The Israeli High Court released late on Tuesday 20 December 2016 its decision regarding the Ghaith-Sub Laban eviction, in which the Court partially accepted the family’s appeal and stopping their eviction.
The decision keeps the family’s protected tenant status for 10 more years after which the family would be evicted and the house would be handed to the Israeli settler organization that requested their eviction.
The decision however limits the right to live in the house to Mrs. Nora Ghaith and her husband Mustafa Sub Laban without their children. The Court also excluded from its decision a small storage room for the family under the house which Israeli settlers can proceed in taking over.
The decision comes one day after the hearing held in front of the Israeli High Court yesterday in which the Court heard the family’s appeal against the eviction and the settler’s claims that the family abandoned their house years ago. During the hearing, the Court proposed a compromise to both parties under which the protected tenancy status would be limited to Nora and her husband and the family would be allowed to stay in the house as long as Nora and her husband live.
The settlers rejected the Court’s suggestion and instead proposed evicting the family and moving them to the small storage under the house which is no more than 20 squared meters in size.
The Court disregarded the settlers’ suggestion and ended the hearing only to come with this unjust decision the following day.
Nora Ghaith’s family rented the house located in the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem in 1953 from the Jordanian Custodian of Public Property. She continued to live in the house after 1967 and currently lives in the house with her husband, her two sons Ahmad and Rafat, her daughter Lama as well as her daughter in law Ruba and two grandchildren Mustafa and Kenan aged 9 and 4.
Nora Ghaith-Sub Laban commented by saying that the Court simply acknowledged the settler’s claims that the house is abandoned and ruled to separate her family. As per the High Court’s decision, Nora will have to be separated from her grandchildren as well as her unmarried son and daughter.
In case the family refuses to comply with the Court’s decision, the settlers can file a new request to evict the family before the 10 years have passed.
Ahmad Sub Laban, journalist and human rights activist, further added that the Israeli High Court’s decision in fact evicts part of the family and keep another temporarily.
Israeli judiciary once again sustains the discrimination that Palestinians face, where Israeli settlers are allowed to reclaim property they allegedly owned pre 1948 whereas Palestinians are prohibited from the same.
Today we also witness how the Court ruled to separate a family by deciding who can live in the house and who cannot.
The Israeli High Court, as with all similar eviction or house demolition cases, have proved itself to be a partner to Israel’s settlement expansion policy and to settler’s ambition to take over as many houses in occupied East Jerusalem. This is simply legitimizing the Israeli occupation’s policies that violate international law and an endorsement of Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem after 1967.
I worked for Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – BOM for 2 years from 1973 to 1975. I was trained in weather observation and general meteorology. I spent 1 year observing Australia’s weather and 1 year observing the weather at Australia’s Antarctic station at Mawson.
As part of it’s Antarctic program, Australia drills ice cores at Law Dome near it’s Casey station. On our return journey in 1975 we repatriated a large number of ice cores for scientific analysis. The globe’s weather and climate records are stored in these ice cores for the past 1 million years approximately.
Australia’s Antarctic program went by the name of Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition or ANARE for short. This is now known as Australian Antarctic Division or AAD. Returned expeditions formed a club called the ANARE Club of which I have been a member since 1975. Members have many functions and reunions and they have a reunion dinner every year. At this dinner there has always been guest speakers from Australia’s Antarctic Division. These guest speakers are usually someone of the caliber of the Divisions Chief Scientist or the Operations Manager and the talks are designed to keep members updated on the Antarctic scientific program.
The annual dinner is also a place where members keep in touch with each other and network and this communication continues throughout the year via email.
The International Panel on Climate Change – IPCC
The IPCC was created by and is a joint 50/50 partnership between the World Meteorological Organisation – WMO and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). It has extremely narrow terms of reference in that it’s role is to determine that humans are causing global warming. In that regard it is only looking at human induced forcings over the past 150 years, just to make sure it reaches that result. That makes it a political body with a political agenda.
World Meteorological Organisation – WMO
The WMO has structurally changed since 1974. Today it is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. When I went through training with the BOM, the WMO had a shared global headquarters between Melbourne, New York, Moscow and London. I don’t know when this structure changed. Australia had a leading role in the WMO and was a dissemination point for weather data.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – BOM
BOM’s headquarters are in Melbourne. Australia has claim to 5.9 million square kilometres, about 42% of Antarctica. That claim is on hold while the Antarctic Treaty is in place. On the Antarctic continent Australia has 3 full time stations, Mawson, Davis and Casey, as well as a 4th, Macquarie Is., in the Southern Ocean. BOM has a full time presence on all these stations. Weather data is collected throughout the day and night at all these stations. At Mawson in 1974, we collected not only our own data but all the weather data from Davis, the Japanese station at Syowa and the Russian station at Molodezhnaya. Mawson sent all this data to the Overseas Telecommunications Commission – OTC in Sydney where it was forwarded on to BOM in Melbourne. A second Russian station, Mirny, was collected by Casey and forwarded on the BOM Melbourne via OTC.
BOM used this data, in conjunction with all the observational data obtained from all the weather stations and observational points throughout Australia, as part of Australia’s weather maps and forecasting. Additionally, Melbourne was the WMO distribution point for all weather data in our region. BOM Melbourne collected and collated all this data and forwarded it on to the WMO.
Temperature Data and IPCC’s Climate Change
In 2013 I attended an ANARE Midwinter Dinner – MWD. Australian Antarctic Division – AAD’s Acting Chief Scientist Dr Martin Riddle was our guest speaker at this function. I met with him over canapes before the dinner and spoke with him for about 20 minutes. I tried to get a sneak preview what his talk was going to be about. He said he was Australia’s lead scientist on the IPCC and, aside from giving us an update on the scientific program in the Antarctic, he was going to talk about climate and global warming. I asked him, were we not in an interglacial warm period in the 100,000 year Milankovitch Cycle and wasn’t all this current warming natural? His jaw dropped and was aghast. Our discussion ended there and he raced off not looking too happy. I couldn’t help but getting the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about the Milankovitch Cycles. It seemed like no one was supposed to know this.
It seems apparent that we all are just supposed to listen to what the IPCC are telling us and don’t ask questions. So what are the IPCC telling us?
The IPCC have produced 102 climate models to predict our future climate. The world’s meteorological organizations use weather models to forecast and predict weather and have been for many years. They have proved to be very accurate over 4 days and reasonably accurate over a week. The IPCC’s climate models are notoriously inaccurate. We’ve had these models now for some 30 years and we now have 30 years of data to compare them against. They are not even close to accurate.
Dr Roy Spencer is a meteorologist, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite. At an International Conference on Climate Change in his presentation he said referring to the IPCC models below.
Climate models are not even forecasting. Those curves on the chart are hindcasts.¹ They already knew what the answer was but still can’t get them right.
In spite of this, the IPCC seem adamant that there is nothing wrong with their models and it must be the data that is not right. Roy Spencer said: There’s no comparison. The IPCC are now hinting, maybe we shouldn’t trust the observations, let’s just trust the models.
Temperature Adjustments – Homogenization
One has to be excused for being skeptical here but it does look prima facie like the IPCC has asked their 50% partner, the WMO, to give them some temperature data that more closely matches their models. At least 3 of the WMO’s senior partners, BOM – Australia, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – NOAA – America and Met Office – UK are adjusting their temperature data to something that has a much more closer resemblance to the IPCC’s models. There is no evidence that Hydrometeorological Centre of Russia – (Roshydromet), is involved with these adjustments.
They are taking this:
And turning it into this:
An Australian scientist, Jennifer Marohasy, has been taking a close interest in the adjustments BOM are making.² She produces weather forecasting models and has a grave concern about these adjustments. One of the data inputs to weather forecasting models in temperature. It appears that the temperature is not correct/accurate now.None of these organizations will say or explain what they are doing or are being vague when asked. Raw data is being removed from public scrutiny and no one knows if it is actually being destroyed. Officially they are providing no scientific basis for making these adjustments. The adjustments they are making are complex. The 1940/41 and 1998 El Ninos have been wiped from these records.
But they haven’t just lowered and raised the temperatures in one hit, they’ve slowly incriminated the adjustments so that it all looks natural. If they’d lowered and raised them in one hit you’d have a chart that looks like this.
At one of our recent MWD reunions I caught up with and spoke to a colleague who spent many years working at the BOM as a weather observer and forecaster both in Antarctica and Australia. This person is outside of the realm of politics and wishes to remain anonymous. The person’s last job was working on these temperature adjustments. The job of this person’s team was to adjust the temperatures upwards so has been working on adjustments from 1990 until the present.
I asked, why was BOM making these adjustments and it was explained to me this way.
When there are temperature observational points located in the CBD area of large cities where there are tall buildings, it has been well known to BOM and generally, that these temperatures would be half to one and a half degrees C cooler if the tall building and the city wasn’t there. It is a phenomenon known as “the island effect”. It is the same as when, on a cold day, the hairs on your arm stand up and that insulates a warm layer of air close to the skin. Tall buildings do the same thing. Additionally, these tall buildings are heated and air conditioned and every time people walk in and out of the building, hot or cold air blows out altering the ambient street temperatures.
But the anomaly in what this person is saying here is that this person’s team is adjusting country temperatures upwards by half to one and a half degrees C so that they match the city temperatures. That’s creating about a degree C of warming when if they had adjusted the city temperatures down half to one and a half degrees C, they’d be creating approximately a half a degree of cooling.
Jennifer Marohasy’s charts for Rutherglen in country Victoria show this quite clearly. Note these are truncated to 1910.
Conclusion
The Australian Climate Observations Reference Network–Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) Technical Advisory Forum released a report in 2015 confirming that the Surface Air Temperatures were being adjusted, confirming the process is called Homogenization, confirming that other weather monitoring institutions around the world are making these same adjustments and purporting to justify why the adjustments are being made. Observing practices change, thermometers change, stations move from one location to another and new weather stations are installed. They refused to release their complex mathematical formula used to make the adjustments. They claim that homogenisation is essential in eliminating artificial non-climate systematic errors in temperature observations. non-climate related factors include:
the replacement of thermometers;
changes in observing practices;
expansion of the network into remote locations;
changes in infrastructure surrounding a weather station;
relocation of weather stations.
The only reason on that list that really makes any sense is changes in infrastructure surrounding a weather station. You can’t calibrate a thermometer used 100 years ago with one used today. When reviewing Jennifer Marohasy’s paper on Rutherglen, just as one example, none of the above apply yet Rutherglen’s temperatures were still adjusted. In her report Jennifer wrote:
In a special advisory issued by the Bureau in September 2014, it is claimed that the adjustments – which create the artificial warming trend in the homogenised temperature minima – were necessary to make the Rutherglen series consistent with the trends measured at neighbouring weather stations. However, it is apparent that in this advisory, annual raw minima values from Rutherglen are compared with data from neighbouring sites that have already been homogenised. This approach, which may once have been considered fraudulent, is now consistent with the postmodernist epistemology that underpins homogenisation as practiced by the Bureau . . .
Jennifer has requested of BOM why Rutherglen was adjusted when none of the BOM’s homogenization criteria applied and received no response.
My observation of all of this is that these so called reasons for making these adjustments are not reasons but excuses. If any adjustments are to be made, city/urban temperatures should be adjusted down to match what the temperature would be without tall buildings. Adjusting country/regional temperatures upwards to match the city is a fabrication to suit an hypothesis or agenda and the reasons are just an excuse. If there was any real reason for an adjustment, aside from the island effect in cities, it would be for where there is a Stevenson Screen out in the middle of an asphalt car park. That temperature should be adjusted down. Yet all these adjustments are both up and down, depending on the time period, with the end result a temperature chart that resembles catastrophic warming. And that is coincidentally exactly what the IPCC are looking for.
That makes these adjustments political not scientific.
It is reasonable to make certain adjustments that are intended to improve accuracy.
Adjustments should be rare.
Adjustments should not be to suit a political purpose and there should be no mechanism that allows to even make this possible.
As a scientific practice, the reporting agencies should ALWAYS maintain and report the original raw data. It should be publicly available for download. It should be easy to find and not buried under numerous web pages making it impossible to find.
Once you start introducing reasons to make adjustments then it becomes too easy to use them as an excuse to adjust everything to suit a purpose. It becomes easy to allow for political interference. Political interference should be impossible.
Discount ISIS claiming responsibility. Germany along with America, other NATO nations and Middle East partners support the terrorist group. Why would it bite the hand feeding it? Makes no sense!
Claims of responsibility lack credibility without verifiable proof. None so far exists. What’s known about Monday’s incident suggests false flag responsibility.
They’re identifiable the way fingerprints ID people. They’re strategically timed for an intended purpose. They’re designed to capture world headlines, conceal responsibility of the perpetrator, and point fingers at a convenient patsy or patsies.
On Wednesday, reports indicated Berlin police found identity documents (apparently a passport) belonging to a Tunisian national named Anis A. in the cabin of the truck used to kill and injure dozens on Monday.
Following an earlier false flag attack, a cartoon on independent media showed an individual dressed in black, a suicide jacket strapped to his chest, his finger on the triggering mechanism, commenting “s..t, I forgot my passport” – mocking the absurdity of a criminal leaving identifying documents at the scene of the crime, making capture all the easier.
The 9/11 mother of all false flags provided a treasure trove of information, showing what happened was other than the official narrative. Most obvious was how could a handful of terrorists outwit America’s 16 intelligence agencies, including sophisticated NSA eavesdropping on anyone or anything suspicious back then?
No evidence implicated Al Qaeda. Official 9/11 claims were beginning-to-end contradictions and fake news – endless imperial wars following the elaborate hoax.
False flags are a Western tradition, notably in America. Were the Monday Berlin attack and same day assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey the latest examples?
Were CIA dirty hands involved in either or both incidents? Were they linked to Aleppo’s liberation, Russia, Iran and Turkey trilaterally cooperating on cessation of hostilities and conflict resolution in Syria excluding US involvement, along with jihadist fear-mongering to pressure Trump to keep waging imperial wars and perhaps other reasons for what happened?
When it comes to geopolitics, things are seldom as they seem. Truth is other than what’s widely reported.
The Russian ambassador was killed in Ankara on the evening of Dec. 19 . The killer, a 22-year-old Turkish graduate of the police academy who had been fired in July after being deemed untrustworthy, fired 11 bullets into the ambassador’s back as he finished addressing the attendees at the opening of the Russia Through Turkish Eyes photo exhibit.
Since the murderer was killed by a detachment of police who arrived a few minutes after the tragedy, the upcoming investigation is unlikely lead back to those who ordered this crime. Obviously this was not the work of the Turkish government – this murder was specifically intended to disrupt the process of rebuilding the dialog between Russia and Turkey spanning a wide range of issues – from resolving the situation in Syria to shipping natural gas to Europe. Many point to Daesh’s underground network in Turkey – but it should be understood that that is under the full control of the Turkish authorities and the cover operation now being conducted by the authors of this campaign of intimidation is intent on convincing the world that the Islamists are beyond anyone’s control and too reckless to be kept in check. The gunman was likely an agent from Mossad or a Western intelligence service who was passing himself off as a covert terrorist, which would be an entirely plausible story for a young man who had found himself in difficulties. The shots that rang out in an Ankara gallery of contemporary art a few minutes after a plane carrying Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu turned toward Moscow were also intended to overshadow his visit (which turned out not to have been worthwhile, based on the negotiations).
By and large this act of terrorism was a desperate, angry move by figures at the backstage in the global theater who have lost this round in Syria.
Back in October we wrote about how the events in Syria are in no way a local conflict, but rather reflect a clash between powerful forces, one demanding “freedom of capital” and the other – protecting freedom of the soul. These high stakes explain the unprecedented campaign of lies that major transnational news outlets have launched in recent weeks concerning the state of affairs in Aleppo with their baseless accusations that the Syrian army and its allies have committed war crimes. The propaganda has become so ferocious that Syrian, Russian, and alternative sources of information that report on the real situation in Syria have been accused of fabricating a “parallel universe.” It’s hard to believe, but people who are well aware that the “documented evidence” that they are presenting as “proof of the regime’s atrocities” was actually filmed say, somewhere in Egypt still have the audacity to claim that their reporting reflects “reality” and that anything inconsistent with that is something “parallel.”
The fanatical faith of the devotees of “freedom of capital” in the “sanctity” of their “civilizing” mission, which they see as the only path, can be attributed to nothing but this entirely Trotskyist psychic phenomenon (that the end justifies the means).
The result of the astonishing intellectual selectivity of these blind guides (or Intellectual Yet Idiots, as the Lebanese-American scholar Nassim Taleb has called them) was recently clearly exhibited by a US correspondent for the Norwegian mainstream newspaper Aftenposten. He was covering the press conference held by Eva Bartlett, a Canadian journalist and activist with the International Syria Solidarity Movement, in the United Nations building in New York on Dec 9. That Norwegian correspondent challenged her on one point and her reply resonated throughout social networks for the next few days.
Among other things, she declared that the volunteer group known as the White Helmets, although so renowned in the West, is entirely unknown in Aleppo (another activist with the Syria Solidarity Movement, Vanessa Beeley, recently published a detailed investigation of these terrorist accomplices). Aftenposten interweaves its usual propaganda with photos and videos from highly dubious sources supporting the insurgents and condescendingly notes, referring to UN humanitarian official Jan Egeland, that “no one in Aleppo has ever heard of the UN either.”
To Russians, who continually find themselves up against a similar lack of coherence in the way Europeans think of their country (whether in the imaginary “Russian threat” to the Baltics, “aggression in the Donbass,” or the “occupation of Crimea”), such metamorphoses are interpreted as “Russophobia.” But it seems that the problem goes much deeper.
A favorite catchphrase for most US and European politicians is “Western values.” This slogan is invariably trotted out whenever they need to force someone else to agree to some decision that is essential to the West, while anyone who opposes them is declared an enemy of these values and is subjected to ostracism, sanctions, condemnation, or even destruction. Few realize that that concept is now widely used within a context that has nothing to do with axiology (the study of values), but which is at its heart merely a political mythology. An impartial analysis of Western values, especially in comparison with those held by Russians, gives a very clear answer to the question as to why Russia, although it seems to no longer have any fundamentally new ideological project to offer the world, is emerging as the new “shining city upon a hill” for a growing number of people across the globe.
First of all, when Western ideologues attempt to define the concept of Western values, they usually cite a dozen or so stock phrases such as “democracy,” “tolerance,” “a strong civil society,” “the rule of law,” and “political pluralism,” all of which were divorced from their original meanings long ago. In fact, only provincial Europhiles and American students in liberal arts colleges believe in these mottos anymore. On the contrary, the difference between the word (“democracy”) and the deed (utterly suppressing dissent and ordering the overthrow of legitimate regimes in objectionable countries) has become one of the most important tools used by the West to promulgate its quasi-values, which are actually fronts for its true expansionist interests.
Let us turn to a comparative table of the actual value systems of the contemporary West vs. Russia:
The West
Russian (Eurasian) civilization
globalism
a multi-polar world
universality
the diversity of identities
the superiority of the Western world (Western civilization as a model)
all civilizations are equal and sovereign
limitless progress
movement forward without destroying the old
material prosperity
spiritual and social development
multiculturalism
internationalism (the brotherhood of nations)
a society that is open to migrants
(at the expense of the native-born population)
a strict migration policy
(the protection of the interests of the native-born population)
political pluralism
the spiritual communion of an entire society (“sobornost”)
a strong civil society
a society in solidarity
the bourgeoisie (the primacy of the propertied classes)
communitarism (the primacy of the majority)
agnosticism, atheism, and secularization
faith (traditional religions)
a preference for newly formed religions and sects
a preference for traditional religions and a rejection of sects
gender equality (the feminization of men and masculinization of women)
the preservation of natural gender differences and traditions
same-sex marriages and surrogate motherhood
the traditional family
sex “education” in schools
moral education in schools
support of the LGBT community at the expense of the traditional majority
the identification of non-traditional sexual orientation as an abnormality
juvenile justice that includes the legal protection of children from their parents
the exclusive right of parents to raise their children as they see fit, up to a certain age
the right to euthanasia
a ban on euthanasia and a focus on improving pain relief
the right to clone
a ban on cloning
individualism
various forms of collectiveness
freedom defined as the utmost rejection of social taboos
freedom defined as alignment with the (Divine) ideal
the law means justice
justice above the law
formal tolerance
genuine forbearance and compassion
political correctness
truth
transparency
openness (in the sense of “honesty”)
a “free” press
an accurate press
shame
conscience
a preference for private ownership
all types of ownership are equal
an open economy
a balance between openness and sovereignty
the “free market” as the primary regulator of economic relationship
the state determines the national priorities for the economy
the right to the unilateral use of force in the name of democracy
non-violence
social safety nets for those who are loyal to the system
social safety nets for all
an army of paid professionals
the universal conscription of citizens
wars are justified and essential in order to bring democracy to the “barbaric” part of the world
only defensive wars are acceptable
It is important to note that the values listed in the right-hand column of the table of values are merely ideals that are professed and are not officially approved Russian imperatives – they are understood identities that Russians have adopted (and these are being retained even amidst the atmosphere of the aggressive recoding emanating from the West, which, however, has not been very successful over the last 25 years). Since the onset of the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, the process of re-traditionalizing Russian society has greatly accelerated, and this now seems irreversible and is even having a clearly beneficial effect on the West. The hysteria unleashed by the owners of a number of international media outlets communicating only a single, primal thought – “Russia is the world’s greatest evil” – is tied to this Russian renaissance and the subsequent frustration of the hopes of Western elites to build a totalitarian super-society in the foreseeable future based on pseudo-liberal slogans. But what kind of “evil” can Western civilization speak of when it has placed its bets on Hominid immoral in its classical, Biblical delineation?
Amb. Andrey Karlov became the real victim of aggressive imposing of false values and world-views on entrapped individuals, vainly wishing to find the Truth in distorting mirrors of the lavishly financed Western propaganda machine. They never realize that consuming Daily News or Al-Jazeera, they are turning into a Mevlut Mert Altintas themselves…
The Washington Post is misleading their frozen US readers once again about the Arctic, telling them the Arctic has temperatures 50 degrees above normal and record low sea ice. They say this is not normal.
Temperatures in Greenland are incredibly cold. The reason the North Pole is not as cold as normal is because deep waves in the jet stream have brought the cold air south, and milder air north.
Arctic sea ice extent is higher than 2012 and 2013, and about the same as last year. There is no “record low sea ice” as the Washington Post fraudsters claim.
What is going on in the Arctic with meridional circulation was explained by Science News during the 1970s ice age scare. There is nothing unusual going on in the Arctic.
This is just one more fake news attempt by the Washington Post to derail President Trump’s efforts to end junk climate science. Warm air in one place normally means cold air somewhere else. This is perfectly normal weather and has nothing to do with fake news global warming.
So far, everyone who has jumped in front of the Trump Train has been crushed.
This video is in honour of all those who have suffered in East Aleppo under the Nusra Front regime funded by the NATO and Gulf states and imposed upon Syria and its people in order to bring about “regime change” and to achieve the US alliance geopolitical aims in the region and to strengthen Israel in the Middle East.
I hope it goes some way towards conveying the incredible suffering that these people endured and the joy they expressed when, at last, they were free from four years of brutal sectarianism, torture, abuse and starvation, not at the hands of the Syrian government, as described by the baying corporate media in the West, but at the hands of the terrorist and militant factions injected into East Aleppo by the very governments who were screaming “humanitarian crisis”.
Children, prematurely aged, whose childhood has been ravaged and stolen from them by our vulture regimes in the west via their proxy “child catchers” and exploiters.
They were using images of tiny Omran Daqneesh to cynically manipulate emotions in the west and to nudge public perception towards their goal of a No Fly Zone to ensure the deaths of yet more children.
Meanwhile, the children of East Aleppo continued to suffer and be traumatised as their siblings, their fathers, their mothers, their world was raped, beheaded, shot, mined, sniped, detonated, exploded in front of them.
Who will heal these children? Who will give them back their childhood, their innocence? Who will say sorry for the blood in the streets and the dust in their souls.
I am not writing this as a journalist but as a human being. To witness the level of depravity and extremism unleashed by the creatures who govern us and to see children – emaciated, angry, bruised and wounded children glaring at the world through a filter of pain, it is hard to be anything else.
For Aleppo and for Syria with all my love and my hope that one day the Syrian people will forgive all of us for what has been done to them.
The Obama administration leaves office with a sting in its tail, announcing more sanctions against Russia over Crimea and the war in the Donbass.
The additional new sanctions are minimal and largely symbolic. They affect nine regional units of the Russian gas producer Novatek, a number of subsidiaries of the Russian Agricultural Bank, Crimean Ports, Crimean Railways, the Stroiproekt Institute, which is one of the organisations involved in designing the Kerch bridge project, the Karst company, which is one of the main subcontractors for the Kerch bridge project, the Transflot shipping company, two ships belonging to the Transflot company (Marshal Zhukov and Stalingrad), and FAU Glavgosekspertiza Rossii, which is the Russian agency responsible for expert reviews of design documents and findings of engineering surveys.
In addition individual sanctions have been imposed or extended against 7 individuals.
Six of these individuals (Kirill Kovalchuk, Dmitri Lebedev, Dmitri Mansurov, Mikhail Klishin, Oleg Minaev, and Mikhail Dedov) are sanctioned because they are connected to Bank Rossiya, ABR Management, or Sobinbank.
Bank Rossiya was placed on the US Treasury’s original sanctions list in 2014. The Obama administration believes – quite groundlessly – that Vladimir Putin has a personal connection to Bank Rossiya, and has insinuated that he is in fact its owner. There is in fact no evidence that Vladimir Putin had any special connection to Bank Rossiya before US sanctions were imposed on the bank in 2014, though after the sanctions were imposed, and in response to them, Putin publicly said he would open an account with it.
The seventh individual placed on the sanctions list is a Russian businessman, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The US Treasury justifies its decision to place him on the sanctions list in this way
Prigozhin has extensive business dealings with the Russian Federation Ministry of Defence, and a company with significant ties to him holds a contract to build a military base near the Russian Federation border with Ukraine.
Prigozhin is moreover accused of
having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services in support of, senior officials of the Russian Federation.
The expression “senior officials of the Russian Federation” is widely recognised code for President Putin himself.
If there is an overarching theme to these new sanctions, it is that they either sanction individuals and companies engaged in upgrading Crimea’s infrastructure – in particular the Kerch bridge – or continue the practice of targeting individuals the Obama administration has (wrongly) convinced itself are custodians of Vladimir Putin’s mythical billions.
What does the Obama administration achieve by imposing these ineffectual sanctions a month before it leaves office?
The short answer is that the sanctions do not seem intended to target Russia so much as Donald Trump, who has made clear that he wants to improve relations with Russia. In particular they seem designed to make more difficult the Senate confirmation of Rex Tillerson (Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of State) who as CEO of Exxon has made known his opposition to the sanctions. Quite possibly demands will be made that Trump and Tillerson commit themselves to maintaining the sanctions in order to secure Tillerson’s confirmation.
If so then this shows the extent to which hostility to Russia has become for the Obama administration an obsession. It seems that even in its dying days it is doing all it can to make sure its hostility to Russia remains US policy even after it is gone, by trying to tie the hands of the next President, who is known to favour a different policy.
The Russians themselves have understood the frankly pathological quality behind this latest action, making dark predictions that it won’t be the last one before the Obama administration ends its life. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said as much shortly after the new sanctions were announced
I won’t be surprised if on January 20, the day of inauguration of the next US president, one minute before Donald Trump takes office, at 11:59, we will once again see behind some curtain, in the corner, those who continuously produce such kind of decisions once again inventing certain rescripts, decisions, pushing into an abyss relations with Russia that are already in tatters due to Washington’s irresponsible and senseless policy.
Whether that is indeed what will happen, and whether the Obama administration really can tie the hands of the next President in this way, remains to be seen. In the meantime it is a frankly sad and even disturbing way for the Obama administration to see out its life.
The New York Times has been leading the charge against “fake news.” Yet its own reporting and editorial positions are often as one-sided, distorted, or downright mendacious as the worst of the pseudo-alternative websites. The Times’ coverage of wars, especially those of strategic import for the US and/or Israel (not necessarily in that order) is a particularly fertile field of fake news flummery.
Most of America’s armed conflicts and interventions have been driven by New York Times war propaganda, and the current conflagration in Syria is no exception. An especially egregious, over-the-top example of “damn the facts, full speed ahead” warmongering, every bit as bad as the Judith Miller version of Iraqi WMD, is last Wednesday’s op-ed by the Editorial Board, “Aleppo’s Destroyers: Assad, Putin, Iran.”
The headline, like the diatribe beneath it, conceals the identities of the worst of the “destroyers” of Aleppo and Syria: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, the US and Israel. These governments have created, armed, financed, advised, and otherwise enabled the various militias, mercenaries, and terrorist groups that overran Aleppo and dismembered Syria.
Assad is the elected President of Syria, and Russia and Iran have intervened at the request of Syria’s legitimate government. Naming these three the “destroyers” of Aleppo, while ignoring the aggressors responsible for the proxy war on Syria, is practicing “fake news” at its worst.
The NY Times Editorial Board writes:
“Mr. Putin’s bloody actions — the bombing of civilian neighborhoods, the destruction of hospitals, the refusal to allow noncombatants to receive food, fuel and medical supplies — are all in violation of international law.”
International law?! What about the non-aggression principle and the doctrine of national sovereignty, the twin foundations of international law as it pertains to war and peace? Are not all nations sovereign entities whose borders are inviolable? Are not the Americans, Israelis, Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis and Turks committing aggression by attempting to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation? And is not such aggression “the supreme war crime” according to international law as enshrined in the Nuremberg precedent?
We know who is committing the supreme war crime, aggression. And we know who is fighting in defense of national sovereignty.
What about the lesser war crimes, all of which are the fruits of the supreme crime, aggression?
It is difficult to separate the facts from the propaganda regarding allegations of particular war crimes in Syria, thanks in large part to the lies of the anti-Assad propaganda industry supported by the West and its regional proxies. We do know that the worst atrocity alleged to have been committed by Assad – the August 2013 chemical weapons massacre at al-Ghouta – has been exposed as a false flag whose real authors were Saudi and Turkish intelligence agents, aided and abetted by Americans and Israelis. (Veterans Today exposed how the sarin was manufactured in Georgia at a US-run factory and smuggled through Turkey into Syria, while Seymour Hersh had to find a non-US publisher to explain how the monumental false flag fail at al-Ghouta forced Obama to abort plans for a US aerial assault on Damascus.)
Wikipedia tells us that between 281 and 1,729 people died in the al-Ghouta sarin attack. Why is the New York Times not demanding war crimes trials for the American, Turkish, and Saudi perpetrators of this monstrous massacre, which was designed to be blamed on Assad in order to trigger a US bombing campaign? Why has al-Ghouta, the worst atrocity of the war, been consigned to the memory hole?
The New York Times falsely reported that Assad bombed his own people at al-Ghouta. No more outrageous, criminal example of “fake news” could possibly be imagined — except, perhaps, for the Times coverage of 9/11 … coverage whose monumental lies, concealments and coverups have directly led to the deaths of many millions of people worldwide, including those who have perished in the “civil war” in Syria as well as the violence in the other “seven countries in five years” whose destruction was the main purpose of the 9/11 false flag operation.
The New York Times is not just a purveyor of fake news, it is a purveyor of propaganda for the supreme war crime, aggression, and several lesser crimes including genocide. If we are going to start shutting down “fake news” outlets, perhaps we should begin with the Times and the other mainstream media war criminals.
Winner of the European Short Film Award at the European Film Awards.
In August 2012, Syrian photographer Issa Touma awoke to the dawn of the rebel uprising in the city of Aleppo. He spent the next nine days holed up in his apartment, filming the emerging civil war outside.
“It’s 8:15 AM”, says Touma, recording the morning sky and fading moon through his window, on a day that signalled a turning point for life in Syria’s largest city. “Strangers take position in my street.” he says, “they look unprepared, without any kind of war experience”. Young men in t-shirts, resembling students more than fighters, drag sandbags into a blockade below Touma’s window. A rebel appeals by loudspeaker to a regime soldier, “leave your post and come to us!”. He is answered by the sound of gunfire. Touma’s raw commentary and eye for photographic detail give an unprecedented glimpse into the beginnings of a war that rages to this day. …
Paris – If the 2016 presidential campaign was a national disgrace, the reaction of the losers is an even more disgraceful spectacle. It seems that the political machine backing Hillary Clinton can’t stand losing an election.
And why is that?
Because they are determined to impose “exceptional” America’s hegemony on the entire world, using military-backed regime changes, and Donald Trump seems poised to spoil their plans. The entire Western establishment, roughly composed of neoconservative ideologues, liberal interventionists, financial powers, NATO, mainstream media and politicians in both the United States and Western Europe, committed to remaking the Middle East to suit Israel and Saudi Arabia and to shattering impertinent Russia, have been thrown into an hysterical panic at the prospect of their joint globalization project being sabotaged by in ignorant intruder.
Donald Trump’s expressed desire to improve relations with Russia throws a monkey wrench into the plans endorsed by Hillary Clinton to “make Russia pay” for its bad attitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. If he should do what he has promised, this could be a serious blow to the aggressive NATO buildup on Russia’s European borders, not to mention serious losses to the U.S. arms industry planning to sell billions of dollars worth of superfluous weapons to NATO allies on the pretext of the “Russian threat”.
The war party’s fears may be exaggerated, inasmuch as Trump’s appointments indicate that the United States’ claim to be the “exceptional”, indispensable nation will probably survive the changes in top personnel. But the emphasis may be different. And those accustomed to absolute rule cannot tolerate the challenge.
Bad Losers On theTop
Members of the U.S. Congress, the mainstream media, the CIA and even President Obama have made fools of themselves and the nation by claiming that the Clintonite cabal lost because of Vladimir Putin. Insofar as the rest of the world takes this whining seriously, it should further increase Putin’s already considerable prestige. If true, the notion that Moscovite hacking could defeat the favorite candidate of the entire U.S. power establishment can only mean that the United States’ political structure is so fragile that a few disclosed emails can cause its collapse. A government notorious for snooping into everybody’s private communication, as well as for overthrowing one government after another by less subtle means, and whose agents boasted of scaring the Russians into re-elected the abysmally unpopular Boris Yeltsin in 1996, now seems to be crying pathetically, “Mommy, Vlady is playing with my hacking toys!”
Of course, Russians would quite naturally prefer a U.S. president who openly shies away from the possibility of starting a nuclear war with Russia. That doesn’t make Russia “an enemy”, it is just a sign of good sense. Nor does it mean that Putin is so naïve as to imagine that Moscow could throw the election by a few dirty tricks. The current Russian leaders, unlike their Washington counterparts, tend to take a longer view, rather than imagining that the course of history can be changed by a banana peel.
This whole miserable spectacle is nothing but a continuation of the Russophobia exploited by Hillary Clinton to distract from her own multiple scandals. As the worst loser in American electoral history, she must blame Russia, rather than recognize that there were multiple reasons to vote against her.
The propaganda machine has found a response to unwelcome news: it must be fake. The Washington conspiracy theorists are outdoing themselves this time. The Russian geeks supposedly knew that by revealing a few Democratic National Committee internal messages, they could ensure the election of Donald Trump. What tremendous prescience!
Obama promises retaliation against Russia for treating the United States the way the United States treats, well, Honduras (and even Russia itself until blocked by Putin). Putin retorted that so far as he knew, the United States was not a banana republic, but a great power able to protect its elections. Washington is loudly denying that. The same mainstream media who brought you Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” are now bringing you this preposterous conspiracy theory with straight faces.
When intelligence agencies become aware of the activities of rival intelligence agencies, they usually keep the knowledge to themselves, as part of the mutual spook game. Going public with this wild tale shows that the whole point is to persuade the American public that Trump’s election is illegitimate, in the hope of defeating him in the electoral college or, if that fails, of crippling his presidency by labeling him a “Putin stooge”.
Bad LosersOn the Bottom
At least the bad losers on the top know what they are doing and have a purpose. The bad losers on the bottom are expressing emotions without clear objectives. It is false self-dramatization to call for “Resistance” as if the country had been invaded by extraterrestrials. The U.S. electoral system is outmoded and bizarre, but Trump played the game by the rules. He campaigned to win swing states, not a popular majority, and that’s what he got.
The problem isn’t Trump but a political system which reduces the people’s choice to two hated candidates, backed by big bucks.
Whatever they think or feel, the largely youthful anti-Trump protesters in the streets create an image of hedonistic consumer society’s spoiled brats who throw tantrums when they don’t get what they want. Of course, some are genuinely concerned about friends who are illegal immigrants and fear deportation. It is quite possible to organize in their defense. The protesters may be mostly disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters, but whether they like it or not, their protests amount to a continuation of the dominant themes in Hillary Clinton’s negative campaign. She ran on fear. In the absence of any economic program to respond to the needs of millions of voters who showed their preference for Sanders, and of those who turned to Trump simply because of his vague promise to create jobs, her campaign exaggerated the portent of Trump’s most politically incorrect statements, creating the illusion that Trump was a violent racist whose only program was to arouse hatred. Still worse, Hillary stigmatized millions of voters as “a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” These remarks were made to an LGBT rally, as part of her identity politics campaign to win over a clientele of minorities by stigmatizing the dwindling white majority. The identity politics premise is that ethnic and sexual minorities are oppressed and thus morally superior to the white majority, which is the implied oppressor. It is this tendency to sort people into morally distinct categories that divides Americans against each other, every bit as much – or more – than Trump’s hyperbole about Mexican or Islamic immigrants. It has served to convince many devotees of political correctness to regard white working class Americans in the “fly-over” regions as enemy invaders who threaten to send them all to concentration camps.
Terrified of what Trump may do, his opponents tend to ignore what the lame ducks are actually doing. The last gasp Clintonite campaign to blame Hillary’s defeat on “fake news”, supposedly inspired by The Enemy, Russia, is a facet of the growing drive to censor the Internet – previously for child pornography, or for anti-Semitism, and next on the pretext of combating “fake news”, meaning whatever goes contrary to the official line. This threat to freedom of expression is more sinister than eleven-year-old locker-room macho boasts by Trump.
There will and should be strong political opposition to whatever reactionary domestic policies are adopted by the Trump administration. But such opposition should define the issues and work for specific goals, instead of expressing a global rejection that is non-functional.
The hysterical anti-Trump reaction is unable to grasp the implications of the campaign to blame Hillary’s defeat on Putin. Do the kids in the street really want war with Russia? I doubt it. But they do not perceive that for all its glaring faults, the Trump presidency provides an opportunity to avoid war with Russia. This is a window of opportunity than will be slammed shut if the Clintonite establishment and the War Party get their way. Whether they realize it or not, the street protesters are helping that establishment delegitimatize Trump and sabotage the one positive element in his program: peace with Russia.
Adjustments in the Enemy List
By its fatally flawed choices in the Middle East and in Ukraine, the United States foreign policy establishment has driven itself into a collision course with Russia. Unable to admit that the United States backed the wrong horse in Syria, the War Party sees no choice but to demonize and “punish” Russia, with the risk of dipping into the Pentagon’s vast arsenal of argument-winning nuclear weapons. Anti-Russian propaganda has reached extremes exceeding those of the Cold War. What can put an end to this madness? What can serve to create normal attitudes and relations concerning that proud nation which aspires primarily simply to be respected and to promote old-fashioned international law based on national sovereignty? How can the United States make peace with Russia?
It is clear that in capitalist, chauvinist America there is no prospect of shifting to a peace policy by putting David Swanson in charge of U.S. foreign relations, however desirable that might be.
Realistically, the only way that capitalist America can make peace with Russia is through capitalist business. And that is what Trump proposes to do.
A bit of realism helps when dealing with reality. The choice of Exxon CEO Rex W. Tillerson as Secretary of State is the best step toward ending the current race toward war with Russia. “Make money not war” is the pragmatic American slogan for peace at this stage.
But the “resistance” to Trump is not likely to show support for this pragmatic peace policy. It is already encountering opposition in the war-loving Congress. Instead, by shouting “Trump is not my President!” the disoriented leftists are inadvertently strengthening that opposition, which is worse than Trump.
Avoiding war with Russia will not transform Washington into a haven of sweetness and light. Trump is an aggressive personality, and the opportunistic aggressive personalities of the establishment, notably his pro-Israel friends, will help him turn U.S. aggression in other directions. Trump’s attachment to Israel is nothing new, but appears to be particularly uncompromising. In that context, Trump’s extremely harsh words for Iran are ominous, and one must hope that his stated rejection of “regime change” war applies in that case as well as others. Trump’s anti-China rhetoric also sounds bad, but in the long run there is little he or the United States can do to prevent China from becoming once again the “indispensable nation” it used to be during most of its long history. Tougher trade deals will not lead to the Apocalypse.
The Failure of the Intellectual Establishment
The sad image today of Americans as bad losers, unable to face reality, must be attributed in part to the ethical failure of the so-called 1968 generation of intellectuals. In a democratic society, the first duty of men and women with the time, inclination and capacity to study reality seriously is to share their knowledge and understanding with people who lack those privileges. The generation of academics whose political consciousness was temporarily raised by the tragedy of the Vietnam war should have realized that their duty was to use their position to educate the American people, notably about the world that Washington proposed to redesign and its history. However, the new phase of hedonistic capitalism offered the greatest opportunities for intellectuals in manipulating the masses rather than educating them. The consumer society marketing even invented a new phase of identity politics, with the youth market, the gay market, and so on. In the universities, a critical mass of “progressive” academics retreated into the abstract world of post-modernism, and have ended up focusing the attention of youth on how to react to other people’s sex lives or “gender identification”. Such esoteric stuff feeds the publish or perish syndrome and prevents academics in the humanities from having to teach anything that might be deemed critical of U.S. military spending or its failing efforts to assert its eternal domination of the globalized world. The worst controversy coming out of academia concerns who should use which toilet.
If the intellectual snobs on the coasts can sneer with such self-satisfaction at the poor “deplorables” in flyover land, it is because they themselves have ignored their primary social duty of seeking truth and sharing it. Scolding people for their “wrong” attitudes while setting the social example of unrestrained personal promotion can only produce the anti-elite reaction called “populism”. Trump is the revenge of people who feel manipulated, forgotten and despised. However flawed, he is the only choice they had to express their revolt in a rotten election. The United States is deeply divided ideologically, as well as economically. The United States is threatened, not by Russia, but by its own internal divisions and the inability of Americans not only to understand the world, but even to understand each other.
Over the past week, eastern Aleppo was completely brought back under control of the Syrian government. The population began to return to its homes, many of which were abandoned when al-Qaeda-linked rebels took over in 2012. As far as I know, the western mainstream media did not have a single reporter on the ground in Aleppo, but relied on “activists” to inform us that the Syrian army was massacring the civilian population. It hardly makes sense for an army to fight and defeat armed rebels just so it can go in and murder unarmed civilians, but then again not much mainstream reporting on the tragedy in Syria has made sense.
I spoke to one western journalist last week who actually did report from Aleppo and she painted a very different picture of what was going on there. She conducted video interviews with dozens of local residents and they told of being held hostage and starved by the “rebels,” many of whom were using US-supplied weapons supposed to go to “moderates.”
We cannot be sure what exactly is happening in Aleppo, but we do know a few things about what happened in Syria over the past five years. This was no popular uprising to overthrow a dictator and bring in democracy. From the moment President Obama declared “Assad must go” and approved sending in weapons, it was obvious this was a foreign-sponsored regime change operation that used foreign fighters against Syrian government forces. If the Syrian people really opposed Assad, there is no way he could have survived five years of attack from foreigners and his own people.
Recently we heard that the CIA and Hillary Clinton believe that the Russians are behind leaked Democratic National Committee documents, and that the leaks were meant to influence the US presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor. These are the same people who for the past five years have been behind the violent overthrow of the Syrian government, which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands. Isn’t supporting violent overthrow to influence who runs a country even worse than leaking documents? Is it OK when we do it? Why? Because we are the most powerful country?
We are a country sitting on $20 trillion in debt, living far beyond our means. Power can oftentimes be an illusion, and in any case it doesn’t last forever. We can be sure that the example we set while we are the most powerful country will be followed by those who may one day take our place. The hypocrisy of our political leaders who say one thing and do another does not go unnoticed.
We should end that hypocrisy starting with Syria. That government, along with its allies, seems to be on track to take their country back from ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other terrorist groups. The only sensible Syria policy is for the US to stop trying to overthrow their government, to treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves. It is a rule that is always good to remember, but perhaps especially important to recall at this time of year.
As Official Washington’s latest “group think” solidifies into certainty – that Russia used hacked Democratic emails to help elect Donald Trump – something entirely different may be afoot: a months-long effort by elements of the U.S. intelligence community to determine who becomes the next president.
I was told by a well-placed intelligence source some months ago that senior leaders of the Obama administration’s intelligence agencies – from the CIA to the FBI – were deeply concerned about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump ascending to the presidency. And, it’s true that intelligence officials often come to see themselves as the stewards of America’s fundamental interests, sometimes needing to protect the country from dangerous passions of the public or from inept or corrupt political leaders.
It was, after all, a senior FBI official, Mark Felt, who – as “Deep Throat” – guided The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their Watergate investigation into the criminality of President Richard Nixon. And, I was told by former U.S. intelligence officers that they wanted to block President Jimmy Carter’s reelection in 1980 because they viewed him as ineffectual and thus not protecting American global interests.
It’s also true that intelligence community sources frequently plant stories in major mainstream publications that serve propaganda or political goals, including stories that can be misleading or entirely false.
What’s Going On?
So, what to make of what we have seen over the past several months when there have been a series of leaks and investigations that have damaged both Clinton and Trump — with some major disclosures coming, overtly and covertly, from the U.S. intelligence community led by CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey?
Some sources of damaging disclosures remain mysterious. Clinton’s campaign was hobbled by leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee – showing it undercutting Clinton’s chief rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders – and from her campaign chairman John Podesta – exposing the content of her speeches to Wall Street banks that she had tried to hide from the voters and revealing the Clinton Foundation’s questionable contacts with foreign governments.
Clinton – already burdened with a reputation for secrecy and dishonesty – suffered from the drip, drip, drip of releases from WikiLeaks of the DNC and Podesta emails although it remains unclear who gave the emails to WikiLeaks. Still, the combination of the two email batches added to public suspicions about Clinton and reminded people why they didn’t trust her.
But the most crippling blow to Clinton came from FBI Director Comey in the last week of the campaign when he reopened and then re-closed the investigation into whether she broke the law with her sloppy handling of classified material in her State Department emails funneled through a home server.
Following Comey’s last-minute revival of the Clinton email controversy, her poll numbers fell far enough to enable Trump to grab three normally Democratic states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – enough to give him a victory in the Electoral College.
Taking Down Trump
However, over the past few weeks, the U.S. intelligence community, led by CIA Director Brennan and seconded by FBI Director Comey, has tried to delegitimize Trump by using leaks to the mainstream U.S. news media to pin the release of the DNC and Podesta emails on Russia and claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally trying to put Trump into the White House.
This remarkable series of assessments from the CIA – now endorsed by the leadership of the FBI – comes on the eve of the Electoral College members assembling to cast their formal votes to determine who becomes the new U.S. president. Although the Electoral College process is usually simply a formality, the Russian-hacking claims made by the U.S. intelligence community have raised the possibility that enough electors might withhold their votes from Trump to deny him the presidency.
If on Monday enough Trump electors decide to cast their votes for someone else – possibly another Republican – the presidential selection could go to the House of Representatives where, conceivably, the Republican-controlled chamber could choose someone other than Trump.
In other words, there is an arguable scenario in which the U.S. intelligence community first undercut Clinton and, secondly, Trump, seeking — however unlikely — to get someone installed in the White House considered more suitable to the CIA’s and the FBI’s views of what’s good for the country.
Who Did the Leaking?
At the center of this controversy is the question of who leaked or hacked the DNC and Podesta emails. The CIA has planted the story in The Washington Post, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets that it was Russia that hacked both the DNC and Podesta emails and slipped the material to WikiLeaks with the goal of assisting the Trump campaign. The suggestion is that Trump is Putin’s “puppet,” just as Hillary Clinton alleged during the third presidential debate.
But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has publicly denied that Russia was the source of the leaks and one of his associates, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, has suggested that the DNC leak came from a “disgruntled” Democrat upset with the DNC’s sandbagging of the Sanders campaign and that the Podesta leak came from the U.S. intelligence community.
Although Assange recently has sought to muzzle Murray’s public comments – out of apparent concern for protecting the identity of sources – Murray offered possibly his most expansive account of the sourcing during a podcast interview with Scott Horton on Dec. 13.
Murray, who became a whistleblower himself when he protested Britain’s tolerance of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, explained that he consults with Assange and cooperates with WikiLeaks “without being a formal member of the structure.”
But he appears to have undertaken a mission for WikiLeaks to contact one of the sources (or a representative) during a Sept. 25 visit to Washington where he says he met with a person in a wooded area of American University. At the time, Murray was at American University participating in an awards ceremony for former CIA officer John Kiriakou who was being honored by a group of former Western intelligence officials, the Sam Adams Associates, named for the late Vietnam War-era CIA analyst and whistleblower Sam Adams.
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, a founder of the Sam Adams group, told me that Murray was “emceeing” the event but then slipped away, skipping a reception that followed the award ceremony.
Reading Between LInes
Though Murray has declined to say exactly what the meeting in the woods was about, he may have been passing along messages about ways to protect the source from possible retaliation, maybe even an extraction plan if the source was in some legal or physical danger.
Murray has disputed a report in London’s Daily Mail that he was receiving a batch of the leaked Democratic emails. “The material, I think, was already safely with WikiLeaks before I got there in September,” Murray said in the interview with Scott Horton. “I had a small role to play.”
Murray also suggested that the DNC leak and the Podesta leak came from two different sources, neither of them the Russian government.
“The Podesta emails and the DNC emails are, of course, two separate things and we shouldn’t conclude that they both have the same source,” Murray said. “In both cases we’re talking of a leak, not a hack, in that the person who was responsible for getting that information out had legal access to that information.”
Reading between the lines of the interview, one could interpret Murray’s comments as suggesting that the DNC leak came from a Democratic source and that the Podesta leak came from someone inside the U.S. intelligence community, which may have been monitoring John Podesta’s emails because the Podesta Group, which he founded with his brother Tony, served as a registered “foreign agent” for Saudi Arabia.
“John Podesta was a paid lobbyist for the Saudi government,” Murray noted. “If the American security services were not watching the communications of the Saudi government’s paid lobbyist in Washington, then the American security services would not be doing their job. … His communications are going to be of interest to a great number of other security services as well.”
Leak by Americans
Scott Horton then asked, “Is it fair to say that you’re saying that the Podesta leak came from inside the intelligence services, NSA [the electronic spying National Security Agency] or another agency?”
“I think what I said was certainly compatible with that kind of interpretation, yeah,” Murray responded. “In both cases they are leaks by Americans.”
In reference to the leak of the DNC emails, Murray noted that “Julian Assange took very close interest in the death of Seth Rich, the Democratic staff member” who had worked for the DNC on voter databases and was shot and killed on July 10 near his Washington, D.C., home.
Murray continued, “WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the capture of his killers. So, obviously there are suspicions there about what’s happening and things are somewhat murky. I’m not saying – don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that he was the source of the [DNC] leaks. What I’m saying is that it’s probably not an unfair indication to draw that WikiLeaks believes that he may have been killed by someone who thought he was the source of the leaks … whether correctly or incorrectly.”
Though acknowledging that such killings can become grist for conspiracy buffs, Murray added: “But people do die over this sort of stuff. There were billions of dollars – literally billions of dollars – behind Hillary Clinton’s election campaign and those people have lost their money.
“You have also to remember that there’s a big financial interest – particularly in the armaments industry – in a bad American relationship with Russia and the worse the relationship with Russia is the larger contracts the armaments industry can expect especially in the most high-tech high-profit side of fighter jets and missiles and that kind of thing.
“And Trump has actually already indicated he’s looking to make savings on the defense budget particularly in things like fighter [jet] projects. So, there are people standing to lose billions of dollars and anybody who thinks in that situation bad things don’t happen to people is very naïve.”
An Intelligence Coup?
There’s another possibility in play here: that the U.S. intelligence community is felling a number of birds with one stone. If indeed U.S. intelligence bigwigs deemed both Clinton and Trump unfit to serve as President – albeit for different reasons – they could have become involved in leaking at least the Podesta emails to weaken Clinton’s campaign, setting the candidate up for the more severe blow from FBI Director Comey in the last week of the campaign.
Then, by blaming the leaks on Russian President Putin, the U.S. intelligence leadership could set the stage for Trump’s defeat in the Electoral College, opening the door to the elevation of a more traditional Republican. However, even if that unlikely event – defeating Trump in the Electoral College – proves impossible, Trump would at least be weakened as he enters the White House and thus might not be able to move very aggressively toward a détente with Russia.
Further, the Russia-bashing that is all the rage in the mainstream U.S. media will surely encourage the Congress to escalate the New Cold War, regardless of Trump’s desires, and thus ensure plenty more money for both the intelligence agencies and the military contractors.
Official Washington’s “group think” holding Russia responsible for the Clinton leaks does draw some logical support from the near certainty that Russian intelligence has sought to penetrate information sources around both Clinton and Trump. But the gap between the likely Russian hacking efforts and the question of who gave the email information to WikiLeaks is where mainstream assumptions may fall down.
As ex-Ambassador Murray has said, U.S. intelligence was almost surely keeping tabs on Podesta’s communications because of his ties to Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments. So, the U.S. intelligence community represents another suspect in the case of who leaked those emails to WikiLeaks. It would be a smart play, reminiscent of the convoluted spy tales of John LeCarré, if U.S. intelligence officials sought to cover their own tracks by shifting suspicions onto the Russians.
But just the suspicion of the CIA joining the FBI and possibly other U.S. intelligence agencies to intervene in the American people’s choice of a president would cause President Harry Truman, who launched the CIA with prohibitions against it engaging in domestic activities, and Sen. Frank Church, who investigated the CIA’s abuses, to spin in their graves.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
An Open Letter to Terry Allen, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, David Corn, Chris Hayes, George Monbiot, Matthew Rothschild, and Matt Taibbi.
[1]According to several left-leaning critics of the 9/11 Truth Movement, some of its central claims, especially about the destruction of the World Trade Center, show its members to be scientifically challenged. In the opinion of some of these critics, moreover, claims made by members of this movement are sometimes unscientific in the strongest possible sense, implying an acceptance of magic and miracles. … Full article
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The Israeli High Court released late on Tuesday 20 December 2016 its decision regarding the Ghaith-Sub Laban eviction, in which the Court partially accepted the family’s appeal and stopping their eviction.
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
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