Mocking Trump Doesn’t Prove Russia’s Guilt
By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | November 13, 2107
If the bloody debacle in Iraq should have taught Americans anything, it is that endorsements by lots of important people who think something is true don’t amount to evidence that it actually is true. If endorsements were the same as evidence, U.S. troops would have found tons of WMD in Iraq, rather than come up empty.
So, when it comes to whether or not Russia “hacked” Democratic emails last year and slipped them to WikiLeaks, just because a bunch of people with fancy titles think the Russians are guilty doesn’t compensate for the lack of evidence so far evinced to support this core charge.
But the reaction of Official Washington and the U.S. mainstream media to President Trump saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed sincere in denying Russian “meddling” was sputtering outrage: How could Trump doubt what so many important people think is true?
Yet, if the case were all that strong that Russia did “hack” the emails, you would have expected a straightforward explication of the evidence rather than a demonstration of a full-blown groupthink, but what we got this weekend was all groupthink and no evidence.
For instance, on Saturday, CNN responded to Trump’s comment that Putin seems to “mean it” when he denied meddling by running a list of important Americans who had endorsed the Russian-guilt verdict. Other U.S. news outlets and politicians followed the same pattern.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and a big promoter of the Russia-gate allegations, scoffed at what Trump said: “You believe a foreign adversary over your own intelligence agencies?”
The Washington Post’s headline sitting atop Sunday’s lede article read: “Trump says Putin sincere in denial of Russian meddling: Critics call that ‘unconscionable.’”
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and another Russia-gate sparkplug, said he was left “completely speechless” by Trump’s willingness to take Putin’s word “over the conclusions of our own combined intelligence community.”
Which gets us back to the Jan. 6 “Intelligence Community Assessment” and its stunning lack of evidence in support of its Russian guilty verdict. The ICA even admitted as much, that it wasn’t asserting Russian guilt as fact but rather as opinion:
“Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”
Even The New York Times, which has led the media groupthink on Russian guilt, initially published the surprised reaction from correspondent Scott Shane who wrote: “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”
In other words, the ICA was not a disposition of fact; it was guesswork, possibly understandable guesswork, but guesswork nonetheless. And guesswork should be open to debate.
Shutting Down Debate
But the debate was shut down earlier this year by the oft-repeated claim that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred in the assessment and how could anyone question what all 17 intelligence agencies concluded!
However, that canard was finally knocked down by President Obama’s own Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who acknowledged in sworn congressional testimony that the ICA was the product of “handpicked” analysts from only three agencies – the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.
In other words, not only did the full intelligence community not participate in the ICA but only analysts “handpicked” by Obama’s intelligence chiefs conducted the analysis – and as we intelligence veterans know well, if you handpick the analysts, you are handpicking the conclusions.
For instance, put a group of analysts known for their hardline views on Russia in a room for a few weeks, prevent analysts with dissenting viewpoints from weighing in, don’t require any actual evidence, and you are pretty sure to get the Russia-bashing result that you wanted.
So why do you think Clapper and Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan put up the no-entry sign that kept out analysts from the State Department and Defense Intelligence Agency, two entities that might have significant insights into Russian intentions? By all rights, they should have been included. But, clearly, no dissenting footnotes or wider-perspective views were desired.
If you remember back to the Iraq WMD intelligence estimate, analysts from the State Department’s intelligence bureau, known as INR, offered unwelcome dissenting views about the pace of Iraq’s supposed nuclear program, inserting a footnote saying they found it too difficult to predict the fruition of a program when there was no reliable evidence as to when – not to mention if – it had started.
DIA also was demonstrating an unusually independent streak, displaying a willingness to give due consideration to Russia’s perspective. Here’s the heterodox line DIA took in a major report published in December 2015:
“The Kremlin is convinced the United States is laying the groundwork for regime change in Russia, a conviction further reinforced by the events in Ukraine. Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine and the Arab Spring and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-established pattern of U.S.-orchestrated regime change efforts.”
So, not only did the Jan. 6 report exclude input from INR and DIA and the other dozen or so intelligence agencies but it even avoided a fully diverse set of opinions from inside the CIA, FBI and NSA. The assessment – or guesswork – came only from those “hand-picked” analysts.
It’s also worth noting that not only does Putin deny that Russia was behind the publication of the Democratic emails but so too does WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange who has insisted repeatedly that the material did not come from the Russians. He and others around WikiLeaks have strongly suggested that the emails came as leaks from Democratic insiders.
Seeking Real Answers
In the face of Official Washington’s evidence-free groupthink, what some of us former U.S. intelligence analysts have been trying to do is provide both a fuller understanding of Russian behavior and whatever scientific analysis can be applied to the alleged “hacks.”
Forensic investigations and testing of relevant download speeds, reported by members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), have undermined the Russia-did-it groupthink. But this attempt to engage in actual evaluation of evidence has been either ignored or mocked by mainstream news outlets.
Still, the suggestion in our July 24 VIPS memo that President Trump ask current CIA Director Mike Pompeo to take a fresh look at the issue recently had some consequence when Pompeo contacted VIPS member William Binney, a former NSA Technical Director, and invited him to explain his latest research on the impossibility of the Russians extracting the Democratic emails via an Internet hack based on known download speeds.
In typically candid terms, Binney explained to Pompeo why VIPS had concluded that the intelligence analysts behind the Jan. 6 report had been making stuff up about Russian “hacking.”
When news of the Binney-Pompeo meeting broke last week, the U.S. mainstream media again rejected the opportunity to rethink the Russia-did-it groupthink and instead treated Binney as some sort of “conspiracy theorist” with a “disputed” theory, while attacking Pompeo’s willingness to discuss Binney’s findings as “politicizing intelligence.”
Despite the smearing of Binney, President Trump appears to have taken some of this new evidence to heart, explaining his dispute with open-mouthed White House reporters on Air Force One who baited Trump with various forms of the same question: “Do you believe Putin?” amid the new jeering about Trump “getting played” by Putin.
Trump’s demeanor, however, suggested increased confidence that the Russian “hacking” allegations were the “witch hunt” that he has decried for months.
Trump also jabbed the press over its earlier false claims that “all 17 intelligence agencies” concurred on the Russian “hack.” And Trump introduced the idea of a different kind of “hack,” i.e., Obama’s political appointees at the heads of the agencies behind the Jan. 6 report.
Trump said, “You hear it’s 17 agencies. Well it’s three. And one is Brennan … give me a break. They’re political hacks. … I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper, you have [FBI Director James] Comey. Comey is proven to be a liar and he’s proven to be a leaker.”
Later, in deference to those still at work in intelligence, Trump said, “I’m with our [intelligence] agencies as currently constituted.”
While Trump surely has a dismal record of his own regarding truth-telling, he’s not wrong about the checkered record of the triumvirate of Clapper, Brennan and Comey.
Clapper played a key role in the bogus Iraq-WMD intelligence when he was head of the National Geo-spatial Agency and hid the fact that there was zero evidence in satellite imagery of any weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq invasion. When no WMDs were found, Clapper told the media that he thought they were shipped off to Syria.
In 2013, Clapper perjured himself before Congress by denying NSA’s unconstitutional blanket surveillance of Americans. After evidence emerged revealing the falsity of Clapper’s testimony, he wrote a letter to Congress admitting, “My response was clearly erroneous – for which I apologize.” Despite the deception, he was allowed to stay as Obama’s most senior intelligence officer for almost four more years.
Clapper also has demonstrated an ugly bias about Russians. On May 28, as a former DNI, Clapper explained Russian “interference” in the U.S. election to NBC’s Chuck Todd on May 28 with a tutorial on what everyone should know about “the historical practices of the Russians.” Clapper said, “the Russians, typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique.”
Brennan, who had previously defended torture as having been an effective way to gain intelligence, was CIA director when agency operatives broke into the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee when it was investigating CIA torture.
Former FBI Director Comey is infamous for letting the Democratic National Committee arrange its own investigation of the “hacking” that was then blamed on Russia, a development that led some members of Congress to call the supposed “hack” an “act of war.” Despite the risk of nuclear conflagration, the FBI didn’t bother to do its own forensics.
And, by his own admission, Comey arranged a leak to The New York Times that was specifically designed to get a Special Prosecutor appointed to investigate Russia-gate, a job that fell to his old friend Robert Mueller, who has had his own mixed record as the previous FBI director in mishandling the 9/11 investigation.
There are plenty of reasons to want Trump out of the White House, but there also should be respect for facts and due process. So far, the powers-that-be in Washington – in politics, the media and other dominant institutions, what some call the Deep State – have shown little regard for fairness in the Russia-gate “scandal.”
The goal seems to be to remove the President or at least emasculate him on a bum rap, giving him the bum’s rush, so to speak, while also further demonizing Russia and exacerbating an already dangerous New Cold War.
The truth should still count for something. No one’s character should be assassinated, as Bill Binney’s is being now, for running afoul of the conventional wisdom that Trump – like bête noire Putin – never tells the truth, and that to believe either is, well, “unconscionable,” as The Washington Post warns.
Ray McGovern was a CIA intelligence analyst for 27 years and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Democratic Party oligarchs already scheming for the 2020 nomination
By Greg Felton | November 12, 2017
To this day, establishment Democrats are in denial about their party’s role in causing the election of Donald Trump. Rather than support the candidacy of the popular, progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders, who would have defeated Trump handily, the Democratic National Committee sabotaged his campaign so that it could nominate the loathesome and unelectable Hillary Clinton. Why would a U.S. political party knowingly commit electoral suicide? Essentially, the Democratic Party hierarchy is more loyal to a foreign government (Israel) than it is to the U.S. For these “Clintoncrats,” installing a warmongering Israeli satrap in the White House was more important than nominating a candidate who cared about the U.S. national interest and American lives.
For obvious reasons, the DNC’s corruption and Clinton’s moral and intellectual unfitness cannot be admitted, so to explain how a bombastic amateur won an election that was essentially rigged against him the Clintoncrats have to invent excuses. One that is still flogged by mainstream media and Internet trolls is that the Russian government “hacked” the election to help Trump. Mentioned as far back as April 2016, this fiction serves four purposes.
First, it allows the Clintoncrats to link Trump to the alleged hacking, thereby imputing impeachable misconduct and painting his victory as illegitimate. Second, it reinvents Hillary Clinton as a victim to deflect attention from her bankster/Israel-first servility and war-criminal past, both of which were largely responsible for making Democratic voters run to Trump. Third, the exclusive external focus on Russia and Trump distracts the public from rampant internal corruption within the Democratic Party and its repression of the surging progressive movement that Sanders leads. Fourth, the invention of Russian hacking, as well as anti-Trump/anti-Sanders blamecasting, gives the Clintoncrats a device to reimpose its authority on the party and the Berniecrats.
Although the election is more than three years away, any opportunity to attack Trump and score points against the progressives must be seized, and it is in that spirit that the Charlottesville riot takes on a deeper meaning than we are being led to believe.
Charlottesville—A Political Contrivance
In a world of universal deceit, crises are staged by those in power or those who hope to seize power. If these “decepticons” can inflame public opinion to serve their interests, especially when a targeted group is set up to take the blame, the public and the media are effectively co-opted since those who are enraged or terrified are too busy reacting emotionally to the crisis to question its validity much less perceive that they are being manipulated. We saw this tactic employed successfully, for example, in the World Trade Center/Pentagon attack, the Boston Marathon bombing and the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan bombings in Paris. It also worked for the Clintoncrats in Charlottesville.
A crisis that casts white southerners in a maliciously violent light while inflaming black anger and sense of racial victimhood can help bring defectors back to the Democratic Party and enlist the party’s confederates in the media to vilify Trump. This is why the dominant images of the August 12 riot are emotional and reactive: white violence against “anti-racist” counter-protesters, a car driven by a white man into a crowd of pro-black counter-protesters, a beatified victim of the driver’s impact and scathing denunciations of Trump for his equivocal ascription of blame for the violence.
The inflammatory depictions of the riot have succeeded because, like all propaganda, they generated an artificial moralized causality. From these images it was easy to infer that they were deliberate, willful acts of violence by white racist protesters, and so preclude the possibility of any intelligent, critical analysis. Such a rational approach would imply either that the white protesters were not entirely reprehensible or that the images as presented did not depict the whole truth. Because the riot was moralized from the outset, anyone who tried to appeal to objectivity could expect to be vilified as an apologist for white racism. This is what happened to Trump.
The most egregious example of this propaganda is a piece written by Helena Cobban, a writer and researcher on international affairs who unfortunately opted for ranting over research. Here is how she began:
This weekend, for the third time this year, our home-city of Charlottesville has been the target of a campaign by leaders of the hate-filled “Alt-Rights” and their associates to claim the space of this city as their own. Yesterday, one of their apparent supporters, who had driven here from Ohio, plowed his car into a group of anti-hate protesters very near to the downtown mall that is the heart of our city, killing one woman (32-year-old Heather Heyer) and injuring more than a dozen others.
Another, more indirect, result of the haters’ provocative convergence on Charlottesville was that a state police helicopter that had been circling over downtown for many hours later crashed a little east of town, killing two state troopers.…
Cobban uses “hate” or “hater” 22 times to stigmatize the protesters, but such lazy name-calling speaks to the prejudice of the writer, not to any alleged negative characteristics of the protesters. Cobban also wrapped the “anti-hate” protesters in sanctimonious, religious verbiage, not bothering to mention that many came armed with chemical irritants, baseball bats, wooden clubs and helmets. There is no possible way the Antifa/BLM crowd could be depicted as “peaceful” or “anti-hate.” In fact, these counter-protesters were the ones spoiling for a fight. Even if one were to accept that the white protesters started the riot, the Antifa/BLM crowd did much to escalate it.
Finally, Cobban manages to praise the police and politicians, and it is here that that the riot proves its political worth for the Clintoncrats. As I showed last time, Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s Democratic governor, bears most of the responsibility because he did nothing to keep the factions apart even though he said he had put the National Guard on stand-by in the name of public safety:
“Men and women from state and local agencies will be in Charlottesville to keep the public safe, and their job will be made easier if Virginians, no matter how well-meaning, elect to stay away from the areas where this rally will take place.”
He never used them because he said that the armed militias, better equipped than the state police, were adequate to keep order. “Not a shot was fired—zero property damage,” he said. Business Insider reporter Harrison Jacobs, as I wrote earlier, deftly captures the perversity of this statement:
“McAuliffe’s response that law enforcement’s handling of the violence was successful because there were no bullets fired and “zero property damage” would appear to ignore that dozens were left injured and a 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, was killed…”
Cobban’s screed, although laughably prejudiced, accurately betrays the essence of the official effect-to-cause narrative that serves the Clintoncrats’ larger objective: condemn white protesters not for what they did, but for who they are and by extension condemn Trump and his southern voter base. Cobban’s title, “Charlottesville confronting white supremacy and hate,” depicts the sort of pro-black/anti-Trump, good-vs-evil hysteria. However, if the riot is viewed from cause to effect as honesty demands, an entirely different picture emerges, one that exposes the political machinations behind it.
First, those who objected to the decision to move the Robert E. Lee statue had a valid permit to stage a protest in Emancipation Park. An attempt had been made to have the permit quashed and the protest relocated to a smaller park, but the original permit was upheld in court. After 15 minutes or so the Charlottesville police, in violation of the permit, dispersed them. The dispersal brought the protesters into direct contact with Antifa/Black Lives Matter counter-protesters, and from there violence ensued. Had the police left the protesters alone and kept the two sides apart, there would have been no violence, but it was necessary to provoke white southerners into looking like the aggressors.
Second, the narrative about the death of Heather Heyer is based on a fabrication that begs allusion to the false-flag Boston Marathon bombing, in which two Chechen brothers were set up to take the blame, and crisis actors were hired to sell the story.
James Alex Fields, a 20-year-old from Ohio, is alleged to have driven the car that hit and killed Heyer, but there is no evidence that he was even behind the wheel or that the car in question hit her. Video footage of the event clearly shows “his” car striking another car, not Heyer, but that still does not answer all questions. One thing we do know: Heather Heyer, who was overweight and taking medication, died on a sidewalk from a heart attack, not a car impact.
From different angles and in different videos, different numbers of cars are involved, and people that were allegedly injured in one version turn up in other scenes unharmed, thus inviting reasoned speculation that this was yet another staged event complete with crisis actors.

CRISIS ACTOR: On the left, a man being struck by the car falsely attributed to James A. Fields as it was being backed away sharply from the site of impact. On the right, that same man sitting uninjured on a parked Toyota while the same impact car is visible next to it on the right. Note the red sneakers.
Indeed, there were conveniently placed “witnesses” to provide the rhetorical spin needed to fix the official narrative in our minds. One conspicuous person was Brennan Gilmore, a former State Department operative in Africa and manager of Virginia Democrat Tom Perriello’s failed campaign for governor. About Heyer’s death, Gilmore told MSNBC:
It was clearly perpetrated by one of these racist Nazis who came to Charlottesville to spread their vile ideology. And he targeted this crowd very clearly. There is no question of anyone who witnessed it that his intent was to cause a mass casualty incident, a domestic terrorist incident as far as what I witnessed.
Gilmore gives himself away by not so much giving evidence but by overselling the absolute certainty of it: “clearly perpetrated,” “very clearly,” there is no question… that his intent was,” “a domestic terror incident.” Gilmore was in no position to make such dogmatic assertions. Also, in the video his intonation is flat and robotic, and he looks unnaturally stiff, as one might be if asked to read lines.

MISSING VEHICLE: The Toyota van with the crisis actor in the above picture is missing in this long shot of the path the impact car took. The Toyota should be somewhere under the red arrow. These inconsistencies strongly suggest that this scene was staged and more than once.
Fields’s part in Heyer’s death had to be invented to make the incident look like an act of deliberate violence by a white racist because that’s what the Clintoncrats wanted. Fields, who was in the crowd and could not have been driving the infamous car, ends up libeled as a “terrorist.” In fact Gilmore wasn’t alone in his labelling of Fields; McAuliffe read from the same script: “You can’t stop some crazy guy who came here from Ohio and used his car as a weapon. He is a terrorist.”
It’s uncertain if the Charlottesville propaganda will still have credibility come Election Day 2020, assuming Trump survives in office that long, but no matter how often its imagery and contrived morality are flogged it won’t mean squat if the Democratic establishment can’t come up with a candidate who is credible, likeable and electable—“an un-Hillary Clinton.” That person looks like it might be McAuliffe, the man most responsible for the riot. Understanding how he fits into the Clintoncrats long-term political ambitions can give a more coherent explanation of the riot and why he did nothing to stop it.
Charlottesville and the ‘Third Clinton’
At 59, McAuliffe is youngish, energetic and comes with an impeccable Clinton loyalist pedigree.
- 2001 to 2005, chairman of the Democratic National Committee
- 1996, co-chairman of Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign,
- 2008, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
In addition, McAuliffe guaranteed the $1.35 million mortgage on the Clintons’ Chappaqua, NY, house and went into business with Tony Rodham, Hillary Clinton’s brother. McAuliffe speaks with Bill Clinton every day and is a fundraiser extraordinaire. If there’s Democratic money to be donated, he knows how to get it. The political and financial propinquity between McAuliffe and the Clintons/Rodhams is so conspicuous that McAuliffe might as well be considered a Clinton, with all the mutual backscratching that that term connotes.
In October 2016, The Daily Mail reported that Hillary Clinton helped raise funds for Common Good VA, McAuliffe’s Political Action Committee (PAC), which then donated $500,000 to the congressional campaign of Clinton’s friend Jill McCabe, the wife of Andrew McCabe, who would later be promoted to FBI deputy director and responsible for investigating Clinton for her use of a private e-mail server. The investigation was dropped. Three years earlier, Clinton had endorsed McAuliffe for governor of Virginia.
In 2009, as chairman of the start-up GreenTech Automotive, McAuliffe needed Chinese investment capital, so he formed a business relationship with Hillary Clinton’s brother Tony Rodham, CEO of Gulf Coast Funds Management. Gulf Coast was in the business of procuring visas for foreigners under the federal EB-5 program for investing at least $500,000 in a rural or impoverished area and created at least 10 jobs. GreenTech qualified because it was set up in a rundown corner of Mississippi.
The GreenTech/Gulf Coast venture ran into serious problems because visa applications were held up over qualification criteria and other legal matters, so Rodham and McAuliffe made personal appeals to government officials to expedite matters, all of this while Clinton was Obama’s secretary of state. One of these officials was Alejandro Mayorkas, director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, whom they personally asked to fast-track the applications. Mayorkas did so, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General would later determine that Mayorkas gave Rodham and McAuliffe unethical, preferential treatment.
Mr. Mayorkas, now Deputy Secretary of DHS, [but who resigned in October 2016 over this matter] communicated with stakeholders on substantive issues outside of the normal adjudicatory process, and intervened with the career USCIS staff in ways that benefited the stakeholders. Mr. Mayorkas’ conduct led many USCIS employees to reasonably believe that specific individuals or groups were being given special access or consideration in the EB-5 program. (p. 52)
The political favouritism afforded Rodham and McAuliffe can be seen in this timeline excerpt from the DHS report about Gulf Coast’s activities. McAuliffe ended his role in GreenTech in 2012 before running for governor in 2013.
The Establishment Man
On June 13, 2017, two months before the Charlottesville riot, McAuliffe gave an interview to the on-line news source Politico This interview is significant because in it McAuliffe pushes the Clintoncrats’s electoral game plan and in so doing telegraphs his future, passive response in Charlottesville.
Russian to judgment
Within a span of fewer than three minutes during the first quarter of the interview, McAuliffe repeatedly pushed the Russia-hacking line using the same pat phrases and the same delivery, as if he had memorized them from a script:
“trying to destabilize our government,”
“wanted to destabilize the presidency,”
“detabliizing our democracy.”
“a direct assault on the democracy of the United States.”
The segment ended with this categorical summation at 12 minutes 19 seconds: “Clearly, Russia was involved in trying to destabilize our government.”
Just like Brennan Gilmore later at Charlottesville, McAuliffe had no first-hand proof of what he was talking about. He only had a prefabricated narrative to work from. He read his part dutifully, although, like Gilmore, he did not appear to appreciate that pat repetition of boilerplate is a defining characteristic of propaganda.
Further proof that McAuliffe was lying comes from his less-than-dogmatic certainty on the subject of evidence for Russian involvement:
“Somebody had to give these people a road map”;
“I believe somebody was directing the Russians”;
“Something was going on.”
Using subjective or vague claims to back up dogmatic assertions is standard in fabricated effect-to-cause narratives, but a logical, cause-to-effect narrative proves the opposite of what McAuliffe claimed. The best evidence comes from WikiLeaks, which in March this year debunked the Russian hacking story in its Vault 7 release:
Another program described in the documents, named Umbrage, is a voluminous library of cyber-attack techniques that the CIA has collected from malware produced by other countries, including Russia. According to the WikiLeaks release, the large number of techniques allows the CIA to mask the origin of some of its attack and confuse forensic investigators.… What this means is that current efforts by Democratic Party leaders and Deep State leakers in the government intelligence sector to pin the blame on Russia for hacking the election or for trying to help elect Trump as president, now must confront the counter-argument that the Deep State itself, in the form of the CIA, may have been behind the hacks, but is making it look like the Russians did it. (emphasis added)
In December 2016, The Intercept refuted the Russian-hacking dogma, and CNBC reported that DHS tried 10 times to hack Georgia‘s election database. Given all this prior evidence of domestic hacking, McAuliffe stuck to the script. As if to make the point crystal clear, on September 28, 2017, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla accused DHS of lying about Russian hacking.
Moral high ground
Pandering to voter emotion and prejudice is a necessary distraction mechanism to preclude rational debate; thus, one of the buttons McAuliffe repeatedly pushed was “values”: moral Democrats have them; immoral “Trumpublicans” don’t:
Leadership is… moral based, value based, and that’s what the Trump administration is lacking (26m40s)
“Values” is one of those vacuous, undefined terms that can be filled with subjective bias and then be made to stand as a definitional truth. For example, “terrorism,” which specifically refers to a government’s use of coercion, violence and fear to intimidate people into obedience, is now an epithet that can be hurled at anyone who uses violence to defy Israeli or American authority. There is no coercive element to such an act, but that no longer matters, any rational analysis of “terrorism” is virtually unthinkable.
McAuliffe may not like the Trump administration, but to say it has no morals or values is inane. Trump does have morals and values, just not the same ones. One doesn’t have to like Trump or agree with him to see that McAuliffe is denying him the essential humanity that he lavishes on the much less deserving Hillary Clinton.
How does McAuliffe think Clinton and the Democratic Party have any claim to morality and “values” when they are responsible for the devastation of Libya and the murder of its leader. Why isn’t McAuliffe troubled that Clinton sold herself to Goldman Sachs banksters while she was a senator? Is being a war criminal and a bankster prostitute the sign of high moral standing? Clearly not, which is why generic terms like “values,” are only ever asserted, never explained, and why they are such good weapons for propagandists.
Liberal poster boy
McAuliffe may be embarrassingly predictable when he runs down Trump and flails at Russia, but on domestic policy he is on solid ground. He has bona fide liberal credentials, and these will be essential selling points if the Clintoncrats hope to crush the democratic wing of the party.
In the interview, McAuliffe boasted that he vetoed legislation against abortion, homosexuals, transsexuals, the environment and voting rights. He proudly told of his reforms to the juvenile detention system, which cut the number of inmates by half and ended maximum security sentences for 14 year-olds. He also made points by noting that he stared down the gun lobby and in the home state of the National Rifle Association no less.
McAuliffe achieved all this and more despite having to work with a Republican-led state legislature. He attributed this success to common values—there’s that word again—which also allowed him to pass legislation to improve jobs, education, transportation and health care. Given that the Republican Party is largely in thrall to god, guns, and greed, McAuliffe’s boasting of “common values” is perhaps not the wisest thing to do.
The Clintoncrats will need to play up McAuliffe’s liberal credentials for all their worth because as is stands the progressive Berniecrats show every sign of capturing the anti-Trump vote. As Salon reported in late May, Berniecrats won districts in state elections in New York and New Hampshire that had voted strongly for Trump in the last election: Christine Pellegrino on Long Island, and Edie DesMarais in Wolfeboro, respectively. Meanwhile, in Montana’s congressional race, Berniecrat Rob Quist openly called for a revolution against the Democratic establishment. He lost, but he forced the Republicans to spend millions of dollars for what should have been an easy victory.
Much of the Berniecrats’ overall success can be attributed to their rational understanding of the last election: not a vote for Trump over Clinton but a vote for populism over the political establishment. As Salon reporter Conor Lynch wrote:
No matter how unpopular Trump gets… Democrats would be foolish to think they can revert to business as usual and still lead a successful resistance. If there is anything more anathema to the American electorate than the boorish president, it is the corrupt and arrogant Washington establishment.
This penetrating analysis is, of course, lost on the Clintoncrats, who are planning to refight their last failure by continuing to treat voters as mindless inputs in some abstract numbers game. For the 2018 mid-term elections they intend to use Hillary Clinton’s 2016 results as a starting point in hopes of mimicking the 2010 mid-terms, when the Republicans surged to majority status.
As Politico reported on May 22, 2017, the Clintoncrats’ chief strategist is none other than Rahm Emanuel—dual Israeli/U.S. citizen, Mossad agent, and former White House Chief of Staff. This epitome of the corrupt and arrogant Washington establishment is in regular contact with the Clintoncrat hierarchy and holds frequent strategy sessions with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. If the electorate sees through the propaganda, the Clintoncrats will be in trouble in 2020, when McAuliffe will be the new face of the party.
Technically, McAuliffe has not formally committed. In the Politico interview he denied any interest in the presidency and fell back on his duty to serve the people of Virginia. This declaration of political modesty, though, was entirely predictable and can be discounted. First, it would be unseemly for McAuliffe to appear to be ambitious so early. Second, a declaration would draw unwanted media attention to his business dealings. Third, the decision might already have been made in secret.
It might be significant or it might just be coincidence, but from June 1-4, a little more than a week before the Politico interview, McAuliffe was invited to attend his first Bilderberg meeting, which happened to take place in Virginia. Bilderbergers are a group of the world’s most powerful plutocrats and power brokers who hold annual meetings behind closed doors. What they discuss is not reported, but they are thought to be the real power behind world governments. McAuliffe’s invitation could signal that his appointment as Clinton’s successor has received official establishment sanction. We might infer this because in 1991, Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, attended his first Bilderberg meeting; the next year he went on to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency.
Charlottesville in perspective
McAuliffe’s contradictory behaviour during the Charlottesville riot makes sense only if it is understood as serving the Clintoncrats’ political motives. There was no political advantage to preventing a racial confrontation that would help the Democratic establishment, demonize the president and stigmatize one of his significant electoral constituencies. As Emanuel infamously told the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 19, 2008, soon after Barack Obama’s election:
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
Emanuel was referring to the Lehman Brothers banking scandal, but his quote has taken on a life of its own. For example, it was cited by Hillary Clinton on March 6, 2009, in a speech to the European Parliament. McAuliffe never used the quote but he followed its spirit.
The Clintoncrats will need many episodes like Charlottesville if they hope to stampede Democratic voters into propping up the crumbling establishment.
A different version of this essay appears in Charlottesville: A Political Theatre in Three Acts…, edited by Dr. James Fetzer available from Moon Rock Books
Saudi Arabia alleges citizen kidnapped in Lebanon
MEMO | November 11, 2017
Saudi Arabia said on Friday a Saudi citizen had been kidnapped in Lebanon, a country with which it is in a diplomatic crisis.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have advised their citizens against travelling to Lebanon and urged those already there to leave, as tensions rise in what is seen as a new front line in the regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Top Lebanese government officials have said they believe Saudi Arabia is holding Saad al-Hariri who resigned as Lebanese prime minister from there last weekend. Riyadh says Hariri is a free man and he decided to resign because Iran-allied Hezbollah was calling the shots in his government.
The Saudi embassy in Beirut announced the kidnap of one of its citizens, but gave no details of the person’s identity of the circumstances of the abduction.
“The embassy is in contact with the highest ranking Lebanese security authorities about securing the unconditional release of a kidnapped Saudi citizen as soon as possible,” it said in a statement quoted by the Saudi state news agency SPA.
Lebanese Interior Minister Nohad Machnouk said on the Lebanese state news agency the safety of Saudi residents and visitors was a priority for the Lebanese authorities.
He added that “security services are on high alert to prevent any attempt of exploiting the current political situation from anyone and for whatever reason.”
“Tampering with the security and stability of Lebanon is a red line.”
Propaganda for Regime Change in Syria
By Susan Dirgham | Dissident Voice | November 10, 2017
The book Dear World: A Syrian Girl’s Story of War and Plea for Peace was published in October 2017. It is purportedly written by a Syrian girl, Bana Alabed, with the help of her mother and an editor. The book is being prominently promoted in the US and UK and is anticipated to be a big seller this coming Holiday Season.
Background
Bana Alabed is an 8-year-old Syrian girl who rose to fame in 2016 when a Twitter account was set up in her name and she started tweeting in fluent English from east Aleppo as it was under bombardment by Syrian and Russian forces trying to dislodge insurgents.
The first tweet in Bana’s name appeared on 24 September 2016. It simply read, ‘I need peace’. The Twitter account soon had tens of thousands of followers, among them J. K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter. It was later observed in a video that 7-year-old Bana knew very little English and was being prompted or told what to say.
Bana and Anne Frank?
The book begins with a quote from The Diary of Anne Frank, thus inferring that there are parallels between Bana and the famous Dutch Jewish girl who was forced to hide from the Nazis in the Second World War. If Bana is meant to represent Anne, then presumably the Syrian and Russian governments are meant to represent the Nazis. This is misleading. Several brave Dutch people hid the young Anne and her family from the Nazis. In Syria, Islamist militants, such as those in east Aleppo have targeted Syrians simply because they belonged to minorities. Australian anthropologist Dr. Fiona Hill described how her adoptive Syrian brother, a Sunni, risked his life to rescue three Alawi families from the Free Syrian Army and ‘inevitable summary murder’ at their hands.
Bana and Malala?
Dear World is published by Simon & Schuster, part of the CBS media empire. It was edited or perhaps ghost written by senior editor Christine Pride who sees Bana Alabed “as a heroine reminiscent of Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai”. This is misleading to the point of being bizarre. Before a Taliban gunman shot her, Malala wrote a blog detailing life under Taliban rule. Bana may be a brave and good child, but Dear World does not take a stand against extremist forces. On the contrary, Bana’s father was active with the extremist insurgents.
Jabhat al-Nusra, a group linked to both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, was the strongest of the militia groups in east Aleppo at the time Bana was sending her tweets. Former Australian soldier Mathew Stewart’s story points to these links. Soon after the start of the war in Afghanistan, Stewart joined the Taliban, and then in 2015 he worked ‘as a trainer with Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s proxy militia in Syria’.
Those who tweet and write in Bana Alabed’s name seem unconcerned about the enforcement of harsh punishments by Jabhat al-Nusra, such as the execution of women. Nor are they concerned about the group’s violence or terror tactics, which are detailed on the Australian National Security webpage.
Ironically, although peace is a word used liberally in Dear World, one tweet since deleted from Bana’s Twitter account read,
Dear world, it’s better to start 3rd world war instead of letting Russia & Assad commit #HolocaustAleppo
The book portrays the young narrator and her mother as courageous and compassionate. According to this narrative the only militants in east Aleppo were the FSA and they were good guys fighting against the evil Syrian government forces. This is public relations propaganda, very far from the reality which American journalists James Foley and Stephen Sotloff documented before being assassinated.
A Western, not Syrian Readership
Dear World is not directed at readers in Syria who are aware of the war’s complex nature and “rebel” reality. Most Syrians grieve the loss of loved ones in the war, want women to maintain freedoms and minorities to be able to worship without fear. Most Syrians do not want their country to be partitioned and made a haven for extremists. The book is written for a western audience, conditioned by the simplistic mainstream media narrative of ‘heroic revolutionaries’ fighting the ‘dictator Assad’.
In January 2017, Bana implored Donald Trump to stop the bombs in Syria and ‘save the children’. But in April 2017, Bana expressed support for Donald Trump’s airstrikes on a Syrian airfield after it was claimed the ‘regime’ had dropped a bomb containing sarin. There were no calls for a thorough impartial investigation, just a call to bomb. Four children were killed in the U.S. airstrikes. It seems clear there is political manipulation guiding the social media messages of a photogenic sweet girl.
Jesus, King, Ghandi … and the FSA?
Dear World champions Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr, and Gandhi, while extolling fighters in the ‘Free Syrian Army’. To the extent that it exists at all, the FSA is made up of armed groups that fly the ‘opposition flag’ rather than al-Qaeda or ISIS ones. This allows them to receive weapons and supplies from western governments even as they defect and turn over these weapons to Syria’s version of Al Queda, Jabhat al Nusra.
James Foley, the American journalist beheaded by ISIS, interviewed an FSA commander in east Aleppo who ‘promised Aleppo would burn.’ In this commander’s opinion, ‘the people of Aleppo were only concerned about their barbecues’ and deserved punishment for not supporting the armed ‘revolution’.
Dear World distorts the truth, abusing the trust of its readers. The book is a weapon in the covert and overt efforts of Syria’s enemies to effect ‘regime change’ by any means. Despite the narrator’s plea for peace, the book’s depiction of the ‘regime’ as the personification of evil could lead a generation of young readers in the West to uncritically support war against Syria and its people for years to come.
As a beautifully packaged children’s book that includes the endorsement of the author of Harry Potter, Dear World could conceivably encourage some impressionable readers to take up arms against a government. Some young readers may believe Syria is an uncivilized wasteland and a battlefield that even they could potentially enter one day, flying a flag, trying to be a hero, killing locals who don’t support the ‘revolution’. For an attractive looking children’s book, Dear World is a potentially dangerous package.
British PR Firm Created “Bana”: the Brand
Could there be any significance in the fact that the PR firm, The Blair Partnership, which handles J. K. Rowling’s publicity also handles Bana’s? The Blair Partnership has transformed ‘Bana’ from a little girl into a brand that represents opposition to the Syrian government and, in effect, support for British foreign policy.
Lies and Omissions in War
Though J .K. Rowling endorses Dear World, it can be assumed that Peter Ford, the former UK ambassador to Syria would not. According to him the British Foreign Office has lied about the war and “it was not the case” that the opposition was dominated “by so-called moderates”.
Apart from mentioning the kidnapping of two of Bana’s uncles, the book hardly refers to the well-documented violence of the Islamist factions operating in east Aleppo at the time Bana was supposedly there. Nor is there mention in Dear World of the civilians killed in west Aleppo when insurgents fired rockets into residential areas or detonated car bombs. In October 2016, the mother of 20-year-old Mireille Hindoyan recounted how a ‘rebel’ missile had killed Mireille and her 12-year-old brother. They had been standing in the street waiting for their mother to finish her shopping. Mireille’s body was dismembered. An online search indicates that the BBC, ABC and the American PBS did not present this story. They surely would have if this had happened in a western country: it was an act of terror, the victims were young and innocent, and Mireille was a local swimming star. Like most of the mainstream western media, those behind the Bana phenomenon seem to have no regard for the victims of ‘rebels’.
Likewise, the beheading of a young boy in July 2016 by an Islamist group in east Aleppo that received funding from the United States is not referred to in Dear World.
Investigating Claims
Dear World presents a long list of claims against the ‘regime’. They include the bombing of schools and hospitals, the random shooting of civilians from a helicopter, and the dropping of cluster bombs, phosphorous, and chlorine on people in east Aleppo.
However, these claims almost invariably originated from media outlets and ‘activists’ linked to the ‘rebels’. The unverified claims have been promoted by western media and some prominent Non-Governmental Organizations while refutations have been ignored. Detailed examinations in case after case have shown the accusations to be exaggerated if not false. It seems this book is actually written by an adult with a political motive.
Bana and Turkish President Erdogan
In December 2016, the extremists controlling east Aleppo were finally forced out of the city. Most surviving civilians rushed into the government controlled west Aleppo and described their “liberation” from the terrorists who had dominated east Aleppo since 2012. In an agreement with the Syrian government, remaining extremists and their families were taken from Aleppo to Idlib province while some others, including Bana and her family, went to Turkey.
Even US Vice President Biden admitted that Turkey supported violent extremists including Al Qaeda (al-Nusra) in Syria. Turkey’s pivotal role and complicity in the violence was confirmed in a video produced by American Lebanese journalist Serena Shim, who died for her work.
Thus it is ironic and a measure of the distortions that Bana told President Erdogan at a meeting in the presidential palace, “Thank you for supporting the children of Aleppo and helping us to get out from war. I love you.”
This is not to suggest that Bana Alabed does not deserve our sympathy. She does, especially since it appears that nefarious forces, which stretch from Syria to Turkey to Britain, are exploiting her. With consummate cynicism, they are using her cute face and demeanor to promote a vicious invasion and war.
Bana Alabed’s Dear World is a book that tugs on the heartstrings as it misleads readers. It is actually propaganda for “regime change” in a small sweet package.
Susan Dirgham is an English as a Second Language Teacher. Beginning in September 2003, she taught at the British Council in Damascus for two years and has subsequently visited Syria several times. With a team that includes Syrian women on humanitarian visas in Australia, she edits the magazine ‘Beloved Syria – Considering Syrian Perspectives’. She can be reached at Susan.dirgham51@gmail.com. Read other articles by Susan.
Putin says claims of Russian intervention in US presidential election mere ‘fantasies’

Press TV – November 11, 2017
Russian President Vladimir Putin has once again strongly rejected claims that Moscow interfered in the 2016 US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, saying these allegations are mere “fantasies.”
The Russian leader made the remarks at a news briefing on the sidelines of the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in the Vietnamese city of Da Nang on Saturday, less than a year after US intelligence agencies made the allegations against the Kremlin, which has since vehemently denied the charges.
“Everything about the so-called Russian dossier in the US is a manifestation of continuing domestic political struggle,” Putin told reporters at the Asia-Pacific summit in the Southeast Asian country, adding that he was well “aware” of the increasing probe regarding contacts between Trump’s team members and Russians, including a woman who has claimed to be Putin’s niece.
“Regarding some sort of connections of my relatives with members of the administration or some officials, I only found out about that yesterday from (spokesman Dmitry) Peskov,” the Russian president further said, asserting that he does not know anything about it. “I think these are some sort of fantasies,” Putin added.
Back in January, American intelligence agencies claimed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to try to help Trump, the current president of the United States, defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. They alleged at the time that Moscow’s interference included a campaign of hacking and releasing embarrassing emails, and disseminating propaganda via social media to discredit Clinton’s campaign.
Special counsel Robert Mueller, appointed by the US Justice Department, is tasked with investigating Russia’s alleged meddling in the election.
Trump, for his part, has long denied any collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives during last year’s White House race, which led to his rival Hillary Clinton’s loss.
On Saturday, after briefly meeting with Putin at the summit, Trump said that the Russian leader felt insulted by persisting allegations of Moscow’s meddling in the US vote.
“You can only ask so many times… he (Putin) said he absolutely did not meddle in our election,” the US president said, adding that Putin was “very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.”
As he was heading to the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, Trump also told reporters that President Putin had personally told him that “he didn’t meddle.”
“He said he didn’t meddle. I asked him again,” Trump said.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the Russian president vowed that Moscow would adopt “reciprocal” measures in response to US steps against RT America, which he called an “attack on freedom of speech.”
His comments came a day after the US Department of Justice ordered that by Monday, the company that provides all services for RT America in the US has to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), adding that in case of any disobedience, the news channel’s head may be held in police custody and its accounts could be frozen.
The so-called US legislation was passed in 1938 to counter Nazi propaganda on the American soil. More than 400 entities, but no media outlet, are currently registered under the act.
“I want to draw your attention to the fact that there wasn’t and could not be any confirmation of our media’s meddling in the [US] election campaign,” Putin said, adding that the latest probe in US Congress showed that the Russian ads amounted merely to “some tenths or hundredths of a percent” in comparison to those carried by the US media in the course of the 2016 election.
The annual APEC summit is one of the largest gatherings on the annual diplomatic calendar, bringing together scores of world leaders and more than 2,000 CEOs. APEC represents 21 Pacific Rim economies, the equivalent of 60 percent of global GDP and covering nearly three billion people, and has pushed for freer trade since its inception in 1989.
Back to the future… NATO self-fulfilling war plans for Russia
By Finian Cunningham | RT | November 10, 2017
Defense ministers of the US-led NATO alliance this week endorsed proposals to set up two new military commands – and it is clear Russia is the target of what are, in effect, war plans.
The setting up of an Atlantic command and a logistical hub in Europe to facilitate the transfer of troops and weapons was openly discussed by NATO officials as being aimed at Russia during their two-day summit in Brussels this week.
The two new commands being proposed are the first expansion of NATO’s command structure since the end of the Cold War more than 25 years ago. It’s a retrograde move that is not only an unnecessary, dangerous provocation to Russia, risking self-fulfilling war threats. Moreover, NATO’s renewed organizational cranking is openly calling for the integration of European societies and economies into its madcap military escalation.
European citizens, whether they like it or not, are effectively being dragooned into a state of war, with attendant social burdens to pay for that state of war, let alone being made to live with the risk of ultimate catastrophe, from all-out hostilities erupting.
Alexander Grushko, Russia’s official on NATO matters, said: “It is evident now that, by making such decisions, NATO members are apparently inspired by Cold War-era strategies.” He added: “It is evident that the task of confrontation with Russia lies at the core of those efforts.”
Grushko also put the new NATO organizational expansion in the context of an ongoing aggressive buildup over several years carried out by the US-led military alliance along Russia’s borders.
In typical fashion, however, Western news media readily turned reality on its head by echoing NATO officials in their justification for the planned military expansion as being (allegedly) necessitated by “Russian aggression.”
Reuters called the new command posts a “deterrent factor against Russia.” While US government-run Radio Free Europe said, the expansion was “to counter the growing threat from Russia.”
Western media gave NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg free rein to accuse Russia of “attacking” Ukraine, “annexing” Crimea, and recently holding threatening war maneuvers on “NATO’s eastern flank.” The latter was a reference to the Zapad military defense exercises carried out by Russia every four years – held on its own territory or that of an ally. Idiotic “NATO’s eastern flank” made apparently intelligible by Western media.
As befitting a propaganda service, rather than news services, the Western media uniformly omit any mention of how NATO states were instrumental in staging a coup d’état in Ukraine in February 2014, overthrowing an elected government back then with neo-Nazis who had designs on viciously suppressing ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
RFE reported: “Russia occupied and seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and backs separatists whose war against Kiev’s forces has killed more than 10,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April of that year.”
Note how Russia and separatists are subtly blamed for killing 10,000 people.
RFE added: “A series of potentially dangerous close encounters between Russian and NATO warplanes and navy ships in recent months has added to the tension, with the alliance accusing Moscow of aggressive maneuvers in the air and at sea.
Well, perhaps “close encounters” would not happen if the NATO alliance could refrain from its escalation of warplanes and navy patrols in the Baltic and Black Seas.
Stoltenberg “explained” the purpose of NATO’s two new command structures. “It is about how to move [American] forces across the Atlantic and how to move forces across Europe,” he said.
He added: “We have been very focused on out-of-area expeditionary military operations, now we have to… increase the focus on collective defense in Europe, and that’s the reason why we are adapting the command structure.”
You have to admire the former Norwegian prime minister’s verbal skills for euphemism. By “out-of-area expeditionary military operations,” he was referring to US-led NATO wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, among other overseas operations, which have resulted in the destruction of nation-states, over a million civilian deaths, the spread of terrorism and the chaos of mass human displacement and refugees.
Now by “increasing focus on the defense of Europe,” the 29-member NATO club – officially charged with maintaining security – will be further ratcheting up tensions with Russia to the point where an outbreak of war is a grave risk.
Earlier, Stoltenberg claimed that the world was more dangerous than ever since the end of the Cold War. Provocatively, and recklessly, he cited “Russian aggression” alongside North Korea’s nuclear program and international terrorism as the three reasons for his morbid outlook.
“We have proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in North Korea, we have terrorists, instability, and we have a more assertive Russia. It is a more dangerous world,” said Stoltenberg in an interview with Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which, of course, did not challenge any of his assertions.
Perhaps if US President Donald Trump were to hold a full summit with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, the de facto leader of NATO might get Russia’s perspective and assurance that it has no such malicious plans for “invading Europe.”
But such is the relentless Russophobia and media hysteria over “Russian aggression” that Trump and Putin – the leaders of the two most powerful nuclear states – are confined to only having a glancing conversation on the sidelines of international summits, such as the APEC conference in Vietnam this week.
Last month, German publication Der Spiegel reported on a secret NATO document which showed the alliance “is preparing for a possible war with Russia.” Such is the irremediable propaganda spouted by NATO officials and regurgitated by Western media that these war plans are becoming self-fulfilling.
What is even more sinister is that NATO is militarizing the entire European society and civilian infrastructure to accommodate its ludicrous war mania. At the summit this week in Brussels, NATO officials said European governments and the private sector must coordinate policies, infrastructure, and laws to be able to facilitate the new transmission belt of military operations from the Atlantic to Russia’s borders.
Jens Stoltenberg said “any new command must ensure that legislation easing the transportation of troops and equipment across various national borders is fully implemented.”
He added: “And we need to improve infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, railways, runways, and ports. So NATO is now updating the military requirements for civilian infrastructure.”
So, let’s get this straight: in an era of economic austerity when the European public is being clobbered with cutbacks and hardships, the NATO military machine wants governments to orient society and infrastructure to serve its war objectives against Russia.
The irrational, insatiable NATO wants to turn Europe into an entire garrison for war with Russia – a war which the majority of European citizens do not want or believe is in any way based on credible reasons.
NATO is not just going back to the future by revamping old Cold War strategies and Russophobia. It is destroying the future for European democratic and social development. Even more dastardly, it could obliterate the future by driving recklessly toward a wholly unnecessary war with Russia.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
Why Saudi Purge Signals War Footing
By Finian CUNNINGHAM | Strategic Culture Foundation | 10.11.2017
Mass arrests of senior royals, amid fear of assassinations, indicate that what is going on in Saudi Arabia is a far-reaching purge. The facade of a “corruption probe” – promoted in part by Western news media and US President Donald Trump – is a barely credible cover.
The cover is not just for a ruthless power grab within the desert kingdom by Saudi rulers, but a realignment that also puts the entire Middle East region on notice for more conflict and possibly even an all-out war with Iran. A war that the Israeli state and the Trump administration are enthusiastically egging on.
This move towards war with Iran could explain why the Saudi royals made a landmark trip to Moscow last month. Was it an attempt to buy off Russia with oil and weapons deals in order to free the Saudi hand with regard to Iran?
In typical fragmented fashion, Western media have tended to report the mass arrest last weekend of royal princes, ministers and business leaders, carried out under the orders of King Salman and his heir Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as a crackdown on corruption and business sleaze.
Omitted in media coverage is the significant wider context of the Saudi rulers moving at the same time to exert political control over regional politicians, as well as making sensational claims that Iran and Lebanon have “declared war” on Saudi Arabia by allegedly supporting a missile strike from Yemen.
The apparent forced resignation of Lebanese premier Saad Hariri last weekend after having been summoned to Saudi capital Riyadh provided convenient substance to Saudi claims that Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah were destabilizing Lebanon and indeed plotting to assassinate Hariri.
However, Hariri was just one of several regional political figures whom the Saudis were reportedly putting pressure on. Reports emerged that the ex-Yemeni president Mansour Hadi has been held under house arrest in his exile home in Riyadh. There were reports too of Syrian opposition figures being detained in Riyadh. And the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was ordered to the Saudi capital. This suggests the Saudis are orchestrating a regional chorus line.
Furthermore, there were credible Israeli media reports that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv is coordinating with Saudi Arabia to support the latter’s accusations against Iran and Hezbollah of committing acts of war from Yemen by supplying missiles to the Houthi rebels.
Washington has also weighed in to support the Saudi claims that Iran is arming the Houthis in violation of a UN Security Council resolution. Referring to the missile strike on Riyadh international airport last Sunday President Trump said that “Iran took a shot at Saudi Arabia”. Then the US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley later in the week called for sanctions against Tehran, citing Saudi “evidence”. Iran has dismissed the claims as baseless, pointing to the Saudi air, sea and land blockade on Yemen as preventing any such weapons supply.
The power behind the Saudi throne, Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), the 32-year-old son of aging King Salman (82), has emerged as an ambitious autocrat who also harbors an intense hostility towards Iran. In several media interviews, the Crown Prince has disclosed an obsession with crushing Iran. This goes way beyond the usual sectarian Wahhabi antipathy of Saudi leaders towards Shia Iran.
Crown Prince MbS is playing a smart game to a degree. He has made a big media play on “reforming” Saudi Arabia from its fundamentalist social conservatism to become a seemingly more cosmopolitan society. The Crown Prince has pushed reforms giving Saudi women the right to drive cars, travel without male guardians, and enter sports stadiums. Hardly radical advances in gender equality. Nevertheless, MbS has ably projected himself with Western media assistance as something of a progressive reformer.
Those changes are but the veneer for ruthless ambitions and a hyper power-grab within the despotic House of Saud. The supposed “corruption probe” is another layer of varnish to conceal much more sinister developments.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper this week waxed lyrical over the mass round-up of senior Saudi royals and ministers describing it as a “revolution” carried out by the would-be reformer Crown Prince, placing the development in the context of minor liberalization of women’s rights.
Meanwhile, the New York Times offered an apologia for the “Saudi Corruption Crackdown” by saying: “Graft is so pervasive that any measures short of revolutionary change may appear to be selective prosecution.”
Such reporting serves as a distraction from the real power play at work and the grave regional implications.
For a start, the number of detained princes, as well as current and former government ministers, are in the dozens. The profiles of those arrested suggest a pattern that has more to do with eliminating potential rivals than with alleged corruption.
Potentially most sinister is that on the day of the mass arrests, a contender for inheriting the Saudi throne was killed in a helicopter crash. Prince Mansour bin Muqrin (42) was among eight officials who died when their chopper went down in southern Asir Province near the border with Yemen. Saudi media have not given any details about the cause of the crash. One might have expected the Saudis to lay the blame on Houthi rebels and, by extension, Iran. But no. The House of Saud and its media outlets have said little about the death of this senior royal. Significantly, too, the Houthi rebels and their media have said little about the incident. If there was a chance of the rebels being involved, one might expect them to prompt a propaganda coup claiming a spectacular blow against the Saudis whom they have been fighting a war against since March 2015.
The chopper victim Prince Mansour was the son of 72-year-old Prince Muqrin, who is one of the last surviving sons of the Saudi kingdom’s founder Ibn Saud. (He is a half-brother to the sitting King Salman.)
Prince Muqrin was also former head of Saudi state intelligence (2005-2012) before he was made Crown Prince in January 2015 upon the death of his brother, the late King Abdullah. In the arcane world of Saudi power inheritance, the throne has always passed between Ibn Saud’s sons, or from brother to brother. When Abdullah died in January 2015, the next in line was their brother Salman (the present king). After Salman, according to traditional succession rules, the next heir to the throne should have been Muqrin, who indeed was made Crown Prince in January 2015. However, three months later, King Salman demoted Muqrin as heir apparent. He was sidelined to make way for the emergence of Mohammed bin Salman, the son of the king, as Crown Prince. That marked an unprecedented rupture in Saudi royal tradition, and no doubt has left a seething resentment among the clans comprising the House of Saud.
Prince Muqrin and his lineage of six sons therefore can be seen as a dangerous rival to the ambitions of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. As his own father King Salman’s health declines, the next-in-line appears to be clearing the royal court of potential competition for the throne.
It is not yet known what actually happened to the helicopter ferrying Prince Mansour last weekend. But it seems more than a coincidence that the crash occurred on the same day as the arrest and round-up of several other senior royals. Two of those arrested were Prince Mataib bin Abdullah and Prince Turki bin Abdullah. They are the sons of the late King Abdullah, and like Prince Mansour, they are cousins of Crown Prince MbS, and therefore could potentially mount a challenge to his succession to the throne.
The arrests also targeted the heads of national security, the National Guard and Navy, as well as Western-connected Saudi media magnates Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and Waleed Al-Ibrahim, who are major shareholders in 20th Century Fox, News Corporation, Apple, Twitter, and TV satellite companies. Those arrests suggest that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is trying to close down any backlash from within the Saudi security establishment, as well as shut off potentially negative media coverage.
Donald Trump immediately hailed the events in Saudi Arabia as a welcome clean-up against corruption. He said people had been “milking the country for years”.
There is little doubt that Saudi elites are generally up to their eyes in graft. The House of Saud and the country’s fabulously wealth oil industry are a byword for endemic corruption, bribery and racketeering. (Recall the British Al-Yamamah $60 billion arms and bribery scandal during the 1980s under the Thatcher government for example.)
So, for Trump and sections of the Western media to indulge the notion of a reforming Crown Prince overhauling endemic national sleaze is impossibly naive.
It also completely misses the point of how the Saudi rulers are gearing up for a regional war with Iran and via Lebanon by consolidating all power behind Crown Prince MbS and his anti-Iran obsession.
Trump and his business mogul son-in-law Jared Kushner have from an early stage gravitated to Crown Prince MbS for massive US arms sales and Saudi investment in the American economy. Only days before the Saudi purge, Kushner was on a low-key visit to Riyadh to meet with Saudi rulers. Trump also appealed last week to the Saudis to choose US stock markets for the much-anticipated share sell-off for Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, which is expected to fetch $2 trillion.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the architect behind the Saudi slaughter in Yemen, is positioning himself with total power in order to pursue his obsession of confronting Iran. That’s like pushing an open door when it comes to forming an anti-Iran front with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and the Trump administration. And for Trump there is also the added incentive of lavishing Wall Street by pandering to the Saudi despots.
Missile targeting main Saudi airport was Iranian – US Air Force
RT | November 10, 2017
The ballistic missile, intercepted near Saudi Arabia’s capital last Saturday, was from Iran and bore “Iranian markings,” a top US Air Force commander has said.
The commander for southwest Asia at US Air Forces Central Command, Jeffrey Harrigian, claimed on Friday that the missile, which targeted the country’s main airport near the capital last Saturday, was Iranian. The projectile, which was downed near the airport of the Saudi capital bore “Iranian markings,” according to Harrigian, who added that an investigation was underway into how it was smuggled to Yemen despite the Saudi naval and air blockade.
The missile incident proves that Iran has made it possible for ballistic missile attacks to be launched from Yemen, the official claimed. Harrigian declined to give any specifics on the exact type of missile the US believed it to be.
While both US and Saudi officials, as well as other politicians, expressed confidence that the projectile originated from Iran, no evidence supporting that claim has been presented so far.
The uncovered wreckage of the missile indicated “the role of the Iranian regime in manufacturing,” Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry said earlier this week, without providing further details.
French President Emmanuel Macron, in his turn, simply put it that the missile was “obviously” Iranian – also without giving any proof.
While the blame for the missile launch was promptly pinned on Iran, Tehran has firmly denied its involvement. The Iranian Foreign Ministry branded the allegations “destructive, irresponsible, provocative and baseless,” adding that the missile launch was an “independent” response by Yemenis to Saudi aggression.
The ministry’s statement was echoed by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who said that Riyadh itself was actually to blame, as the Yemeni fighters were only protecting their country from Saudi bombings.
“How should the Yemeni people react to the bombardment of their country? So they are not allowed to use their own weapons? You stop the bombardment first and see if the Yemenis would not do the same,” Rouhani said on Wednesday.
‘Zero evidence’ for claims Russia hacked DNC – NSA whistleblower
The CIA director Mike Pompeo has come under fire for meeting a former intelligence official, William Binney, over the alleged hacking of the Democratic party back in 2016. The US intelligence community laid the blame for the hack, on Moscow. READ MORE: https://on.rt.com/8rsl

If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .