by the bubonic plague or Lucrezia Borgia’s antics. You know what else was common to all of Europe before the EU? The slave trade.
(3) More recently the Guardian published another bombshell piece, saying that Russia’s Facebook posts reached 126 million Americans. But we are talking about 80,000 posts, only 0.004% of news feed content according to Facebook, during a two year period. The big number is perfect for propaganda, but conveniently it is not made clear whether 126m different users saw the posts, or if for example 10m users on average saw 120 of these posts.
(4) We should clarify that exploitation does not mean having an evil boss that pays low salaries and forces workers to work weekends. Workers in capitalism are exploited simply because there is a value difference between what they earn and what they produce. In other words, profit comes from unpaid labour. Exploitation is the foundation of capitalism and should not be framed in moral terms, which imply that the problem is not the system but a matter of finding “good capitalists”.
Zero evidence, but… DOJ source says it ‘knows identities of Russians involved in DNC hack’
RT | November 2, 2017
Just days after the Mueller investigation came up short on Kremlin involvement in the US presidential election, a source in the Department of Justice says the names of the Russians who hacked the DNC computers are known, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In yet another effort to make a connection between the Kremlin and Hillary Clinton’s loss in the November 2016 US presidential elections, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department “has identified more than six members of the Russian government involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers and swiping sensitive information.” The leaked materials divulged a mountain of unsavory information related to the Clinton campaign.
Although relations between the world’s two preeminent nuclear powers hang in the balance over the charges, the accusations about “Russian meddling” in the US democratic process come without the outlet offering any evidence to support the claims. This much was admitted by the authors of the WSJ article early in the report.
“US intelligence agencies have attributed the attack to Russian intelligence services, but haven’t provided detailed information about how they concluded those services were responsible, or any details about the individuals allegedly involved,” authors Aruna Viswanatha and Del Quentin Wilber wrote.
Curiously, the US mainstream media has only shown interest in pursuing the “Russian hack” narrative regarding the release of thousands of the DNC’s emails, which were made public by WikiLeaks last year. Yet there were possible other suspects in this case, not least of all Seth Rich, former Voter Expansion Data Director, who was gunned down on July 10, 2016, in Washington DC.
WikiLeaks offered $20,000 reward for information regarding Rich’s death, while saying their offer should not be taken as implying Rich had been involved in leaking information to them. At the same time, however, WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, stated emphatically that Russia was not the source of the DNC data leak.
“We can say, we have said, repeatedly over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party,” he said in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News.
Nevertheless, despite providing zero evidence to support these extremely severe charges, the Obama administration took the unprecedented step of expelling 35 Russian diplomats right before the New Year, and the changing of the presidential guard, as well as imposing sanctions.
Meanwhile, this is not the first time the Wall Street Journal has produced “evidence” allegedly incriminating Russia in some conspiracy, only to be debunked later.
In early October, the influential business newspaper reported that the Russian government used software, created by the Moscow-based company Kaspersky Lab, to “secretly scan computers around the world for classified U.S. government documents and top-secret information.”
Without identifying its sources, WSJ accused the respected anti-virus company of being aware of “an adjustment to its normal operations,” allowing the company to search for terms as broad as “top secret,” as well as the “classified code names of US government programs.”
These accusations were immediately refuted by Germany’s BSI federal cyber agency.
“There are no plans to warn against the use of Kaspersky products since the BSI has no evidence for misconduct by the company or weaknesses in its software,” BSI said in an emailed response to questions about the latest media reports. “The BSI has no indications at this time that the process occurred as described in the media.”
The unsubstantiated report by the WSJ comes as Robert Mueller’s investigation into “Russian interference” in the 2016 presidential election has failed to turn up any evidence.
Attempts by US investigators to find alleged Russian collusion with President Donald Trump’s campaign have led to the discovery of a “Ukrainian trail,” Russia’s FM Sergey Lavrov said, suggesting Washington should now investigate Kiev’s role.
Over the past several years, Washington has attempted to blame any negative world events on Russia, “be it political protests, companies going bankrupt, or man-made disasters,” Lavrov said. “I’ve already heard we’ll soon be not only interfering in elections, but also manipulating the environment in order to create floods,” he added.
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Provoking a Path to Persia
The Saban Center’s prescient paper on war with Iran
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | October 20, 2011
In June 2009, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy published “Which Path to Persia?—Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran.” Writing in a tone strikingly reminiscent of the Project for a New American Century’s infamous pre-9/11 paper “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the six co-authors noted that, “It seems highly unlikely that the United States would mount an invasion without any provocation or other buildup.” For a think tank specifically established by media mogul Haim Saban to protect Israel, this could prove to be a formidable obstacle impeding their desired march—of U.S. troops—to Tehran.
“In fact, if the United States were to decide that to garner greater international support, galvanize U.S. domestic support, and/or provide a legal justification for an invasion, it would be best to wait for an Iranian provocation, then the time frame for an invasion might stretch out indefinitely,” Saban’s think-tankers ruefully observed.
“With only one real exception, since the 1978 revolution, the Islamic Republic has never willingly provoked an American military response, although it certainly has taken actions that could have done so if Washington had been looking for a fight. Thus it is not impossible that Tehran might take some action that would justify an American invasion. And it is certainly the case that if Washington sought such a provocation, it could take actions that might make it more likely that Tehran would do so (although being too obvious about this could nullify the provocation). However, since it would be up to Iran to make the provocative move, which Iran has been wary of doing most times in the past, the United States would never know for sure when it would get the requisite Iranian provocation. In fact, it might never come at all.”
Seemingly undeterred by Iran’s frustrating unwillingness to provide the requisite provocation, the analysts continued to examine this option… continue
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