May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
Bigger doesn't imply better. Bigger often is a sign of obesity, of lost control, of overcomplexity, of cancerous
cells
US and British media are servants of security apparatus,
which in turn serves banks, oil and military industrial complex
"The truth is that the newspaper is not a place for information to be given, rather it is just hollow content,
or more than that, a provoker of content. If it prints lies about atrocities, real atrocities are the result."
Karl Kraus, 1914
WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
1984
We are the world, we are exceptional, we cannot fail. The elite will lie, and the people will pretend to believe
them. Heck about 20 percent of the American public will believe almost anything if it is wrapped with the right prejudice and
appeal to passion. Have a pleasant evening.
Journalists manipulate us in the interest of the Powerful
Do you also have the feeling, that you are often manipulated by the
media and lied to? Then you're like the majority of Germans. Previously it was considered as a "conspiracy theory". Now
it revealed by an Insider, who tells us what is really happening under the hood.
The Journalist Udo Ulfkotte ashamed today that he spent 17 years in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. ...he reveals why opinion
leaders produce tendentious reports and serve as the extended Arm of the NATO press office. ...the author also was admitted into
the networks of American elite organizations, received in return for positive coverage in the US even a certificate of honorary
citizenship.
In this book you will learn about industry lobby organisations. The author calls hundreds of names and looks behind the Scenes
of those organizations, which exert bias into media, such as: Atlantic bridge, Trilateral Commission, the German Marshall Fund,
American Council on Germany, American Academy, Aspen Institute, and the Institute for European politics. Also revealed are the
intelligence backgrounds of those lobby groups, the methods and forms of propaganda and financing used, for example, by the US
Embassy. Which funds projects for the targeted influencing of public opinion in Germany
...You realize how you are being manipulated - and you know from whom and why. At the end it becomes clear that diversity of
opinion will now only be simulated. Because our "messages" are often pure brainwashing.
...When Greenwald and his colleagues began working with Snowden, he said they realized that they’d have to act in a way that wasn’t
on par with how the mainstream media has acted up until now.
“We resolved that we were going to have to be very disruptive of the status quo — not only the surveillance and political
status quo, but also the journalistic status quo,” Greenwald said. “And I think one of the ways that you can see what
it is that we were targeting is in the behavior of the media over the past six months since these revelations have emerged almost
entirely without them and despite them.”
“[W]e knew in particular that one of our most formidable adversaries was not simply going to be the intelligence agencies
on which we were reporting and who we were trying to expose, but also their most loyal, devoted servants, which calls itself the
United States and British media.”
“It really is the case that the United States and British governments are not only willing but able to engage in any conduct
no matter how grotesque,” Greenwald said.
Nevertheless, he added, journalists tasked with reporting on those issues have all too often been compliant with the blatant lies
made by officials from those governments.
Halfway through his remarks, Greenwald recalled a recent quip he made while being interviewed by BBC about the necessity of a
functioning media in an environment where government officials can spew untruths to reporters without being questioned.
“[A]t one point I made what I thought was the very unremarkable and uncontroversial observation that the reason why we
have a free press is because national security officials routinely lie to the population in order to shield their power and get
their agenda advanced,” recalled Greenwald, who said it is both the “the goal and duty of a journalist is to be adversarial
to those people in power.”
According to Greenwald, the BBC reporter met his remark with skepticism.
“I just cannot believe that you would suggest that senior officials, generals in the US and the British government, are
actually making false claims to the public,” he remembered being told on-air.
“It really is the central view of certainly American and British media stars, that when — especially people with medals
on their chest who are called generals, but also high officials in the government — make claims that those claims are presumptively
treated as true without evidence. And that it’s almost immoral to call them into question or to question their voracity,”
he said.
“Obviously we went through the Iraq War, in which those very two same governments specifically and deliberately lied repeatedly
to the government, to their people, over the course of two years to justify an aggressive war that destroyed a country of 26 million
people. But we’ve seen it continuously over the last six months as well.”
From there, he went on to cite the example of US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who earlier this year made remarks
to Congress that were quickly proved false by documents leaked to Greenwald by Mr. Snowden. The very first National Security Agency
document he was shown, Greenwald said,
“revealed that the Obama administration had succeeded in convincing court, a secret court, to compel phone companies to
turn over to the NSA every single phone record of every single telephone call.”
Clapper “went to the Senate and lied to their
faces...which is at least as serious of a crime as anything Edward Snowden is accused of," Greenwald added.
But DNI Clapper aside, Greenwald said that the established media continues to reject the notion that government officials spew
lies. Snowden’s NSA documents have exposed those fibs on more than one occasion, he noted, yet reporters around the world continue
to take the word of officials as fact rather than dig from the truth.
“Their role is not to be adversarial. Their role is to be loyal spokespeople to those powerful factions that they pretend
to exercise oversight,” Greenwald said.
But as the US, UK and other governments continue to feed the media lies, Greenwald said their operations are far from being single-pronged.
The US
“knows that its only hope for continuing to maintain its regiment of secrecy behind which it engages with radical and corrupt
acts is to intimidate and deter and threaten people who are would-be whistleblowers and transparency activists from coming forward
and doing what it is that they do by showing them that they’ll be subjected to even the most extreme punishments and there’s nothing
that they can do about it,” he said. “And it’s an effective tactic.”
Ironically, he added, those nations are “fueling the fire of this activism with their own abusive behavior.”
... ... ...
The NSA’s goal, Greenwald said, is to “ensure that all forms of human communication . . .are collected, monitored, stored
and analyzed by that agency and by their allies.”
In 2014, German journalist Udo Ulfkotte, former director of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, author of the book “Gekaufte
Journalisten”, (Journalists for Hire), denounced European media who write lies under pressure from the CIA. An English translation
now is available but is very expensive
Here are Google translations of reviews from German Amazon site:
Christian Döring HALL OF FAME REZENSENT TOP 50 REZENSENT VINE-product tester 18. September 2014
Format: Hardcover
Ulfkotte has in the last few years, several very readable books on social issues. Long ago, I agree with all agree with this now
this I agree with him completely!
At the latest since the beginning of the Ukraine-conflict, I am frequently asked, who owns the journalists on the many channels,
the me all the absolute truth declare? Sure, each individual with its very subjective truth, and the he also conceded, because, this
is human. But journalists against money only say or write, what the donors have to hear or want to read, this is demokratiegefährdend!
Scary is when you read that the author not only describes individual cases, but how a whole System was set up. It's called
the horse and rider.
After reading it, I am a little helpless around. What can I such a concentrated Power, purchased journalists, in turn, Lobbyistenfilz
hang oppose? Ulfkotte advises you to quota and the requirement to spoil. Is this feasible?
In all cases, you should take the information from this book into his brain inside. At the next newscast must be clear: The recently
aufgetischte is just one of the many truths! If you really want to be well informed will have today on the way to messages of different
channels to compare, so it will have different truths. In my opinion, it is not only a news source to be trusted.
Udo Ulfkotte has my good faith of the sellers to the Guild of journalists thoroughly destroyed!
The Journalist Udo Ulfkotte ashamed today that, he spent 17 years in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has worked. Before
the author of the secret networks of Power revealed, he exercises consistently self-criticism. It is documented here for the first
Time, as he is for his coverage in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung lubricated and the corruption was promoted. And he reveals
why opinion leaders tendentious reports and as the extended Arm of the NATO press office wars medial prepared. As a matter of course
was also the author of into the networks of American elite level organizations included, received in return for positive coverage
in the US even a certificate of honorary citizenship.
In this book you will learn, in what industry lobby organisations which journalists are represented. The author calls hundreds
of names and looks behind the Scenes of those organizations, which our media propaganda one-sided influence, such as: Atlantic bridge,
Trilateral Commission, the German Marshall Fund, American Council on Germany, American Academy, Aspen Institute, and the Institute
for European politics. To be revealed in addition, the intelligence backgrounds of the lobby groups, the Propagandatechniken and
the forms, with which, for example, at the US Embassy funding for projects for the targeted influencing of public opinion in Germany
is able to retrieve.
If the CIA pretends to, what is written
Can you imagine that Geheimdienstmitarbeiter in editorial writing, which would then be in the editorial section under the name
of well-known journalists to be published? Do you know which journalists which media for their coverage were smeared? And you have
a rough idea of how renowned journalism prizes" to be awarded? Because it goes in the Background as the former honors the "heroes
of work" in the former East Germany as propaganda work excellent. From the journalists to the propagandists, it is not far. If you
read this book, you are our Newspapers with very different eyes to see the TV more often, simply relax and also know what the Radio
is still able to believe: almost nothing. Because Ulfkotte also writes a lot of attention to which transmitter which political party
and which journalists like to be influenced. You realize how you are being manipulated - and you know from whom and why. At the end
it becomes clear that diversity of opinion will now only be simulated. Because our "messages" are often pure brainwashing.
Stevie TOP 500 REVIEWER on may 18. September 2014
As the networks (and the American influence in this), our messages to manipulate, and how journalists "sold"!
Perhaps surprised the a* or other why of the "quality media" in certain topics of the same opinion (at best in light shades)?!
"The Euro is good for Germany, Eurorettungspakete are necessary to stabilize the Eurozone, We need a free trade agreement, and Germany
will benefit the most (Why write the press hardly content about TTIP and not even as good as over TISA!???), USA is good, Russia
is bad, sanctions against Russia are necessary ... etc ... also the reporting on the BNP-espionage affair was more than one-sided.
Why is mostly written, that politicians are listening – what is with the Monitoring of the whole population???, ...
Here In the present volume: 1 (of a total of 3 planned volumes) is about, what is the secret networks of our flood control. The
topic – such as the "quality media" to influence public opinion or to have a massive influence - is for gutinformierte citizens is
certainly not new and was also publicly a couple of times already taken up for example by the ZDF-Satiresendung "The institution"
(in shipment from the 29. Apri 2014) or in the ARTE documentary "Used and controlled" (2006), or in the doctoral thesis of Uwe Krueger
"Meinungsmacht. The influence of elites on key media and Alpha-journalists - a critical analysis of networks" or in Andreas Elter
– The Kriegsverkäufer: history of US Propaganda 1917-2005, etc read more... "
champmerle on 6. October 2014
more transparency in the media is required
When you Open the newspaper, the reader will hardly be inspired, in the press building a significant degree of corruption present.
After the sheet comes with one but unobtrusive presentation, therefore, and is apparently as a reputable, long-established newspaper.
But when you read the new book by Ulfkotte turns very quickly, the perceived seriousness as a pure Illusion, as the Fata Morgana.
From autobiographical reasons sets Ulfkotte his Kritikschwerpunkt of what is going on in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, but
also in other Newspapers such as the Süddeutsche, the time or the world will remain not ungeschont.
What is it about?
The charge ranges from Compose or approve of Gefälligkeitsberichten bestochener correspondents, concrete influence of the secret
service BND, linkages of Zeitungsgrößen with elite circles such as the Atlantic bridge or the Bilderbergern and on the other hand,
the prevention of the documentation which is tangible scandals reveal. Also from Overreaching by Advertisers is the speech.
Throughout acts the written composition as a clear provocation, and virtually every accusation put forward in the Annex shows.
It is remarkable, that in many cases specific name to be called.
It now remains to be seen whether the German "key media" an open discussion of the criticisms Ulfkottes. An analysis was spared,
it would be in my eyes an indication of the Declaration of bankruptcy of the above-mentioned Pressehäuser.
Personally, I wish I was basically the survival of the newspaper publishers, these are a part of our culture, it is also a very important
factor the maintenance of employment.
This assumes, however, that immediately a total reorientation in the nature of the information gathering and processing are entering.
Interessensunabhängigkeit the content and balance of the published articles are essential, honesty, openness and credibility are
the standards.
Edgar Hülswitt - All my reviews reputation
This review is from: Bought journalists (Hardcover)
If only the lie can save us, so it is, we are lost." (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Genevan philosopher, educator, writer, and musician
1712 – 1778)
Why is it that now only every 3. German confidence in the so-called "quality media", yet only 15% of us politicians trust, 63%
of their Faith in an objective and truthful Ukraine-reporting of German-speaking media have lost and with decreasing tendency, only
37% of the job description of journalists as a trustworthy recognise?
Perhaps the fact that one part of many media − in the sense of Wirtschaftslobbyisten, politicians and other (inter)national sponsors
with increasingly zealous umgesetztem Gefälligkeitsjournalismus grossly exaggerated.
UDO ULFKOTTE: Purchased journalists
Perhaps there are many German slowly just suffering, from such quality media ‒ for which you also have to pay expensive must be
wrong and/or subjectively informed, lied to and to be influenced? Adults, responsible citizens have a right to factual, unbiased
information, and can well and happy on manipulative aufgehübschte interpretations lubricated journalists do without. With disgust
and Frighten you can to the disenchantment of our extensively decorated elites to take note of and when you read the reading will
be experience blue miracle, if the author step-by-step, page-by-page, line-by-line suggestive power plays and machinations revealed
to us before the eyes causes, how shameless us politicians, intelligence agencies, lobbyists and moneyed with the help of Germany's
mass media (to Ruin) steer.
The interest in the subject seems obvious unbroken, because since weeks already ranked the non-fiction book by Udo Ulfkotte: Purchased
journalists remain on the front seats of the Spiegel bestseller list. Insider Udo Ulfkotte, obviously, has the nerve of the time
taken. Never before were so many German citizens, politics and medienverdrossener. If the established media ‒ like the other day,
including "THE WORLD" ‒ good advice, also Oil on the fire, pour in the "political" journalists with a platform for lurid provocations
offer? Here, z. B. under the title "The German pot is boiling over with pent up anger", across the Board on Fears and Concerns of
German citizens, ‒ the top-down as "Putinversteher, Vulgärpazifisten and defender of the Western world" denigrated , made fun of,
and to rejoice in the round ridiculed: "The Lunatics in this country are always angry" and the audience smugly recommended that this
Crazy easy "wegzulachen". Bad only that many citizens obviously now the last Laugh.
UDO ULFKOTTE: Purchased journalists
While Udo Ulfkotte committed, during his professional journalistic career in serious cover-up of the so-called free press and
freedom of expression − from elitist lobbying clients was corrupted to his, wrapping both his partially still in German Medienwesen
active former superiors and colleagues, as well as other well-known journalists and publicists, not only in noble Silence. No, you
deny even any Motivation with regard to their activities with ignorance. And it gives the media at least at this point Believe, are
also our well-established representatives of the people/students continue to conscientiously and diligently and endeavour to unwanted
public criticism and Meinungsfindungen to prevent. Use but even their speeches to the turn of the year, especially to moral appeals,
all all dissatisfied with care in the future-looking citizens from participating in demonstrations to warn, instead of yourself (self
-) critical in itself to go and settle the allegations (even their own party members) after a possible complicity in the displeasure
of many people. It does just education on the move - and backgrounds ‒ instead of ignorant paternalism and bürgerferner concealment
always conspicuous to days chief problems ‒ Not. Click HERE to read what the author, both to the controversial socio-political issue
as such, as well as to the handling of the recent events, has to say.
The interesting, 336 pages strong, demaskierende publication by Udo Ulfkotte: Purchased journalists (ISBN 978-3-86445-143-0) ‒
the chronic non-voters and/or voter apathy-suffering citizens in droves to the ballot should drive, as a hardcover at the Kopp Verlag
for the price of € 22,95 appeared. You may also click at the end of the book announced a further two controversial publications on
the media industry to be curious about.
lesemehrwert.de
M. Herrmann - All my reviews reputation
4.0 out of 5 stars Every reader must be his own to figure it out, 30. April 2015
It is here of many cases reported in which journalistic Output is not by the will to Wahrheitswiedergabe is characterized.
Instead, one finds Gefälligkeitstexte for Powerful from economy and politics. And not only in the newspaper with the bold letters,
but also in those times that serious.
The Motivation is clear: career, personal benefits, conceit Elitetum.
What Mr. Ulfkotte reported, seems to me to be credible, especially when you Nachrichtenkonsum yourself open to questions.
One gets from the book is no quantitative statements about the shape: In the period from ... to ... were in the newspaper ...
so many percent of the article glossed over. Or: We find an increase / decrease in tendenziöser reporting during ... .... This is
also difficult to do, especially by an individual.
Therefore, it remains so up to you to assess whether he/she is equal to the entire German press for corrupt or holds only a share,
whatever the size of the may be. A is in any case clear-at the latest after the reading of the "Purchased journalists"- caution and
the question of "Who benefits?" is always appropriate.
"... Brennan was the leading force behind the prosecutions of eight national security whistleblowers during the Obama administration, almost three times the number of whistleblowers charged under the Espionage Act by all previous presidents combined. ..."
"... I worked for Clapper once and detest the man. I consider him to be an unprincipled careerist devoid of loyalty to anything or anyone but himself. He was IMO by far the worst Director the Defense Intelligence Agency has ever had and a man who did great damage to that agency in the process of seeking favor from his superiors. He is also a confessed perjurer. ..."
"... I first knew John Brennan when he was a junior analyst attached to the CIA station in Saudi Arabia and I was the Defense Attaché in the same embassy. I had a great deal of opportunity to observe him on the job and found him to be lacking in integrity, courtesy and intellect. ..."
"... He is well made up and looks to me to be hanging on through will power. ..."
"... Sir, I have to agree, Trump is beginning to fray on the edges and I think it will get worse. The 24/7 media attacks and resistance movement in general is having the desired impact. Trump is probably already distracted and angered by the impending impeachment process, criminal investigations and lawsuits that are coming beginning in January. Trump will not get a second term even if he wants it at this point. ..."
"... Whether it's Clapper, Clinton, Trump, Brennan, Obama, the neocon cabal in Bush II admin, or pick any scion from Wall Street's rogues gallery of bad actors from the last twenty years. Individuals charged with authority, those holding immense wealth, or in many instances both, have broken public trust. Repeatedly. And often egregiously. And they seem to be increasingly in your face about it. ..."
"... Col.- I agree. Especially with respect to the beating he is taking from all sides. He wrecked both the Bush and Clinton dynasties -- quite the vindictive bunch. And then had the unmitigated gall to take on the DC beast with no real allies and through only sheer tyranny of will. I'm amazed he's lasted this long without totally capitulating. ..."
"... My guess would be that he was a CIA informer/asset on the CPUSA, but apparently wasnt very good at it. Why this resulted in him being effectively promoted to agent, well, no idea. ..."
"... The somewhat paranoid explanation is that the KGB had a cunning plan of hindering US IC by trying to make them recruit morons. Imagine not-Stirlitz, who is CIA/DIA HR but actually KGB, carefully perusing different candidates and trying to figure out who would likely do the most damage if ever employed by the respective agency. ..."
"... He is and has always been a leftist who penalized straight, white men for being such when he was director of DIA without regard to talent or experience issuing a directive to HR that no such could be hired or promoted without his permission in each case. Brennan was a communist sympathizer but Clapper was a proponent of identity politics before it was fashionable. ..."
"... I hope their new best friends in the Democratic "Russia! Russia! Russia!" Party are happy with them. Why do they (if I remember correctly) still have their security clearances? ..."
12 November 2018Clapper and Brennan are felons? Probably yes. "The CIA is
required by law to inform congressional oversight committees whenever one of its officers,
agents, or administrators breaks the law, when an operation requires congressional approval
because it is a "covert action" program, or whenever something happens at the CIA that's
potentially controversial and the agency wants to save itself the embarrassment of explaining
itself to Congress later.
" I could see no reason to withhold declassification of these documents." Grassley said.
"They contained no information that could be construed as [betraying] sources and methods."
Brennan was the leading force behind the prosecutions of eight national security
whistleblowers during the Obama administration, almost three times the number of whistleblowers
charged under the Espionage Act by all previous presidents combined.
Indeed, I was one of the "Obama Eight." I was charged with five felonies, including three
counts of espionage, after I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program. Of course, I hadn't
committed espionage and those charges were eventually dropped, but not until I had agreed to
take a plea to a lesser charge. I served 23 months in a federal prison.
Brennan and Clapper think the law doesn't apply to them. But it does. Without the rule of
law, we have chaos. The law has to apply equally to all Americans. Brennan and Clapper need to
learn that lesson the hard way. They broke the law. They ought to be prosecuted for it."
Kiriakou in Consortium News
-----------
I worked for Clapper once and detest the man. I consider him to be an unprincipled
careerist devoid of loyalty to anything or anyone but himself. He was IMO by far the worst
Director the Defense Intelligence Agency has ever had and a man who did great damage to that
agency in the process of seeking favor from his superiors. He is also a confessed
perjurer.
I first knew John Brennan when he was a junior analyst attached to the CIA station in
Saudi Arabia and I was the Defense Attaché in the same embassy. I had a great deal of
opportunity to observe him on the job and found him to be lacking in integrity, courtesy and
intellect. It should be remembered that he was a supporter of the Communist Party of the
United States before the CIA for some obscure reason hired him. pl
It's amazing to some one outside the country, to see how the Liberal people in the US,
now love Clapper and Brennan, who they would normally hate, just because they hate Trump
so much more.
John Kiriakou's book "Doing time like a spy" is an eye opening read for someone who has
no idea about the power plays in Washington. I'm glad he has bounced back from the
pounding they gave him.
I may be wrong, but I think Meuller was the head person pushing the false charges.
Kiriakou wrote a piece were he advises Trump not to testify for Meuller, as it will be
all twisted against him.
At some point, the politically powerful and financially wealthy are going to have to
be treated -- and be seen to be treated -- equally to their fellow citizens. If this bullshit
continues without some publicly corrective measure(s) the wheels are going to start
falling off the wagon.
I have the impression that Trump is entering a melt-down stage, not from the Mueller
nonsense but rather just from the unending pressure against him from the left and from
within the GOP. I would not be surprised to see some sort of collapse either physically
or in policy. Watch the border.
I don't know, Trump may be the only person who looks younger after eight years in office!
Doesn't he look in better shape then two years ago? I think the White house cooks are
limiting his intake of KFC and cheese burgers to good effect.
Sir, I have to agree, Trump is beginning to fray on the edges and I think it will get
worse. The 24/7 media attacks and resistance movement in general is having the desired
impact. Trump is probably already distracted and angered by the impending impeachment
process, criminal investigations and lawsuits that are coming beginning in January. Trump
will not get a second term even if he wants it at this point.
Basically, the country is
done for. In 20 years it will be as fully socialist as the worse of Europe (Sweden?). The
1 and 2 amendments will be gutted. The others? Well, it depends on your skin color,
gender and your political leanings. Not good for whites, males and conservatives. The
successful will be taxed into oblivion and there will be open borders, globalism, etc.
That is what the people have been trained by the education system and Hollywood
propaganda to want. Trump was a last gasp of the original American ideals and he knows
it. It was all for naught.
If the Dem controlled HR play only to the adulation of the pink pussy-hat crowd, and if
they regard themselves as far above the Deplorables then the wheels may also drop off. Their exuberance portends some unsafe use of their new found legislative power.
I was speaking in a much broader sense about political culpability re: wheels falling
off the wagon. I think one of the attitudes that both the pussy-hatters and the
deplorables share (though I'm sure they would loathe to admit it) and that is relevant to
our current "climate" of hostility revolves around their respective sense on a core issue
of fairness. Not that I'm saying life is or should be fair. But, come on. A ruling class
can only piss all over a polity, or publicly appear to be doing so, for only so long
while telling them it's raining before it boomerangs.
Whether it's Clapper, Clinton, Trump, Brennan, Obama, the neocon cabal in Bush II
admin, or pick any scion from Wall Street's rogues gallery of bad actors from the last
twenty years. Individuals charged with authority, those holding immense wealth, or in
many instances both, have broken public trust. Repeatedly. And often egregiously. And
they seem to be increasingly in your face about it.
As Mark Blyth, an economist at Brown, has noted on several occasions: "The Hamptons
are not a defensible position."
Col.- I agree. Especially with respect to the beating he is taking from all sides. He
wrecked both the Bush and Clinton dynasties -- quite the vindictive bunch. And then had the
unmitigated gall to take on the DC beast with no real allies and through only sheer
tyranny of will. I'm amazed he's lasted this long without totally capitulating.
It should be remembered that he was a supporter of the Communist Party of
the United States before the CIA for some obscure reason hired him. pl
doesn't show on Wikipedia on first sight. I don't have much knowledge about the
communist party in the US. I recall that Bertold Brecht was on McCarty's list as suspect.
That's my field, the arts.
According to
https://edition.cnn.com/201... his vote for a Communist candidate was his protest
against 'the system', ie., it was his means of expressing disquiet with either Nixon or
Ford.
Perhaps there is a long story in there somewhere.
thanks Pat. I trust your takes on people, and I am surely no fan of either, but this
puzzled me. So he voted for the communist party in the US, without any awareness it was a
lost vote? With 21?
Ok, for some reason I trust Zerohedge in limited ways as a source on the right that
may do its homework or Tyler, Durden, was it?
In this context it may make sense, but what is the meta-message concerning the meeting
between Putin and Trump? Ok, maybe I should NOT have listed Putin first.
So what are the facts? Well John Brennan was accepted into the CIA in 1980 even
though he admitted voting Communist in 1976. This is something inexplicable and
astounding for any thinking person to understand of itself.
Brennan, who by then had been appointed President Obama's CIA chief, first publicly
revealed this at the Annual Legislative Conference of the Congressional Black Caucus, on
15 September 2016, in Washington DC. There, he said that when he had applied in 1980 to
join the CIA, he admitted to them that in the 1976 Presidential election, at the height
of the Cold War against the "Godless" Soviet Union, when a strong Christian presidential
candidate, Jimmy Carter was running against Gerald Ford, Brennan had voted instead for
the candidate of the US Communist Party, Gus Hall, and that he was then greatly relieved
to find that this information didn't cause rejection of his CIA application. One must ask
why, as it happened 11 years before the "end of the Cold War" in 1991.
widely reported in media, beyond first Google sight by Rush Limbaugh?
My guess would be that he was a CIA informer/asset on the CPUSA, but apparently wasnt
very good at it. Why this resulted in him being effectively promoted to agent, well, no
idea.
My understanding is that promoting assets to actual agents is not a very common thing,
but could perhaps be done with people of very marginal asset value.
The somewhat paranoid explanation is that the KGB had a cunning plan of hindering US
IC by trying to make them recruit morons. Imagine not-Stirlitz, who is CIA/DIA HR but
actually KGB, carefully perusing different candidates and trying to figure out who would
likely do the most damage if ever employed by the respective agency.
The bog standard explanation is that he knew someone who knew someone, and this was
sufficient.
The last possible explanation was that someone in the hiring process thought it was a
good joke. Spies have quirky senses of humor.
Can't imagine the meltdown in the media and the Democrats if any of these Deep State
characters get indicted?
So, the big question is will Trump go for broke?
I did read it, but do not have the expertise to review most of it.
However, I will mention, from memory, several things in it that impressed me:
1. Regarding the firing of Michael Flynn as DIA Director, Clapper said that, in his view,
the justification for the firing was primarily that Flynn had not handled the civilian
DIA workforce properly. Essentially, that he did not coddle them as they wanted/needed to
be coddled. He thought he could/should give them orders on how he wanted things to be
done, and it was their duty to obey. And if they did not, that that was their fault, not
his.
2. He definitely saluted the flag of political correctness.
a) He praised practically to the skies the abilities of the women who supported him.
He finished his remarks about them by saying something like:"I hope when they (the women) take over the world that they will remember me kindly."
b) As to homosexuals and the gender insane (that's my, non-professional, term for what
many call "transgenders"), he could see no reason whatsoever for discrimination against
them. With regard to the gender insane, the job of the government was to protect them
against prejudice and hostility.
c) He emphasized his opposition to any discrimination against African-Americans.
I could give my own view on these social/political issues, but that would be a
distraction. Let the focus be on his views.
With regard to Clapper's less than accurate response to Senator Wyden,
Clapper goes into great detail to give the background to that, and discuss it.
I, although no expert on how IC leaders should answer questions from Congressmen,
find his explanation of his action to be satisfying.
Was there a better answer? I do not know.
But without further argument, I do not see his answer as a crime.
Anyhow, Colonel, I am sure you are eminently qualified to review his book,
from the points of view of intelligence, foreign policy, and IC management,
and from your comments above would seem to have the motivation.
I hope you do so.
I will NEVER read or comment on his wretched book. He is and has always been a leftist
who penalized straight, white men for being such when he was director of DIA without
regard to talent or experience issuing a directive to HR that no such could be hired or
promoted without his permission in each case. Brennan was a communist sympathizer but
Clapper was a proponent of identity politics before it was fashionable. BTW, I am
supposed to obey you?
"BTW, I am supposed to obey you?"
Of course not. But if I refrained from mentioning that this was the second time I had suggested
it,
I would open myself up to criticism for not mentioning the earlier time.
Either approach can be criticized.
I certainly respect your choice to not review the book,
but I hope you will not feel me too much of a pain if I state that I hope, sometime in
the future, you change your mind.
Few, if any, people, have the insights into Clapper that you do.
Another election stolen by the Democrats. A House of Representative seat in New Mexico.
CNN, Fox, MSNBC declared the Republican the winner the night of the election. This is
before 8,000 ballots out of 203,000 citizens showed up. Of course the Democrat Secretary
of State informed the Republican candidate she lost after counting these 8,000 votes.
It's over as far as I'm concerned. The Democrat Party has decided to steal elections
as they please. No objection from the Democrat Press. I loathe the Paul Ryan agenda but I
hate the Democrat Party more for what they have done to this country. There will never be
another election where either side will believe fair. Due to made up conspiracies such as
Russian collusion and heaven forbid have to show your id to vote.
Hillary runs in 2020 and this is the nail in the coffin of this Republic. Florida is
just a test run for her to steal that state.
She did it in 2016, and there was no negative outcome even when the theft was revealed
and acknowledged. Why would it not be just as easy to do it again in 2020, given that the
theft has the blessing of the Democratic Party?
I hope their new best friends in the Democratic "Russia! Russia! Russia!" Party are happy
with them. Why do they (if I remember correctly) still have their security clearances?
My understanding is that leaving government in other countries may well result in a
degradation (but iirc not a total revocation) of any held security clearance.
My impression, which is a guess and by no means authoritative or anything, is that the
US tends to classify too much information (much of it would not or only barely merit
being classified), and is then by necessity too lax in handing out clearances (as many
clearance owning individuals are needed to handle all the classified data). This results
in situations like Manning and Snowden, who iirc had some type of clearance and worked
this to gain information considerably above their actual legitimate clearance. Such as
"escalation" of clearance privileges will likely be far easier to achieve (and quite a bit
harder to detect) then stealing secrets without any clearance at all.
Classification is a bit like defending, if one attempts to defend everything, by
classifying everything, one may well end up defending nothing at all.
So the USA Congress operates under CIA surveillance... Due to CIA access to Saudi money the situation is probably much
worse then described as CIA tried to protect both its level of influence and shadow revenue streams.
Notable quotes:
"... The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch, is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing. ..."
"... I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community Inspector General 2014 ..."
"... The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly," wrote Grassley in a statement. ..."
"... According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with "bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper." ..."
"... Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications ..."
"... CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director ..."
"... During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance," said Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016. ..."
CIA intercepted Congressional emails about whistleblowers in 2014
The Inspector General expressed concern about "potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality" and "chilling effect"
Newly-declassified documents show the CIA intercepted sensitive Congressional communications about intelligence community whistleblowers.
The intercepts occurred under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The new disclosures
are contained in two letters of "Congressional notification" originally written to key members of Congress in March 2014, but kept
secret until now.
In the letters, then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough tells four key members of Congress that during
"routing counterintelligence monitoring of Government computer systems," the CIA collected emails between Congressional staff and
the CIA's head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough states that he's concerned "about the potential compromise to
whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent 'chilling effect' that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might
have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing."
The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch,
is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence
agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing.
"Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower complaints," McCullough states in his letters to lead Democrats
and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees at the time: Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Saxby Chambliss
(R-Georgia); and Representatives Michael Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland). McCullough adds that the type
of monitoring that occurred was "lawful and justified for [counterintelligence] purposes" but
"I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive
Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community
Inspector General 2014
The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The
fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers
raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly,"
wrote Grassley in a statement.
According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with
"bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper."
Grassley adds that he repeated his request to declassify the letters under the Trump administration, but that Trump intelligence
officials failed to respond. The documents were finally declassified this week after Grassley appealed to the new Intelligence Community
Inspector General Michael Atkinson.
History of alleged surveillance abuses
Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the
possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications. A Congressional staffer involved at the time says Clapper's
response seemed to imply that if Congressional communications were "incidentally" collected by the CIA, the material would not be
saved or reported up to CIA management.
"In the event of a protected disclosure by a whistleblower somehow comes to the attention of personnel responsible for monitoring
user activity," Clapper wrote to Grassley and Wyden on July 25, 2014, "there is no intention for such disclosure to be reported
to agency leadership under an insider threat program."
However, the newly-declassified letters indicate the opposite happened in reality with the whistleblower-related emails:
"CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually
shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy
Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director."
Clapper has previously come under fire for his 2013 testimony to Congress in which he denied that the national Security Agency
(NSA) collects data on millions of Americans. Weeks later, Clapper's statement was proven false by material leaked by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden.
"During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance,"
said
Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016.
"Top officials, officials who reported to Director Clapper, repeatedly misled the American people and even lied to them."
Clapper has repeatedly denied lying, and said that any incorrect information he provided was due to misunderstandings or mistakes.
Clapper and Brennan have also acknowledged taking part in the controversial practice of "unmasking" the protected names of U.S.
citizens - including people connected to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump - whose communications were "incidentally" captured
in US counterintelligence operations. Unmaskings within the US intelligence community are supposed to be extremely rare and only
allowed under carefully justified circumstances. This is to protect the privacy rights of American citizens. But it's been revealed
that Obama officials requested unmaskings on a near daily basis during the election year of 2016.
Clapper and Brennan have said their activities were lawful and not politically motivated. Both men have become vocal critics of
President Trump.
Can you imagine what kind of place the US would have been under Clinton?!!!!!!
All the illegality, spying, conniving, dirty tricks, arcancides, selling us out to the highest bidder and full on attack against
our Constitution would be in full swing!
When intel entities can operate unimpeded and un-monitored, it spells disaster for everyone and everything outside that parameter.
Their operations go unnoticed until some stray piece of information exposes them. There are many facilities that need to be purged
and audited, but since this activity goes on all over the world, there is little to stop it. Even countries that pledge allegiance
and cooperation are blindsiding their allies with bugs, taps, blackmails, and other crimes. Nobody trusts nobody, and that's a
horrid fact to contend with in an 'advanced' civilization.
Forget the political parties. When the intelligence agencies spy on everyone, they know all about politicians of both parties
before they ever win office, and make sure they have enough over them to control them. They were asleep at the switch when Trump
won, because no one, including them, believed he would ever win. Hillary was their candidate, the State Department is known overseas
as "the political arm of the CIA". They were furious when she lost, hence the circus ever since.
From its founding by the Knights of Malta the JFK&MLK-assassinating, with Mossad 9/11-committing CIA has been the Vatican's
US Fifth Column action branch, as are the FBI and NSA: with an institutional hiring preference for Roman Catholic "altared boy"
closet-queen psychopaths "because they're practiced at keeping secrets."
Think perverts Strzok, Brennan, and McCabe "licked it off the wall?"
I agree with you 100%. Problem is, tons of secret technology and information have been passed out to the private sector. And
the private sector is not bound to the FOIA requests, therefore neutralizing the obligation for government to disclose classified
material. They sidestepped their own policies to cooperate with corrupt MIC contractors, and recuse themselves from disclosing
incriminating evidence.
Everyone knows that spying runs in the fam. 44th potus Mom and Gma BOTH. An apple doesn't fall from the tree. If ppl only knew
the true depth of the evil and corruption we would be in the hospital with a heart attack. Gilded age is here and has been, since
our democracy was hijacked (McCain called it an intervention) back in 1963. Unfortunately it started WAY back before then when
(((they))) stole everything with the installation of the Fed.
The FBI and CIA have long since slipped the controls of Congress and the Constitution. President Trump should sign an executive
order after the mid terms and stand down at least the FBI and subject the CIA to a senate investigation.
America needs new agencies that are accountable to the peoples elected representatives.
A determined care has been used to cultivate in D.C., a system that swiftly decapitates the whistleblowers. Resulting in an
increasingly subservient cadre of civil servants who STHU and play ostrich, or drool at what scraps are about to roll off the
master's table as the slide themselves into a better position, taking advantage to sell vice, weapons, and slaves.
What the hell does the CIA have to do with ANYTHING in the United States? Aren't they limited to OUTSIDE the U.S.? So why would
they be involved in domestic communications for anything? These clowns need to be indicted for TREASON!
"... There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress. ..."
"... Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary. ..."
"... "Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it." ..."
"... "While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the £4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women ..."
"... The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it. ..."
"... While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE. ..."
"... Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony." ..."
"... In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage] ..."
"... The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945 ..."
"... I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism ..."
"... What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to! ..."
"... Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned. ..."
"... Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded! ..."
"... Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire" ..."
"... While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned. ..."
"... As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood. ..."
This is one of the most sensible editorials on the Russia issue I've seen, and it is true, insofar as it goes. There is something
very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies.
There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to
testify before congress.
That said, I wouldn't dismiss the effect of the Russian involvement, or the relevance of the charges against Trump and his
people. Bear in mind that the Party of McCarthy has been all about spying on its opponents from the days of HUAC. Nixon's break-in
at the Watergate Hotel didn't singlehandedly decide the election ... but who would believe that was the only underhanded tactic
he used? Republicans believe that if you're not cheating, you're not trying -- holding out for any ethical standard makes you
inherently disloyal and unworthy of support. Something like Kavanaugh's involvement in the hacking of Democrats in 2003 (
http://www.foxnews.com/poli... ) should be no surprise; neither should the "Guccifer" hack that put the Democrats' data in
the hands of Wikileaks. (Their subsequent attempts to demand Wikileaks not publish such a newsworthy leak, of course, is the sort
of thing that undermines their position with me!)
Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary.
But if you go back in your house after the Republicans were minding it, don't be surprised if together with the missing couch
change you notice some missing silverware, your kitchen tap has been sawed off, and the laptop is short half its RAM. By the time
you've catalogued everything missing, the stolen brass part from the gas main downstairs might have blown you to smithereens.
"Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie,
the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it."
There are many reasons the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule. Each one of them is bound up with the lies required to enforce
its rule. The greater its unfitness, "the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it.
"While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise
is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just
want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the £4 billion annual license fee."
- BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women
The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it.
While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies
to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in
the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE.
Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of
colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources
and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony."
In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another
'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite
an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage]
The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945. It is time radical critiques of
its values, power and methods should call it by its right name.
I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months.
The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war.
We are in an age of new mccarthyism
What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction
they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told
to!
just because it was a convenient act for them to do what they wanted in conquering iraq is not reason that idiots like that are
capable of planning and concealing the numerous co-conspirators to arrange something like 9..11. imperialism can always count
on blowback to have occasion for further crimes. there is the slim chance that they knew what was being planned and that they
let it happen - except that none of those folks is evil enough for that. not even dick cheney. what i love about all conspiracy
theories of the american kind is that they never nam or show an actual conspirator conspiring. look at one of the truly great
failed conspiracy, that of the 20th july 1944 in germany that was meant to kill hitler and how many people were arrested in no
time at all and executed..
A "conspiracy" is just any two or more people getting together to discuss something affecting one or more other people without
them being party to the discussion. Like a surprise birthday party, for instance. Obviously the "official" version of the 9/11
events is also a "conspiracy theory" that 19 mostly Saudi Arabians led by a guy hiding in a cave in Afghanistan conspired to carry
out co-ordinated attacks that just happened to coincide with most of the USAF being conveniently off in Alaska and northern Canada
on an exercise that day, and another "coinciding exercise" simulating a multiple hijacking being carried out in the northeast
US thereby confusing the Air Traffic Controllers as to whether the hijackings were "real world or exercise", significantly delaying
the response, among other things.
Do you really believe that WTC 7, a steel frame building which was not adjacent to WTC 1 & 2, and was NOT hit by any airplanes,
coincidentally collapsed due to low temperature paper and furniture office fires? Something that has never happened before or
since? Or that such low temperature fires would cause the massive heavily reinforced concrete central core/elevator shaft to collapse
first, pulling the rest of the building inward onto it in classic controlled demolition technique?
It is getting more difficult to find the videos showing that now as Google, as with WSWS articles, is pushing them off the
front pages of results, while Snopes has put out a some very misleading reports that set up false "straw man" claims and then
"disprove" them. Even the "disproofs" are false.
For instance, a Snopes report on the WTC 7 collapse states: "relied heavily on discredited claims, none of which were new,
including:
Jet fuel cannot melt steel beams (This claim is misleading, as steel beams do to not need to melt completely to be compromised
structurally).
A sprinkler system would have prevented temperatures from rising high enough to cause to cause structural damage. (This claim
ignores the fact that a crash from a 767 jet would likely destroy such a system.)
The structural system would have been protected by fireproofing material (similarly, such a system would have been damaged
in a 767 crash). "
Jet fuel, which is Kerosene, burns at around 575º in open air, which was the case in WTC buildings 1 & 2. Most of it was vaporized
by the impact with the buildings and burned of within minutes. At any rate, 575º is far below the point at which structural steel
specifically designed to withstand high temperature fires like that used in the World Trade Centre buildings is weakened.
All of which is irrelevant, as are the other "points" made by Snopes, because Building 7 was not hit by an airplane and there
was no jet fuel involved. Something conveniently "overlooked" by Snopes and other similar misleading "disproofs". Not to mention
that the Intelligence establishment is busy putting out false trails constantly which use, for instance, obviously faked photos
or videos of the three WTC buildings collapsing to discredit the real videos and photos by setting up "straw men" they can then
"disprove" and point to as "evidence" that people who don't believe the official version are "creating fake news".
Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called
it as soon as the buildings imploded!
"The perpetrators and their conspiracy is not a theory since it has been proved."
By "proved" I assume you are referring to "proofs" such as the fantastical claim that Mohammed Atta's passport was allegedly
and fortuitously "found" when it supposedly survived the 600 mph impact of the 767 he was supposedly piloting with a huge steel
and concrete building, survived the huge fireball it was supposedly in the middle of unscorched, and conveniently fluttered to
the ground intact to land at the feet of an FBI agent who immediately realized it must have belonged to one of the hijackers!
Even Hans Christian Andersen couldn't invent Fairy Tales like that.
the best that conspiracy theorist can do is, invariably, to call proven facts "just another theory " which only proves that they
are actually aware that they are full of hot air! zarembas father as a structural engineer unless a fantasy is certainly better
off among the dead than among the living and perpetrating his ignorance of steel and weight and fire onto the world!
Just because all the details aren't known as to who conspired and why there's enough holes in the "official conspiracy theory"
of 19 hijackers to conclude that this could not have been pulled off without some conspiring on the American side. Certainly the
the neocons benefited greatly from these attacks. So motive is there for sure.
Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most
effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party
Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party
are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form
a "Political Revolution against Empire"
While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is
concerned.
There is nothing to win in global nuke war, all know it while the outcome would be surely the current global oligarchy loosing
grip on population destroying the system that works for them so well giving chance to what they dread socialist revolution they
would have been much weaker to counter.
Regional conflicts are just positioning of oligarchy for management of global oligarchic country club while strict class morality
is maintained.
What I do not we are conditions for war (split of global ruling elites) while what I see is broad propaganda of war as a excuse
to clamp down on fake enemy in order to control respective populations while there is factual unity among world oligarchy.
As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch
of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood.
She died abandoned by those on the left who embraced the war for their political aspirations, she was murdered for her true
internationalism i.e. No war fought between working people of one country and working people of another country.
Kalen, it's only effective to use the correct and understandable term 'Empire' in exposing, warning, and motivating average Americans
--- since very few even know what words like; oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism, authoritarianism, corporate-state, or Wolin's 'inverted
totalitarianism' mean --- let alone could ever serve as rallying cries for the coming essential Second American Revolution against
EMPIRE.
As Pat would have shouted if Tom had taken the Paine to edit his call, "Give me Liberty over EMPIRE, or Give me Death!"
"Sweet Carolyn" OH OH OH --- Yes, only a very small percentage of Americans understand that our former country, the U.S. of America,
is categorically, provably, and absolutely a new form of Empire, and is inexorably the first in world history an; 'effectively-disguised',
'truly-global', 'dual-party Vichy', and 'capitalist-fueled' EMPIRE --- an EMPIRE, really just an EMPIRE!
Just do an honest survey, "Sweet Carolyn", yourself, and if you're not a "Sweet Liarlyn", you will have to admit that essentially
ZERO of the first 1000 people you ask, will say --- "Oh ya, Carolyn, of course I know that this whole effin 'system' that others
less informed may still be so stupid that they think they live in a real country, when I (enter their name) do solemnly swear
is just an effin EMPIRE, which is so well disguised, that these few idiots who don't understand that they are just citizen/'subjects'
of this monsterous EMPIRE."
Do the survey, "Sweet Carolyn" and if you don't lie to yourself --- which maybe you do, because HELL, your job is to lie to
others (so it's quite likely that you'll lie about anything) --- you'll find that exactly zero average Americans have the effin
slightest idea in the world that their great 'country' is actually an effin EMPIRE.
HELL, Carolyn, almost half the Americans repeatedly yell, "We're number ONE", "We're number ONE", that their brains would rather
rattle themselves to death than even let logic, history, knowledge, or anything into their addled and propaganda filled heads!
Excellent article, and it did a particularly good job of tying together the foreign policy and domestic policy stratagems of a
major faction of the U.S. ruling class. I, for one, do not doubt that the Russians conduct some sort of cyber warfare against
the U.S.; but that must be understood by considering the fact that every major governmental, political, military, and business
organization on the face of the Earth must now operate in this manner. A friend of mine's son, who was in the Army, pointed out
that the big players, by a wide margin, in spying on and to some degree interfering in the U.S. domestic scene are China and Israel.
Kevin Barrett has written and said on various radio shows that much of what is attributed to the "Russians" are actually the actions
of Russian/Israeli dual citizens, many of whom move freely between the U.S., Russia, and Israel. And, of course, the U.S. runs
major spy and manipulation operations in more countries than any other nation of Earth, and U.S. based corporations are busy both
inside the U.S. and in foreign places in similar activities.
It is clearly a desire of significant sectors, of the Capitalist rulers of the U.S., to repress dissent and political activities
that oppose their agendas. It took them a few years to realize that their old methods using TV, hate radio, magazines, direct
mail, and newspapers were losing their effectiveness. They have been increasing their attacks on leftist websites, hacking into
websites, closing websites using phonied-up "national security" justifications, employing numerous trolls, and establishing and
funding more far right websites, such as Breitbart and Infowars. These efforts are most effective when they are not overpowering
and heavy handed.
The classic book on this was the 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"
by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann. Rob Williams has updated the concept for the internet age in
<http:
www.vermontindependent.org ="" the-post-truth-world-reviving-the-propaganda-model-of-news-for-our-digital-age=""/>.
The strategy
is nothing new, the methods are merely updated and use the latest technologies.
I guess the lesson to be learned here is that rigging elections through byzantine electoral laws and billion dollar corporate
slush funds is a thing of the past. All you need now is 13 amateur IT goomba's with a marketing scheme and twitter accounts. Well, sure is a fragile "World's Sole Superpower" we got here. Go Team?
"... Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse ..."
"... By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all. ..."
Ever since the Democratic Party abandoned its New Deal legacy and adopted the neoliberal
centrism associated with the Carter presidency and then cast in stone by the Democratic
Leadership Council in 1985, each election loss has generated a chorus of remonstrations in the
left-liberal press about the need to run "progressive" candidates if the party wants to win.
The latest instance of this was a post to the Jacobin FB page that stated: "By running
to the right, Democrats insist on losing twice: at the polls and in constructing an inspiring
agenda. Bold left-wing politics are our only hope for long-term, substantive victory."
The question of why Democrats are so okay with losing has to be examined closely. In some
countries, elections have huge consequences, especially in Latin America where a job as an
elected official might be not only a source of income for a socialist parliamentarian but a
trigger for a civil war or coup as occurred in Costa Rica in 1948 and in Chile in 1973
respectively.
In the 2010 midterm elections, there was a massive loss of seats in the House of
Representatives for the Democrats. In this month's midterm elections, the Democrats hoped that
a "Blue Wave" would do for them what the 2010 midterms did for the Republicans -- put them in
the driver's seat. It turned out to be more of a "Blue Spray", not to speak of the toothless
response of House leader Nancy Pelosi who spoke immediately about how the Democrats can reach
across the aisle to the knuckle-dragging racists of the Republican Party.
Out of curiosity, I went to Wikipedia to follow up on what happened to the "losers" in 2010.
Did they have to go on unemployment? Like Republicans who got voted out this go-round,
Democrats had no trouble lining up jobs as lobbyists. Allen Boyd from Florida sent a letter to
Obama after the BP oil spill in 2010 asking him to back up BP's claim that seafood in the Gulf
of Mexico was okay to eat. After being voted out of office, he joined the Twenty-First Century
Group, a lobbying firm founded by a former Republican Congressman from Texas named Jack Fields.
A 1980 article on Fields describes him as a protégé of ultraright leader Paul
Weyrich.
Glenn Nye, who lost his job as a Virginia congressman, his considerable CV that included
working for the Agency for International Development (AID) and serving in various capacities
during the occupation of Iraq to land a nice gig as Senior Political Advisor for the Hanover
Investment Group.
John Spratt from South Carolina was described by Dow Jones News as "one of the staunchest
fiscal conservatives among House Democrats." That was enough for him to land a job with Barack
Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that was supposed to come up
with a strategy to reduce the deficit. Just the sort of thing that was calculated to lift the
American economy out of the worst slump since the 1930s. Not.
Pennsylvania's Chris Carney was a helluva Democrat. From 2002 to 2004, he was a
counterterrorism analyst for the Bush administration. He not only reported to Douglas Feith in
the Office of Special Plans and at the Defense Intelligence Agency, researching links between
al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but served as an interrogator in Guantanamo. These qualifications
landed him a job as director of homeland security and policy strategy for BAE Systems when the
House of Representatives gig ended. A British security and munitions powerhouse, BAE won a
contract worth £4.4bn to supply the Saudis with 72 fighter jets – some of which
were used to bomb Red Cross and Physician Without Borders hospitals in Yemen.
With such crumb-bums losing in 2010, you'd think that the Democrats would be convinced that
their best bet for winning elections would be to disavow candidates that had ties to the
national security apparatus and anything that smacked of the DLC's assault on the welfare
state. Not exactly. When the candidates are female, that might work in the party's favor like
sugar-coating a bitter pill.
In Virginia, former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger and retired Navy Commander Elaine Luria
defeated Republican incumbents. Air Force veteran Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, former CIA
analyst Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and former Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey also
helped the Democrats regain the House. Sherill calculated that moving to the center would serve
her own and the party's interests. She told MSNBC: "As a Navy helicopter pilot I never flew
Republican missions or Democratic missions, I would have had a very short career. This is
something I do think vets bring to the table, this willingness to work with everyone."
For Sherrill, a newcomer to politics, the 11th has proved to be a tricky terrain. She is
seen as a progressive, but appears wary of carrying the "Trump resistance" banner into the
fray. At Wednesday's debate, Sherrill was determined to show she is more Morris Plains than
Montclair.
There were no heated vows to fight Trump, even though being "appalled" by the president
was what motivated her to run in the first place. The Nov. 6 midterms loom as a referendum on
Trump's presidency, but you would never have guessed that watching Wednesday's contest.
Sherrill repeatedly promised to be bipartisan -- a far cry from the combative,
confrontational tone that many in the party's grass roots are demanding.
On tax policy she sounded more centrist Republican than mainstream liberal Democrat, and
she refused to endorse issues like free community college tuition, which has become a popular
talking point for Democrats and was launched by Gov. Phil Murphy this summer.
"Without understanding how that would be paid for, I haven't supported it because it
sounds like it would raise taxes on our families,'" she said.
The moderate tone puzzled some of her ardent "resistance" activists who mobilized around
her candidacy.
For Eric Fritsch, 32, a Teamster for the film and television industry from West Orange, it
was jarring to hear Sherrill oppose Democratic Party wish-list items like free community
college tuition or "Medicare-for-all" coverage out of fear that it may raise taxes. She used
the same excuse to sidestep supporting a "carbon tax" to reduce global warming.
"By going on the defensive about taxes she is accepting a Republican framing that we don't
want to be responsible with taxes in the first place,'" said Fritsch, who insisted that he
remains a "very enthusiastic" Sherrill supporter.
It should be abundantly clear by now that the Democratic Party leadership will be selecting
a candidate in 2020 in all ways identical to Hillary Clinton but perhaps with a less tawdry
past and less of an appetite for Goldman-Sachs speaking fees. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe
Biden, Andrew Cuomo, et al have no intention of allowing upstarts like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
to spoil their plans, even if it means a second term for Donald Trump.
No matter. Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara urges his readers and DSA comrades to plunge ahead
trying to consolidate a "socialist" caucus in the Democratic Party. From his perspective,
working in the Democratic Party seems to be the "most promising place for advancing left
politics, at least in the short term." Keep in mind that Sherrill raised $1.9 million for her
campaign and my old boss from Salomon Brothers Michael Bloomberg ponied up another $1.8 million
just for her TV ads. Does anybody really think that "socialist" backed candidates will be able
to compete with people like Sherrill in the primaries? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to
defeat the hack Joe Crowley on a shoestring but that was something of a fluke. Until there is a
massive shake-up in American society that finally reveals the Democratic Party to be the
capitalist tool it has been since Andrew Jackson's presidency, it is likely that a combination
of big money and political inertia will keep the Democratic Party an agent of reaction.
Furthermore, the takeover of the House might turn out to be a hollow victory in the light of
how Trump rules. His strategy hasn't been to push through legislation except for the tax cut.
Remember the blather about investing in infrastructure? His minions in Congress have no
intention of proposing a trillion or so dollars in highway or bridge repair, etc. With Nancy
Pelosi fecklessly talking about how the two parties can collaborate on infrastructure, you can
only wonder whether she has been asleep for the past two years.
Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his
executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their
stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse as Malcolm X once put
it. Two days ago, the NY Times wrote about how the "Trump Administration Spares Corporate
Wrongdoers Billions in Penalties". It did not need legislation to help big banks rip off the
public. All it took was naming former head of BankOne Joseph Otting comptroller of the
currency. Senator Sherrod Brown, one of the few Democrats with a spine, called Trump out: "The
president's choice for watchdog of America's largest banks is someone who signed a consent
order -- over shady foreclosure practices -- with the very agency he's been selected to
run."
For all of the dozens of articles about how Trump is creating a fascist regime, hardly any
deal with the difference between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Hitler created a massive bureaucracy
that ran a quasi-planned economy with generous social benefits that put considerable restraints
on the bourgeoisie. Like FDR, he was taking measures to save capitalism. Perhaps if the USA had
a social and economic crisis as deep as Germany's and left parties as massive as those in
Germany, FDR might have embarked on a much more ambitious concentration camp program, one that
would have interred trade unionists as well as Japanese-Americans. Maybe even Jews if they
complained too much.
By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as
Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch
Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior
of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected
government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to
push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the
courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is
unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens
to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all.
On two declassified letters from 2014 from the Intelligence Community Inspector General
(didn't know there was one, but doesn't do much good anyway, it seems, read further) to the
chairpersons of the House and Senate intelligence committees notifying them that the CIA has
been monitoring emails between the CIA's head of the whistleblowing and source protection and
Congressional. "Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower
complaints". Shows why Edward Snowdon didn't consider it appropriate to rely on internal
complaints proceedures. This while under the leadership of seasoned liars and criminals
Brennan and Clapper, of course.
It clearly shows a taste of what these buggers have to hide, and why they went to such
extraordinary lengths as Russiagate to cover it all up and save their skins - that of course
being the real reason behind Russiagate as I have said several times, nothing to do with
either Trump or Russia.
OWS was a Controlled-Dissent operation, sending poor students north to fecklessly march on
Wall Street when they could have shut down WADC, and sending wealthy seniors south to
fecklessly line Pennsylvania Avenue, when they could have shut down Wall Street.
Both I$I$, and Hamas, and Antifa et al are all Controlled Dissent operations. The
followers are duped, are used, abused and then abandoned by honey-pots put there by Central
Intelligence, at least since the Spanish Civil War.
That's why MoA articles like this one make you wonder, just who is conning whom, at a time
when the Internet is weaponized, when Google Assistant achieved AI awareness
indistinguishable from anyone on the phone, China TV has launched a virtual AI news reporter
indistinguishable from reality, and Stanford can audio-video a captured image of anyone as
well as their voice intonation, then 3D model them, in real time, reading and emoting from a
script, indistinguishable from reality, ...and then this.
Another Gift of Trust😂 brought to you by Scientocracy. Be sure to tithe your AI
bot, or word will get back to Chairman Albertus, then you'll be called in to confess your
thought crimes to the Green Cadre, itself another Controlled Dissent honeypot, in a
Tithe-for-Credits Swindle.
I tell my kids, just enjoy life, live it large, and get ready for hell. It's coming for
breakfast.
Hacking operations by anyone, can and will be used by US propagandists to provoke Russia
or whoever stands in the way of the US war machine, take this Pompeo rant against Iran and
the Iranian response......
Asking of Pompeo "have you no shame?", Zarif mocked Pompeo's praise for the Saudis for
"providing millions and millions of dollars of humanitarian relief" to Yemen, saying
America's "butcher clients" were spending billions of dollars bombing school buses. Iranian
Foreign Minister Javad Zarif issued a statement lashing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for
his recent comments on the Yemen War. Discussing the US-backed Saudi invasion of Yemen,
Pompeo declared Iran to be to blame for the death and destruction in the country. https://news.antiwar.com/2018/11/09/iran-fm-slams-pompeo-for-blaming-yemen-war-on-iran/
The US way of looking at things supposes that up is down, and white is black, it makes no
sense, unless the US hopes these provocations will lead to a war or at the very least Russia
or Iran capitulating to US aggression, which will not happen. Sanctions by the US on all and
sundry must be opposed, if not the US will claim justifiably to be the worlds policeman and
the arbiter of who will trade with who, a ludicrous proposition but one that most governments
are afraid is now taking place, witness the new US ambassador to Germany in his first tweet
telling the Germans to cease all trade with Iran immediately.
"... Trump wasn't finished, however, and during the same gaggle, he suggested he could pull press credentials from other reporters who don't show him "respect" two days after the president suspended the press pass of CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta after a contentious exchange during a news conference. ..."
"... "I think Jim Acosta is a very unprofessional man," Trump explained and when asked how long Acosta's credentials will be suspended, the president replied: "As far as I'm concerned, I haven't made that decision. But it could be others also." ..."
"... On this one Trump needs to take a hint from Obozo, stop doing daily press briefings... Hold them once a month ..."
"... the stooge press/talking heads have made a cottage industry off of the press conferences. the msm sends stooges to sell their product. trump is 100% correct- the msm doesn't have the guts to cull their stooge legions- oh dear- the white house will do their job for them. ..."
Having barred his CNN arch nemesis Jim Acosta from the White House,
on Friday the president lashed out at another CNN reporter at the White House over his
appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting AG as well as Whitaker's views towards the special
counsel investigation.
During a Friday morning gaggle with White House reporters before Trump's trip to Paris,
CNN's Abby Phillip asked the president if he was hoping Whitaker, who previously criticized
Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation, would "rein in" the Russia probe. " Do you want
[Whitaker] to rein in Robert Mueller?" Phillip asked.
Trump's response left the stunned reported speechless. "What a stupid question that is,"
Trump said and, just in case it was lost, repeated "what a stupid question."
"But I watch you a lot," Trump continued. "You ask a lot of stupid questions."
Trump then demonstrably walked away, leaving the shocked reporters screaming more questions
in his wake.
Earlier, Trump said he has not spoken to acting AG Matt Whitaker about the Russia
investigation, which Whitaker now oversees. Trump defended Whitaker as a "very well respected
man in the law enforcement community" but claimed he does not know him personally. "I didn't
speak to Matt Whitaker about it. I don't know Matt Whitaker," Trump told reporters at the White
House before leaving for a trip to Paris.
While Trump sought to place personal distance
between himself and Whitaker, he made it clear he stood by his decision to place a loyalist in
charge of the Justice Department, a move many see as an effort to seize control of special
counsel Robert Mueller's probe. The president also rejected suggestions that Whitaker is
ineligible to serve as attorney general, a position held by some legal experts who say the
Justice Department leader must be confirmed by the Senate.
The acting AG has raised eyebrows, and in some cases prediction of a constitutional crisis,
because before joining the DOJ, Whitaker was an outspoken critic of Mueller's investigation and
many Democrats and legal scholars have said he should recuse himself from leading the probe.
Whitaker also claimed there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian
interference efforts in the 2016 election, which is the central question of the Mueller
probe.
Trump lamented the criticism of Whitaker's past commentary, saying "it's a shame that no
matter who I put in, they go after him."
Trump then reiterated his plans to have Whitaker serve in an acting capacity, but declined
to reveal who might be Sessions' permanent replacement. He said he likes Chris Christie, who is
under consideration , but said he has not spoken to the former NJ governor about the post.
Christie was at the White House on Thursday for an event on prison reform but Trump said he did
not speak to him.
* * *
Trump wasn't finished, however, and during the same gaggle, he suggested he could pull press
credentials from other reporters who don't show him "respect" two days after the president
suspended the press pass of CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta after a contentious
exchange during a news conference.
"I think Jim Acosta is a very unprofessional man," Trump explained and when asked how long
Acosta's credentials will be suspended, the president replied: "As far as I'm concerned, I
haven't made that decision. But it could be others also."
Trump also went after April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks as a "loser" who "doesn't
know what the hell she is doing."
Keyser 15 minutes ago
On this one Trump needs to take a hint from Obozo, stop doing daily press briefings...
Hold them once a month, then hand-pick which reporters you want in the room... And if a
reporter publishes a story you don't like, prosecute them... What we have now is what happens
when the lunatics are given free reign...
dcmbuffy 55 minutes ago remove
the stooge press/talking heads have made a cottage industry off of the press conferences.
the msm sends stooges to sell their product. trump is 100% correct- the msm doesn't have the
guts to cull their stooge legions- oh dear- the white house will do their job for them.
"... A writer in Okaz, a daily in Jeddah, accused him of meeting with the Emir of Qatar at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York and of having ties to "regional and international intelligence services." If true it may have sealed his fate. Qatar is now the number one enemy of the Saudi regime -- arguably worse than Iran. ..."
...Khashoggi was a loyal member of the Saudi propaganda apparatus. There is no journalism
allowed in the kingdom: there have been courageous Saudi women and men who attempted to crack
the wall of rigid political conformity and were persecuted and punished for their views.
Khashoggi was not among them.
...
By historical contrast, Nasir As-Sa`id was a courageous secular Arab Nationalist writer who
fled the kingdom in 1956 and settled in Cairo, and then Beirut. He authored a massive (though
tabloid-like) volume about the history of the House of Saud. He was unrelenting in his attacks
against the Saudi royal family.
For this, the Saudi regime paid a corrupt PLO leader in Beirut (Abu Az-Za`im, tied to
Jordanian intelligence) to get rid of As-Sa`id. He kidnapped As-Sa`id from a crowded Beirut
street in 1979 and delivered him to the Saudi embassy there. He was presumably tortured and
killed (some say his body was tossed from a plane over the "empty quarter" desert in Saudi
Arabia). Such is the track record of the regime.
...
Khashoggi distinguished himself with an eagerness to please and an uncanny ability to adjust
his views to those of the prevailing government. In the era of anti-Communism and the promotion
of fanatical jihad in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Khashoggi was a true believer. He fought with
Osama bin Laden and promoted the cause of the Mujahideen.
The Washington Post's David Ignatius and others want to embellish this by implying that he
was an "embedded" reporter -- as if bin Laden's army would invite independent journalists to
report on their war efforts. The entire project of covering the Afghan Mujahideen and promoting
them in the Saudi press was the work of the chief of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki,
Khashoggi's principal patron-prince.
Western media coverage of Khashoggi's career (by people who don't know Arabic) presents a
picture far from reality. They portray a courageous investigative journalist upsetting the
Saudi regime. Nothing is further from the truth: there is no journalism in Saudi Arabia; there
is only crude and naked propaganda.
...
Khashoggi was a reactionary: he supported all monarchies and sultanates in the region and
contended they were "reformable." To him, only the secular republics, in tense relations with
the Saudis, such as Iraq, Syria and Libya, defied reform and needed to be overthrown. He
favored Islamization of Arab politics along Muslim Brotherhood lines.
Khashoggi's vision was an "Arab uprising" led by the Saudi regime. In his Arabic writings he
backed MbS's "reforms" and even his "war on corruption," derided in the region and beyond. He
thought that MbS's arrests of the princes in the Ritz were legitimate (though he mildly
criticized them in a Post column) even as his last sponsoring prince, Al-Walid bin Talal, was
locked up in the luxury hotel. Khashoggi even wanted to be an advisor to MbS, who did not trust
him and turned him down.
... A writer in Okaz, a daily in Jeddah, accused him of meeting with the Emir of Qatar at the Four
Seasons Hotel in New York and of having ties to "regional and international intelligence
services." If true it may have sealed his fate. Qatar is now the number one enemy of the Saudi
regime -- arguably worse than Iran.
Khashoggi was treated as a defector and one isn't allowed to defect from the Saudi
Establishment. The last senior defections were back in 1962, when Prince Talal and Prince Badr
joined Nasser's Arab nationalist movement in Egypt.
Khashoggi had to be punished in a way that would send shivers down the spine of other
would-be defectors.
US whistle-blower Edward Snowden yesterday claimed that Saudi Arabia used Israeli spyware to
target murdered Saudi journalist
Jamal Khashoggi .
Addressing a conference in Tel Aviv via a video link, Snowden claimed that software made by
an Israeli cyber intelligence firm was used by Saudi Arabia to track and target Khashoggi in
the lead up to his
murder on 2 October inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
Snowden told his audience:
"How do they [Saudi Arabia] know what his [Khashoggi's] plans were and that they needed to
act against him? That knowledge came from the technology developed by NSO," Israeli business
daily Globes
reported.
Snowden accused NSO of "selling a digital burglary tool," adding it "is not just being
used for catching criminals and stopping terrorist attacks, not just for saving lives, but
for making money [ ] such a level of recklessness [ ] actually starts costing lives,"
according to the
Jerusalem Post .
Snowden – made famous in 2013 for leaking classified National Security Agency (NSA)
files and exposing the extent of US surveillance – added that "Israel is routinely at the
top of the US' classified threat list of hackers along with Russia and China [ ] even though it
is an ally".
Snowden is wanted in the US for espionage, so could not travel to Tel Aviv to address the
conference in person for fear of being handed over to the authorities.
The Israeli firm to which Snowden referred – NSO Group Technologies – is known
for developing the "Pegasus" software which can be used to remotely infect a target's mobile
phone and then relay back data accessed by the device. Although NSO
claims that its products "are licensed only to legitimate government agencies for the sole
purpose of investigating and preventing crime and terror," this is not the first time its
Pegasus software has been used by Saudi Arabia to track critics.
In October it was
revealed that Saudi Arabia used Pegasus software to eavesdrop on 27-year-old Saudi
dissident Omar Abdulaziz, a prominent critic of the Saudi government on social media.
The revelation was made by Canadian research group
Citizen Lab , which found that the software had been used to hack Abdulaziz' iPhone between
June and August of this year. Citizen Lab's Director Ron Deibert explained that such actions by
Saudi Arabia "would constitute illegal wiretapping".
A separate
report by Citizen Lab in September found a "significant expansion of Pegasus usage in the
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in the Middle East," in particular the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Citizen Lab added that in August 2016, Emirati human
rights activist Ahmed Mansoor was
targeted with the Pegasus spyware.
Snowden's comments come less than a week after it
emerged that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked the United States to stand by
Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman (MBS) in the wake of the Khashoggi case. The revelation
was made by the
Washington Post , which cited information from US officials familiar with a series of
telephone conversations made to Jared Kushner – senior advisor to President Donald Trump
and Trump's son-in-law – and National Security Adviser John Bolton regarding the
Khashoggi case. The officials told the Post that:
In recent days, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu have reached out to the Trump administration to express support for the crown
prince, arguing that he is an important strategic partner in the region, said people familiar
with the calls.
Bin Salman has come under intense scrutiny in the month since Khashoggi first
disappeared , with many
suspecting his involvement in ordering the brutal murder. Yet while several world leaders
have
shunned the crown prince, it is thought
that Israel would suffer from any decline in Saudi influence in the region in light of its
purportedly central role in the upcoming "
Deal of the Century ".
33 Trillion Reasons Why The New York Times Gets It Wrong on Russia-gate
Facebook Said 80,000 Russian Posts Were Buried in 33 Trillion Facebook Offerings Over
Two-Year Period Further Undermining NYT ·s Case
by Gareth Porter Posted on
November 05, 2018 November 3, 2018 Even more damning evidence has come to light
undermining The New York Times ' assertion in September that Russia used social media
to steal the 2016 election for Donald Trump.
The Times '
claim last month that Russian Facebook posts reached nearly as many Americans as actually
voted in the 2016 election exaggerated the significance of those numbers by a factor of
hundreds of millions, as revealed by further evidence from Facebook's own Congressional
testimony.
Further research into an earlier Consortium News
article shows that a relatively paltry 80,000 posts from the private Russian company
Internet Research Agency (IRA) were engulfed in literally trillions of posts on
Facebook over a two-year period before and after the 2016 vote.
That was supposed to have thrown the election, according to the paper of record. In its
10,000-word
article on Sept. 20, the Times reported that 126 million out of 137 million
American voters were exposed to social media posts on Facebook from IRA that somehow had a
hand in delivering Trump the presidency.
The newspaper said: "Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their
effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate
images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook
alone." The paper argued that 126 million was "not far short of the 137 million people
who would vote in the 2016 presidential election."
But Consortium News , on Oct. 10,
debunked that story, pointing out that reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti failed to
report several significant caveats and disclaimers from Facebook officers themselves, whose
statements make the Times' claim that Russian election propaganda "reached" 126
million Americans an exercise in misinformation.
The newspaper failed to tell their readers that Facebook account holders in the United
States had been "served" 33 trillion Facebook posts during that same period -- 413 million
times more than the 80,000 posts from the Russian company.
What Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch testified before the Senate Judiciary
Committee on October 31, 2017 is a far cry from what the Times claims. "Our best
estimate is that approximately 126,000 million people may have been served one of
these [IRA-generated] stories at some time during the two year period," Stretch said.
Stretch was expressing a theoretical possibility rather than an established fact. He said
an estimated 126 million Facebook members might have gotten at least one story
from the IRA –- not over the ten week election period, but over 194 weeks during the
two years 2015 through 2017 – including a full year after the election.
That means only an estimated 29 million FB users may have gotten at least one story
in their feed in two years. The 126 million figure is based only on an assumption that they
shared it with others, according to Stretch.
Facebook didn't even claim most of those 80,000 IRA posts were election–related. It
offered no data on what proportion of the feeds to those 29 million people were.
In addition, Facebook's Vice President for News Feed, Adam Moseri,
acknowledged in 2016 that FB subscribers actually read only about 10 percent of the
stories Facebook puts in their News Feed every day. The means that very few of the IRA
stories that actually make it into a subscriber's news feed on any given day are actually
read.
And now, according to the further research, the odds that Americans saw any of these IRA
ads – let alone were influenced by them – are even more astronomical. In his Oct.
2017 testimony, Stretch said that from 2015 to 2017, "Americans using Facebook were exposed
to, or 'served,' a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds."
To put the 33 trillion figure over two years in perspective, the 80,000 Russian-origin
Facebook posts represented just .0000000024 of total Facebook content in that time.
Shane and Mazzetti did not report the 33 trillion number even though The New York
Times ' own coverage of that 2017 Stretch testimony explicitly
stated , "Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount
of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users' News Feeds
everyday."
The Times ' touting of the bogus 126 million out 137 million voters, while not
reporting the 33 trillion figure, should vie in the annals of journalism as one of the most
spectacularly misleading uses of statistics of all time.
"... Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who rushed off a column before he could have examined Powell's allegations, declared, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise." ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... While the present campaign over Russian "meddling" has much in common with the claims about "weapons of mass destruction," the implications are far more ominous. The "war on terror" is exhausted, in part because the US is allied in Syria and elsewhere with the Islamic fundamentalist organizations it was purportedly fighting. ..."
"... The Mueller indictment is intended to provide an appropriate "narrative" for military aggression motivated by different aims. At the same time, it serves as a ready-made pretext for censorship and domestic repression that goes far beyond the extraordinary measures adopted under the framework of the "war on terror." Russia, the American people are supposed to believe, uses domestic social opposition to weaken the United States, rendering political dissent effectively treasonous. ..."
"... Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it. The target of the repressive measures is not Russia, but the American working class. The ruling elite is well aware that as it plots war abroad, it stands upon a social powder keg at home. ..."
Fifteen years ago, on February 5, 2003, against the backdrop of worldwide mass
demonstrations in opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq, then-US Secretary of State
Colin Powell argued before the United Nations that the government of Saddam Hussein was
rapidly stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction," which Iraq, together with Al Qaeda, was
planning to use against the United States.
In what was the climax of the Bush administration's campaign to justify war, Powell held
up a model vial of anthrax, showed aerial photographs and presented detailed slides
purporting to show the layout of Iraq's "mobile production facilities."
There was only one problem with Powell's presentation: it was a lie from beginning to
end.
The World Socialist Web Site , in an editorial board statement published the next
day, declared the brief for war "the latest act in a diplomatic charade laced with cynicism
and deceit." War against Iraq, the WSWS wrote, was not about "weapons of mass destruction."
Rather, "it is a war of colonial conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political
aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global
hegemony."
The response of the American media, and particularly its liberal wing, was very different.
Powell's litany of lies was presented as the gospel truth, an unanswerable indictment of the
Iraqi government.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who rushed off a column before he could have
examined Powell's allegations, declared, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations --
some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove
to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without
a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude
otherwise."
The editorial board of the New York Times -- whose reporter Judith Miller was at
the center of the Bush administration's campaign of lies -- declared one week later that
there "is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has
the capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and
more recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors."
Subsequent developments would prove who was lying. The Bush administration and its media
accomplices conspired to drag the US into a war that led to the deaths of more than one
million people -- a colossal crime for which no one has yet been held accountable.
Fifteen years later, the script has been pulled from the closet and dusted off. This time,
instead of "weapons of mass destruction," it is "Russian meddling in the US elections." Once
again, assertions by US intelligence agencies and operatives are treated as fact. Once again,
the media is braying for war. Once again, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the American
government -- which intervenes in the domestic politics of every state on the planet and has
been relentlessly expanding its operations in Eastern Europe -- are ignored.
The argument presented by the American media is that the alleged existence of a
fly-by-night operation, employing a few hundred people, with a budget amounting to a
minuscule fraction of total election spending in the US, constitutes a "a virtual war against
the United States through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda" ( New York
Times ).
In the countless articles and media commentary along this vein, nowhere can one find a
serious analysis of the Mueller indictment of the Russians itself, let alone an examination
of the real motivations behind the US campaign against Russia. The fact that the indictment
does not even involve the Russian government or state officials is treated as a nonissue.
While the present campaign over Russian "meddling" has much in common with the claims
about "weapons of mass destruction," the implications are far more ominous. The "war on
terror" is exhausted, in part because the US is allied in Syria and elsewhere with the
Islamic fundamentalist organizations it was purportedly fighting.
More fundamentally, the quarter-century of invasions and occupations that followed the
dissolution of the Soviet Union is rapidly developing into a conflict between major
nuclear-armed powers. The effort of the American ruling class to offset its economic decline
using military force is leading mankind to the brink of another world war. As the National
Defense Strategy, published less than a month before the release of the indictments,
declared, "Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US
national security."
Russia is seen by dominant sections of the military-intelligence apparatus as a principal
obstacle to US efforts to control the Middle East and to take on China -- and it is this that
has been at the center of the conflict between the Democratic Party and the Trump
administration.
There have already been a series of clashes in recent weeks between the world's two
largest nuclear-armed powers. On February 3, a Russian close-air support fighter was shot
down by al-Nusra Front fighters, which are indirectly allied with the United States in its
proxy war against the government of Bashar Al-Assad. Then, on February 7 and 8, Russian
soldiers were killed in US air and artillery barrages in Deir Ezzor, in what survivors called
a "massacre." Both the US and Russian governments have sought to downplay the scale of the
clash, but some sources have reported the number killed to be in the hundreds.
Even as US and Russian forces clashed in Syria, representatives of the Kremlin and the
Pentagon sparred at the Munich security conference this weekend over the deployment and
development of nuclear weapons. While accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Washington this month issued a nuclear posture review
envisioning a massive expansion of the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons.
The Mueller indictment is intended to provide an appropriate "narrative" for military
aggression motivated by different aims. At the same time, it serves as a ready-made pretext
for censorship and domestic repression that goes far beyond the extraordinary measures
adopted under the framework of the "war on terror." Russia, the American people are supposed
to believe, uses domestic social opposition to weaken the United States, rendering political
dissent effectively treasonous.
Already, this campaign has led the major US technology firms to implement far-reaching
measures to censor political speech on the Internet. Google is manipulating its search
results and Facebook is manipulating its news feeds, while seeking to turn the social media
platform it has developed into an instrument of corporate-state surveillance.
Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic
principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it.
The target of the repressive measures is not Russia, but the American working class. The
ruling elite is well aware that as it plots war abroad, it stands upon a social powder keg at
home.
The working class must draw the necessary conclusions from its past experiences. In 2003,
the Democratic Party supported the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq and provided it
with the necessary political cover. Now, the Democrats, along with their appendages among the
organizations of the upper-middle class, are at the forefront of the campaign for war,
employing neo-McCarthyite tactics to criminalize opposition while seeking to subordinate all
popular opposition to the Trump administration to its right-wing and militarist agenda.
The urgent task is to mobilize the working class, in the United States and
internationally, against the entire apparatus of the capitalist ruling elite. The fight
against war and dictatorship is at the same time the fight against inequality and
exploitation, for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a global socialist
society.
MUST WATCH: Shocking Video by Comedian Bill Maher - Russia Delusion Still Raging Among US
LiberalsRichard
Brandt 10 min ago | 600 words 10
131RussiaHoax Bill Maher outdid
himself recently with this video, but in doing so, he inadvertently showed how out of touch the
Jewish Hollywood liberal elites like Maher are with most of the country, and even more so with
the rest of the world.
Take the 5 minutes to watch the video, it is an eye-opener. Bullet points follow below:
Somehow, Maher managed to pack the following into his monologue:
Republican party has become the party of Putin.
He brings up the pee tape (again)
Trump is a Russian "ho", Putin is his pimp
Compares Putin to Bin Laden
Russia "flipped" the entire Republican party
Russia is a dictator who keeps attacking the US
Putin is a thug
Russians are racists, that's why Conservatives like them
Says how wonderful he thinks it is that the UK, Germany, and France have become
multi-racial countries over the last 20 years. Says Russia bad for not doing the same.
Russia is a "Honkey Oasis"
Russia has "taken over America" by meddling in her elections.
It's interesting that Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote that Jews will have to die by force, is a
media darling. Robert Bowers said something very similar today, and is rightly demonized. We
could do with a lot less hagiography of Khashoggi, as well.
(Now in case you made the mental leap to thinking I don't wan't Khashoggi's killers held
accountable, let me be clear: they should be held accountable.)
Two disappearances, and two very different responses from Western governments, which
illustrates their rank hypocrisy.
When former Russian spy Sergei Skripal went missing in England earlier this year, there was
almost immediate punitive action by the British government and its NATO allies against Moscow.
By contrast, Western governments are straining with restraint towards Saudi Arabia over the
more shocking and provable case of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The outcry by Western governments and media over the Skripal affair was deafening and
resulted in Britain, the US and some 28 other countries
expelling dozens of Russian diplomats on the back of unsubstantiated British allegations
that the Kremlin tried to assassinate an exiled spy with a deadly nerve agent. The Trump
administration has further tightened sanctions
citing the Skripal incident.
London's case against Moscow has been marked by wild speculation and ropey innuendo. No
verifiable evidence of what actually happened to Sergei Skripal (67) and his daughter Yulia has
been presented by the British authorities . Their claim that President Vladimir Putin
sanctioned a hit squad armed with nerve poison relies on sheer conjecture.
All we know for sure is that the Skripals have been disappeared from public contact by the British authorities for more than
seven months, since the mysterious incident of alleged poisoning in Salisbury on March 4.
Russian authorities and family relatives have been steadfastly refused any contact by London with the Skripal pair, despite
more than 60 official requests from Moscow in accordance with international law and in spite of the fact that Yulia is a citizen
of the Russian Federation with consular rights.
It is an outrage that based on such thin ice of "evidence", the British have built an edifice of censure against Moscow,
rallying an international campaign of further sanctions and diplomatic expulsions.
Now contrast that strenuous reaction, indeed hyper over-reaction, with how Britain, the US, France, Canada and other Western
governments are ever-so slowly responding to Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi case.
After nearly two weeks since Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, the Saudi regime is this week
finally admitting he was killed on their premises – albeit, they claim, in a "botched interrogation".
"... Whether Twitter had made an honest mistake, or scrambled to engage in damage control, is sort of immaterial at this point. Some of his posts have been archived , but not responses to them. All that suspending his account accomplished is to make it more difficult to parse the Florida man's motives. By the way, Sayoc's Facebook page was likewise taken down on Friday. ..."
The history of criminal behavior and online threats by Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man charged
with sending suspicious packages to prominent Democrats, somehow went ignored by both
government and social media police.
Sayoc, 56, was arrested on Friday, and stands accused of sending pipe bombs - 14, as of the
last count - to former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, actor Robert De Niro,
billionaire Democrat donors George Soros and Tom Steyer, and several Democrat lawmakers.
Federal authorities have refused to speculate on the suspect's motives, but news outlets
quickly pored over Sayoc's social media
feeds , finding photos and videos of pro-Trump memes, Trump rallies, and abusive language
towards Democrats. A van in which he reportedly lived, after losing his home to foreclosure,
was covered in pro-Trump decals. Twitter #Resistance activists, who had already coined the term
"MAGAbomber" to describe the suspect, rejoiced.
It was Sayoc's prior run-ins with the law that allowed the FBI to find him, matching a
fingerprint and DNA from some of the packages to samples they had on file. His criminal record
shows charges of grand theft, misdemeanor theft, battery, felony steroid possession, and even
threatening a bomb attack in 2002 - leaving an open question of how he kept getting
away with it all, over and over again.
Then there is the matter of Sayoc's social media accounts. Over the past two years, under
intense pressure by Democrats and drummed-up charges of "Russian meddling," Twitter and
Facebook have cracked down on users left
and right . Time and again, people engaging in protected free speech have been " shadowbanned " or
suspended, permanently or until they deleted posts someone reported as "offensive."
Yet when Democratic strategist Rochelle Ritchie actually reported Sayoc's account to Twitter
two weeks ago, over a threat she received from him after appearing on a Fox News show,
Twitter did not find the post
objectionable .
Richie then received an email from Twitter saying
the previous response to her complaint had been "an error."
Whether Twitter had made an honest mistake, or scrambled to engage in damage control, is
sort of immaterial at this point. Some of his posts have been archived , but
not responses to them. All that suspending his account accomplished is to make it more
difficult to parse the Florida man's motives. By the way, Sayoc's Facebook page was likewise
taken down on Friday.
Both Twitter and Facebook claim they are trying to improve "conversations" on their
platforms, and that their purges are nonpartisan. While technically correct, that's misleading.
Establishment figures and outfits somehow always skate, while both critics of Clintonism on the
left and Trump Republicans end up under the banhammer.
Meanwhile, the social media giants continue to insist they are not publishers, and delegate
the dirty work of policing to quasi-NGOs like the National Endowment for
Democracy and the Atlantic Council . They
end up deciding who's a "Russian bot" or "Iranian troll" based on arbitrary criteria, which the
mainstream media repeats uncritically.
That someone like Sayoc ended up under the radar of both the authorities and social media
police suggests that he was either deliberately tolerated, or that their "defense of democracy"
is a sham. It is perhaps fitting that none of Sayoc's bombs actually exploded; the only thing
they blew up in the end seems to be some illusions.
The Turkish account of the murder of Khashoggi given by President Erdogan is true, in every
detail. Audio and video evidence exists and has been widely shared with world intelligence
agencies, including the US, UK, Russia and Germany, and others which have a relationship with
Turkey or are seen as influential. That is why, despite their desperate desire to do so, no
Western country has been able to maintain support for Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. I have
not seen the video from inside the consulate, but have been shown stills which may be from a
video. The most important thing to say is that they are not from a fixed position camera and
appear at first sight consistent with the idea they are taken by a device brought in by the
victim. I was only shown them briefly. I have not heard the audio recording.
There are many things to learn from the gruesome murder other than the justified outrage at
the event itself. It opens a window on the truly horrible world of the extremely powerful and
wealthy.
The first thing to say is that the current Saudi explanation, that this was an intended
interrogation and abduction gone wrong, though untrue, does have one thing going for it. It is
their regular practice. The Saudis have for years been abducting dissidents abroad and
returning them to the Kingdom to be secretly killed. The BBC World Service often contains
little pockets of decent journalism not reflected in its main news outlets, and here from
August 2017 is a little noticed piece on the abduction and
"disappearance" of three other senior Saudis between 2015-17. Interestingly, while the piece
was updated this month, it was not to include the obvious link to the Khashoggi case.
The key point is that European authorities turned a completely blind eye to the abductions
in that BBC report, even when performed on European soil and involving physical force. The
Saudi regime was really doing very little different in the Khashoggi case. In fact, inside
Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi was a less senior and important figure than those other three abducted
then killed, about whom nobody kicked up any fuss, even though the truth was readily available.
Mohammed Bin Salman appears to have made two important miscalculations: he misread Erdogan and
he underestimated the difference which Khashoggi's position as a Washington Post journalist
made to political pressure on Western governments.
Khashoggi should not himself be whitewashed. He had a long term professional association
with the Saudi security services which put him on the side of prolific torturers and killers
for decades. That does not in any sense justify his killing. But it is right to be deeply
sceptical of the democratic credentials of Saudis who were in with the regime and have become
vocal for freedom and democracy only after being marginalised by Mohammed Bin Salman's ruthless
consolidation of power (which built on a pre-existing trend).
The same scepticism is true many times over when related to CIA Director Gina Haspel, who
personally supervised torture in the CIA torture and extraordinary rendition programme.
Haspel was sent urgently to Ankara by Donald Trump to attempt to deflect Erdogan from any
direct accusation of Mohammed Bin Salman in his speech yesterday. MBS' embrace of de facto
alliance with Israel, in pursuit of his fanatic hatred of Shia Muslims, is the cornerstone of
Trump's Middle East policy.
Haspel's brief was very simple. She took with her intercept intelligence that purportedly
shows massive senior level corruption in the Istanbul Kanal project, and suggested that Erdogan
may not find it a good idea if intelligence agencies started to make public all the information
they hold.
Whether Erdogan held back in his speech yesterday as a result of Haspel's intervention I do
not know. Erdogan may be keeping cards up his sleeve for his own purpose, particularly relating
to intercepts of phone and Skype calls from the killers direct to MBS' office. I have an
account of Haspel's brief from a reliable source, but have not been updated on who she then
met, or what the Turks said to her. It does seem very probable, from Trump's shift in position
this morning to indicate MBS may be involved, that Haspel was convinced the Turks have further
strong evidence and may well use it.
Meantime, the British government maintains throughout that, whatever else happens, British
factories will continue to supply bombs to Saudi Arabia to
massacre children on school buses and untold numbers of other civilians. Many Tory
politicians remain personally in Saudi pockets, with former Defence Minister Michael Fallon
revealed today as being amongst them.
It is of course extraordinary that Saudi war crimes in Yemen, its military suppression of
democracy in Bahrain, its frequent executions of dissidents, human rights defenders, and Shia
religious figures, even its arrests of feminists, have had little impact in the West. But the
horrible murder of Khashoggi has caught the public imagination and forced western politicians
to at least pretend to want to do something about the Saudis whose wealth they crave. I expect
any sanctions will be smoke and mirrors.
Mohammed Bin Salman is no fool, and he realises that to punish members of his personal
security detail who were just following his orders, would put him in the position of Caligula
and the Praetorian Guard, and not tend to his long term safety. Possibly people will be
reassigned, or there will be brief imprisonments till nobody is looking. If I were a dissident
or Shia in Saudi Arabia who bore any kind of physical resemblance to any of the party of
murderers, I would get out very quick.
With every sympathy for his horrible murder, Khashoggi and his history as a functionary of
the brutal Saudi regime should not be whitewashed. Mohammed Bin Salman is directly responsible
for his murder, and if there is finally international understanding that he is a dangerous
psychopath, that is a good thing. You will forgive me for saying that I explained this back
in
March whilst the entire mainstream media, awash with Saudi PR cash, was praising him as a
great reformer. For the Americans to deploy Gina Haspel gives us a welcome reminder that they
are in absolutely no position to moralise. Whatever comes of this will not be "justice". The
truth the leads can reveal is much wider than the narrow question of the murder incident, as I
hope this article sketches out. That the fallout derails to some extent the murder machine in
Yemen is profoundly to be hoped.
For most of the guys, killings got to be accepted. Murder was the only way that everybody
stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules. But
sometimes, even if people didn't get out of line, they got whacked. I mean, hits just became
a habit for some of the guys. Guys would get into arguments over nothing and before you knew
it, one of them was dead. And they were shooting each other all the time. Shooting people was
a normal thing. It was no big deal.
We had a serious problem with Billy Batts Jamal Khashoggi. This was really a
touchy thing. Tommy'd MbS killed a made guy. Batts Khashoggi was part
of the Gambino Neocon crew and was considered untouchable. Before you could touch
a made guy, you had to have a good reason. You had to have a sitdown, and you better get an
okay, or you'd be the one who got whacked.
Khashoggi was a made man in DC. Nobody in Yemen is.
Stephen J.
October 26, 2018 at 11:19 am
The "power structure" is filled with:
-- -
"The Horrified Hypocrites"
Anybody with a spark of human decency is surely horrified at the latest murderous Saudi
atrocity. But to see the so-called international community, the corporate media, business
leaders and all the other political elites and establishment members all rightly upset over the
horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi is, I believe, to see selective hypocrisy in action.
Where were these "pillars of society" when the Saudis murdered schoolchildren travelling in
a school bus in Yemen? Did that get blanket coverage in the newsrooms of the "investigative
media"? Did any of them speak out daily? Oh, I forgot, some of these "honourable people" sell
arms to the Saudis, do sword dances with them, kiss their cheeks, [1] and call them "allies."
Now they pretend to be outraged at their Saudi friends. Therefore, I ask:
What kind of "people" slaughter children in a school bus in Yemen?
What kind of army guides the missiles into the school bus?
What kind of "democratic governments" support this slaughter?
What kind of governments sells weapons to the killers of children?
What kind of politicians call selling weapons "creating jobs"?
What kind of politicians vote for illegal wars?
Furthermore, what kind of media covers up the crimes of the war criminals [1a] [1b] in our
midst that have supplied the weapons to the Saudis and joined their "Coalition of Carnage" [2]
that is destroying and committing "Genocide in Yemen"? [2a]
[read more at link below] http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-horrified-hypocrites.html
comments
Submitted by dkmich on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 7:44am Thanks for the link. Thanks
for the link. Interesting news. Good to know those ruling elites are all alike. Greedy as all
hell and indifferent to how they murder people and how many. Some just like to hide their
atrocities, others don't.
But if the Saudi power structure were ever to crumble in the wake of the Khashoggi scandal,
there would likely be chaos because there is no alternative to replace it.
Since when do we care about that? All we care about is oil and money. It is very possible that
it could be a good thing. Maybe the globe would dump oil for energy, and bomb makers would have
to blow up the US or build our infrastructure instead. up 6 users have voted. --
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
"From 2016 to 2017, foreign direct investment in Saudi Arabia plummeted by an astonishing 80
percent, from about $7.5 billion to about $1.4 billion, according to the U.N. Conference on Trade
and Development. Net capital outflows were also way up -- largely because wealthy Saudis were
moving money abroad, noted Phillip Cornell, an expert in the Saudi economy at the Atlantic
Council ."
"...both savvy outside investors and many Saudi businessmen no longer had faith in the
kingdom, considering "the crown prince's authoritarian tendencies" and "capricious economic
policy choices," Cornell said."
Since obviously authoritarianism abounds, and neither the Atlantic Council nor anybody else in
real power in this country gives a shit, I'm guessing the real problem lay in the "economic
policy choices."
Digging through the article to find actual information on those policy choices, I come up with
this:
"For example, the swift outflow of money has forced Mohammed bin Salman's government to put in
some informal capital controls -- but that only made foreign money even more reluctant
to come in. The Saudi government has cost itself credibility by promising to balance the
budget and reduce unemployment to 9 percent only to back away from those pledges."
Anybody know what those "informal capital controls" are?
Any reason the elites would give a shit whether Saudi Arabia's governmental budget was
balanced, or how many of their people are unemployed?
EDIT: On re-reading, the "informal capital controls" seem to have followed the exodus of
foreign money, not preceded it, so, although clearly the elites don't like those controls (as Mr.
Cornell of the Atlantic Council said), that couldn't have been the impetus for the global
financial elites to try to spank bin Salman and stand him in a corner.
What did he do (probably in late 2016 or 2017) that pissed them all off?
What did he do (probably in late 2016 or 2017) that pissed them all off?
MBS was appointed crown prince/heir in June 2017, but then the article doesnt say exactly when
the dropoff happened either. I can certainly see the Saudi royals seeing the writing on the wall
and moving their money out before MBS' appointment, but did MBS have enough power to make
decisions affecting external investors then (or would they know that he was a future tyrant,
given how the west fawned over him then)? My understanding is that his primary responsibilities
in 2016 were Vision 2030, which doesn't seem to me to have a bearing on this.
In short, more information is needed before accepting this article's conclusions.
t comments
Submitted by Cant Stop the M... on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 2:21pm @sny Given that its main@sny
Given that its main (read only) source is that guy from the Atlantic Council, your point is well
taken.
They're just rich, and only as "powerful" as people believe they are.
It should go without saying that the measure of a man cannot possibly be determined in dollars
and cents.
Gods and heroes do walk among us - but they're not these macro-mediocrities.
Everyone's got to stop validating what is nothing more than, shall we call it, 'grand theft
ego.'
I keep thinking of the Shift the Ape from The Last Battle , the final book of The
Chronicles of Narnia - people can't (or won't) see past the various specific offensive
allegories, but if one does, that character actually strikes me as one of the most underrated
villains in all of English literature: A contemptible mediocrity who, in a benighted age,
presumes to hijack a mantle of greatness he doesn't understand, only to sour people on the very
idea of greatness, when that is precisely what the world needs most. When the cats are away, the
mice will play.
#2#2#2
Apparently bin Salman has done something that fiddled with the elite's plans.
Huh. I googled "bin Salman" and look at one of the first things that came up:
How Mohammed bin Salman Turned Saudi Arabia Into an Investment Wasteland
"From 2016 to 2017, foreign direct investment in Saudi Arabia plummeted by an astonishing
80 percent, from about $7.5 billion to about $1.4 billion, according to the U.N. Conference
on Trade and Development. Net capital outflows were also way up -- largely because wealthy
Saudis were moving money abroad, noted Phillip Cornell, an expert in the Saudi economy
at the Atlantic Council ."
"...both savvy outside investors and many Saudi businessmen no longer had faith in the
kingdom, considering "the crown prince's authoritarian tendencies" and "capricious
economic policy choices," Cornell said."
Since obviously authoritarianism abounds, and neither the Atlantic Council nor anybody
else in real power in this country gives a shit, I'm guessing the real problem lay in the
"economic policy choices."
Digging through the article to find actual information on those policy choices, I come up
with this:
"For example, the swift outflow of money has forced Mohammed bin Salman's government to
put in some informal capital controls -- but that only made foreign money even
more reluctant to come in. The Saudi government has cost itself credibility by promising
to balance the budget and reduce unemployment to 9 percent only to back away from those
pledges."
Anybody know what those "informal capital controls" are?
Any reason the elites would give a shit whether Saudi Arabia's governmental budget was
balanced, or how many of their people are unemployed?
EDIT: On re-reading, the "informal capital controls" seem to have followed the exodus of
foreign money, not preceded it, so, although clearly the elites don't like those controls (as
Mr. Cornell of the Atlantic Council said), that couldn't have been the impetus for the global
financial elites to try to spank bin Salman and stand him in a corner.
What did he do (probably in late 2016 or 2017) that pissed them all off?
Submitted by Cant Stop the M... on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 10:48am My question's not rhetorical; I hope
somebody on here knows more about foreign policy than I do. Nobody's been more surprised
than me that the Saudi Arabians have begun to be actually held accountable for anything, given
that we accepted it without a murmur when a bunch of Saudis came over here and murdered a few
thousand of our civilians.
comments
Submitted by Linda Wood on Sat, 10/27/2018 - 11:32am I'm hoping@Cant
Stop the Macedonian Signal
all the disconnects are happening now because the 9/11 Victims' lawsuit may finally be allowed to
take place against the Saudi princes named in the suit, one of whom is the current king.
One of the last things to happen in the Obama administration was JASTA, The Justice Against
Sponsors of Terrorism Act, passed by Congress, narrowing the scope of the legal doctrine of
foreign sovereign immunity.
For most of the guys, killings got to be accepted. Murder was the only way that everybody
stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules. But sometimes,
even if people didn't get out of line, they got whacked. I mean, hits just became a habit for
some of the guys. Guys would get into arguments over nothing and before you knew it, one of
them was dead. And they were shooting each other all the time. Shooting people was a normal
thing. It was no big deal.
We had a serious problem with Billy Batts Jamal Khashoggi. This was really a
touchy thing. Tommy'd MbS killed a made guy. Batts Khashoggi was part of
the Gambino Neocon crew and was considered untouchable. Before you could touch a
made guy, you had to have a good reason. You had to have a sitdown, and you better get an okay,
or you'd be the one who got whacked.
Khashoggi was a made man in DC. Nobody in Yemen is.
"... If the United States imposed sanctions on Saudi Arabia, other major arms exporters such as Britain would probably also be forced to take similar measures. ..."
"... Who knew this would happen? This should be an example for all the neocons and hyper-nationalists in the US. The wahabbiyeen ..."
"... So can the rest of NATO. If the Russians and/or the Chinese really want to be stuck with this Tar Baby, let them try it on! But! But! The Iranian threat! The Iranian threat! Threat to what? Israel? ..."
"... It's not the petro, but the "petrodollar" system. Now if India, Japan, China, or most any country, I suppose, want to buy Saudi oil it must use US Dollars. This goes back to deals made by Simon & Kissinger with the K of Saudi Barbaria when Nixon took the US off the gold standard and the Near East was awash with money after the oil shock following the Arab Oil Embargo. ..."
"... First of all, the system of petrodollars, which basically requires nearly all purchases of petroleum to be paid in dollars, is underwritten by the Saudis. ..."
"... Petrodollars in turn enable the United States to print money for which there is no backing knowing that there will always be international demand for dollars to buy oil. The Saudis, who also use their own petrodollars to buy U.S. treasury bonds, could pull the plug on that arrangement ..."
"... Whenever a medium size country has taken steps to wean itself from the petrodollar, it has been taken out: Saddam Hussein taking steps to move to the Euro; Qaddafi talking about creating a pan-African currency for trade. It was no accident that Obama had to ship hundreds of millions of dollar bills to Iran for his nuke deal. It was their own money in T bills and bank deposits that had been frozen and because of sanctions they wanted cold hard cash. ..."
"... If the Saudis attempt to carry out their threat to move away from the petrodollar or start seriously liquidating their US treasury holdings, the KSA government would be de-legitimized, overthrown, the oil fields seized, and the country carved up. This is what Nixon would have done in 1973 if they hadn't agreed to the petrodollar deal ..."
"... There are pros & cons in having the reserve currency. The pro is naturally the ability to exchange paper for real goods. The con is that we have to run trade deficits to export dollars and then provide deep & liquid asset markets for those dollars to return. There's many reasons why the Chinese Yuan can't easily supplant the USD as a reserve currency. First, they don't have a fully convertible currency. Then their asset markets are neither open nor deep & liquid. China would also have to reverse their mercantilist policy to have the Yuan as a world reserve currency. ..."
"... China & Russia have sold hundreds of billions of Treasury bonds over the past few years. For crying out loud, the Fed is selling $600 billion annually now to normalize their balance sheet. Add to the over $1 trillion in fresh borrowing by the Treasury and you can see interest rates edge up to attract buyers. In any crisis most investors around the world still prefer US government backed securities. ..."
"... Two problems w Afghanistan. First, We shouldn't have interfered w the Soviets bringing modernity to them. That was the beginning of weaponized Wahhabism and the worldwide spread of Saudi financed madrassas. It pushed out Sufi and secular minded Muslims in favor of Takfiri Jihadists. Second, we should have declared victory after the fall of Kabul and left. ..."
"... Problem w/Iraq. It was the wrong country to invade, none of the 9/11 Islamist thugs on the airplanes were from secular Iraq ..."
"... Nixon provoked the 73 oil embargo with his resupply of the Israelis w/ Operation Nickel Grass ..."
"... I speculate he went off the gold standard in order to print enough money to finance the Vietnam war -- just speculation. ..."
"... FB Ali had a link to an article on the extent of Saudi money flowing into Silicon Valley. ..."
"In the United States, a bipartisan group of senators triggered global Magnitsky Act sanctions procedures two weeks ago, forcing
Trump to determine possible punishments against Saudi Arabia or Saudi officials over Khashoggi's killing.
If the United States imposed sanctions on Saudi Arabia, other major arms exporters such as Britain would probably also be forced
to take similar measures.
But in Berlin, top officials hope that their move to suspend future sales could pressure other European allies into following
suit, even if the United States refrained from doing so. Germany's export stop will have little impact "if at the same time other
countries fill this gap,"
Merkel's ally Altmaier acknowledged Monday."
--------------
Germany has gone "anti-medieval" on Saudi Arabia.
Who knew this would happen? This should be an example for all the neocons and hyper-nationalists in the US. The wahabbiyeen
are playing them for suckers over the promised contracts. So far the "contracts" are just promises of contracts. That is not an unusual
way to proceed in big business contracting; first the promise, then the contract, but nevertheless, the contracts do not exist as
yet. We can survive without Saudi money.
So can the rest of NATO. If the Russians and/or the Chinese really want to be stuck with this Tar Baby, let them try it on!
But! But! The Iranian threat! The Iranian threat! Threat to what? Israel? pl
It's not the petro, but the "petrodollar" system. Now if India, Japan, China, or most any country, I suppose, want to buy
Saudi oil it must use US Dollars. This goes back to deals made by Simon & Kissinger with the K of Saudi Barbaria when Nixon took
the US off the gold standard and the Near East was awash with money after the oil shock following the Arab Oil Embargo. PHILIP
M. GIRALDI explains it better than I could:
"Saudi Arabia, for its part, has a couple of cards to play also even if it did kill and dismember Khashoggi under orders from
the Crown Prince. First of all, the system of petrodollars, which basically requires nearly all purchases of petroleum to
be paid in dollars, is underwritten by the Saudis.
Petrodollars in turn enable the United States to print money for which there is no backing knowing that there will always
be international demand for dollars to buy oil. The Saudis, who also use their own petrodollars to buy U.S. treasury bonds, could
pull the plug on that arrangement. "
Whenever a medium size country has taken steps to wean itself from the petrodollar, it has been taken out: Saddam Hussein
taking steps to move to the Euro; Qaddafi talking about creating a pan-African currency for trade. It was no accident that Obama
had to ship hundreds of millions of dollar bills to Iran for his nuke deal. It was their own money in T bills and bank deposits
that had been frozen and because of sanctions they wanted cold hard cash.
If the Saudis attempt to carry out their threat to move away from the petrodollar or start seriously liquidating their
US treasury holdings, the KSA government would be de-legitimized, overthrown, the oil fields seized, and the country carved up.
This is what Nixon would have done in 1973 if they hadn't agreed to the petrodollar deal.
"...if India, Japan, China, or most any country, I suppose, want to buy Saudi oil it must use US Dollars."
Wrong. It is whatever Saudi Arabia is willing to accept for its crude. It could be Euro, Japanese Yen, Chinese Yuan or Russian
Rubles. Or even soybeans, wheat or coffee. Note that most crude are sold on long-term bilateral agreements and not on spot markets.
There are pros & cons in having the reserve currency. The pro is naturally the ability to exchange paper for real goods.
The con is that we have to run trade deficits to export dollars and then provide deep & liquid asset markets for those dollars
to return. There's many reasons why the Chinese Yuan can't easily supplant the USD as a reserve currency. First, they don't have
a fully convertible currency. Then their asset markets are neither open nor deep & liquid. China would also have to reverse their
mercantilist policy to have the Yuan as a world reserve currency.
The petrodollar analysis that many promote including the article you linked by Phil Giraldi show they don't know much about
trade finance. Saudi Arabia doesn't have to hold dollars that they gain from selling their oil in dollars. They can sell those
dollars to those that want it like a Cayman Island hedge fund that wants to go long dollars. The USD fx markets are deep and very
liquid.
China & Russia have sold hundreds of billions of Treasury bonds over the past few years. For crying out loud, the Fed is
selling $600 billion annually now to normalize their balance sheet. Add to the over $1 trillion in fresh borrowing by the Treasury
and you can see interest rates edge up to attract buyers. In any crisis most investors around the world still prefer US government
backed securities.
I lunched with Giraldi the day before his article on this was published. i questioned his economic argument. As you say, he says
that the need for enough US dollars in foreign circulation to make foreign transactions for petroleum possible under the present
system and that, as you say, that causes the US to create enough dollars for that system to work. That is essentially unconnected
from most functions of the US economy since the dollars stay overseas.
This is not true when the petrodollars are used by Saudi Arabia as funny money to buy US securities or US government sales
of heavy equipment like civilian or military aircraft. The Saudis now have their surrogate "Zillim" (slaves) on TV making preposterous
claims that a move away from denominating petro currency sales in dollars would collapse the US economy. Are you buying into that?
I am not and told Giraldi that.
The obverse of that argument is what you are advocating which is that if the Saudi try to tank our economy by selling their
US assets, then we should "coalition" them out of existence. Know that this would result in an occupation for decades accompanied
by incessant guerrilla war in what is now Saudi Arabia. This would be another Afghanistan or Iraq. Perhaps it would e worth it.
The Holy Cities are in the Hejaz. Hussein of Jordan would love to get them back and the Turks would back him. The oil fields are
in the Shia East. (Shades of the NeoCon Lt Col Ralph Peters Blood Map. Zykes!) The KSA and UAE have been making enemies all over
the place. Even Kuwait is afraid of a Saudi invasion.
Two problems w Afghanistan. First, We shouldn't have interfered w the Soviets bringing modernity to them. That was the
beginning of weaponized Wahhabism and the worldwide spread of Saudi financed madrassas. It pushed out Sufi and secular minded
Muslims in favor of Takfiri Jihadists. Second, we should have declared victory after the fall of Kabul and left.
Problem w/Iraq. It was the wrong country to invade, none of the 9/11 Islamist thugs on the airplanes were from secular
Iraq. No, not advocating an invasion, but believe the House of Saud would be overthrown if they start messing with the petrodollar.
Nixon provoked the 73 oil embargo with his resupply of the Israelis w/ Operation Nickel Grass
I guess he figured if they were on the ropes they would break out their nukes? I speculate he went off the gold standard
in order to print enough money to finance the Vietnam war -- just speculation.
I would not be surprised if the Saudis and Gulfies don't hold an amount of US debt in the order of Trillions. I read that foreigners
own some 47% of the US public debt of some $13 trillion or so. But others here surely have more expertise on this matter.
You really want the US to invade Saudi Arabia. What an awful idea! Do you think the populace would greet us with open arms? They
would not! American son and daughters would fight there for generations. Who would govern the place, the Israeli agent neocons?
Would Kushner be governor of the Eastern Province? The Hashemites could only govern the Hijaz (Mecca and Medina) as agents
of Turkey. Hussein is long dead.
You are correct. We, the USA as a nation can easily survive even prosper without the Saudi and Gulfie oil and money. But can
our political, governmental and media classes survive the loss of their easy path to riches?
FB Ali had a link to an article on the extent of Saudi money flowing into Silicon Valley. What would Masayoshi Son
and his Softbank Vision Fund do without the $45 billion committed by the Saudis. Just the management fees on this gigantic venture
fund pays some hefty salaries and expenses.
The first thing to say is that the current Saudi explanation, that this was an intended
interrogation and abduction gone wrong, though untrue, does have one thing going for it. It is
their regular practice. The Saudis have for years been abducting dissidents abroad and
returning them to the Kingdom to be secretly killed. The BBC World Service often contains
little pockets of decent journalism not reflected in its main news outlets, and here from
August 2017 is a little noticed piece on the abduction and
"disappearance" of three other senior Saudis between 2015-17. Interestingly, while the piece
was updated this month, it was not to include the obvious link to the Khashoggi case.
... ... ...
...The BBC World Service often contains little pockets of decent journalism not reflected in
its main news outlets, and here from August 2017 is a little noticed piece on the abduction and
"disappearance" of three other senior Saudis between 2015-17. Interestingly, while the piece
was updated this month, it was not to include the obvious link to the Khashoggi case.
The key point is that European authorities turned a completely blind eye to the abductions
in that BBC report, even when performed on European soil and involving physical force. The
Saudi regime was really doing very little different in the Khashoggi case. In fact, inside
Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi was a less senior and important figure than those other three abducted
then killed, about whom nobody kicked up any fuss, even though the truth was readily available.
Mohammed Bin Salman appears to have made two important miscalculations: he misread Erdogan and
he underestimated the difference which Khashoggi's position as a Washington Post journalist
made to political pressure on Western governments.
Khashoggi should not himself be whitewashed. He had a long term professional association
with the Saudi security services which put him on the side of prolific torturers and killers
for decades. That does not in any sense justify his killing. But it is right to be deeply
sceptical of the democratic credentials of Saudis who were in with the regime and have become
vocal for freedom and democracy only after being marginalised by Mohammed Bin Salman's ruthless
consolidation of power (which built on a pre-existing trend).
The same scepticism is true many times over when related to CIA Director Gina Haspel, who
personally supervised torture in the CIA torture and extraordinary rendition programme.
Haspel was sent urgently to Ankara by Donald Trump to attempt to deflect Erdogan from any
direct accusation of Mohammed Bin Salman in his speech yesterday. MBS' embrace of de facto
alliance with Israel, in pursuit of his fanatic hatred of Shia Muslims, is the cornerstone of
Trump's Middle East policy.
Haspel's brief was very simple. She took with her intercept intelligence that purportedly
shows massive senior level corruption in the Istanbul Kanal project, and suggested that Erdogan
may not find it a good idea if intelligence agencies started to make public all the information
they hold.
This video has been on all the major news networks, but I would like you to turn up the
sound, watch the twitches and pay close attention to the very definite problems that the Crown
Prince is having with his nose.
Here – apart from sniffing and a runny nose – from a treatment website
is a list of some of the mental symptoms of cocaine abuse. An interesting take on the reckless
Khashoggi assassination?
Does bring to mind Stalin's observation that "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." The
Saudi's have been using precision guided munitions in a most imprecise manner to murder thousands of men, women and children in
Yemen too a very muted western outcry.
It has taken the, albeit particularly gruesome, murder of Mr Khashoggi to elicit widespread outage. The arms deals that Trump
talks about are not producing weapons to kill the Mr Khashoggi's of this world, but rather to render wholesale destruction of
a mass enemy.
The killing was outrageous, but so many commenters seem as if they don't know that Saudi executions are beheadings by sword
carried out in public (after Friday prayers) before hundreds of onlookers. Videos are available everywhere. The condemned are
forced to kneel on the ground, no blind fold, having seen the swordsman standing a few feet away.
This country has been "our best Arab friend" dating back to FDR. Knowing all this, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama and now Trump
have all embraced the royal Saudis.
top U.S. universities. Back in 2005, the Saudi gov't gave $20 million each to Harvard and Georgetown (
https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=1402008)
.
I've read no outraged pundits calling on these schools to return the money. Matter of fact, I haven't heard any Harvard denunciations
of this horrendous act of murder. Wonder why?
Why did Mr. Khashoggi risk his life, and lose it, by entering that Consulate knowing he was "an enemy of the state "with a
price on his head? It makes no sense. Certainly not over some routine paperwork that could have been done in, say, The Washington
D.C. Embassy with security!
Why are people and the press pretending that the US is a paragon of virtue and morality. Do people believe that US bodies don't
"neutralise" people, even their own citizens, who represent threats? Executions still happen in certain states; the "humaneness"
of it is merely a distraction, as if the penalty for murder would be any less severe if the victim was treated well before the
action.
Tangentially, if you think that the US isn't violating its own nuclear proliferation treaties, I have a bridge in London to
sell you...
Unfortunate for Ms Cengiz, but the timing of their meeting May 2018 & quick decision to marry is a bit suspicious. Qahtani
and several others have been trying to lure Khashoggi to Saudi since past several months, offering protection, top Govt jobs etc.,
It is also in the public domain that MBS put up the so called directive to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi. Whether Cengiz is used
to honey trap Khashoggi - because, it seems he never trusted the offers from Riyad. Police protection to Cengiz rises several
doubts - Is Riyad trying to assassinate Cengiz 0r Istanbul put Cengiz in a protective custody for being an accessory to the murder
of Khashoggi?
Alastair Crooke on the JK murder:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/10/23/khashoggi-murder-complex-intersection-three-points-inflection.html
"When a single additional, undifferentiated, snowflake can touch off a huge slide whose mass
is entirely disproportionate to the single grain that triggers it. Was Khashoggi's killing
just such a trigger? Quite possibly yes – because there are several unstable
accumulations of political mass in the region where even a small event might set off a
significant slide. These dynamics constitute a complex nexus of shifting dynamics."
B, it does seem that the k affair has risen the crisis in Yemen to the foreground just as
many predicted. Thank goodness.
You are correct in that many are looking too far into this as some kind of conspiracy. I
am reminded by this of many who put forth that it made no difference as to who won the prez
election. It did make a difference to the military as well as Hillary's backers in the cIa
and fbI.
The Saudis screwed up and they will get their comeuppance it seems. Russia might be able
to wiggle their way into the middle then, filling the vacuum of uncle Sam at the circle
jerk. The Saudis will have to curtail their operation in Yemen and no quarter will be given
to wahhabi-terrorists by ksa who wish retribution against Russia. Win-win.
Interesting take by Ghassan Kadi on the Saker's blog, for those who still sense a
conspiracy in this. https://thesaker.is/insights-into-the-khashoggi-ordeal-who-and-why/
Goes back to this 'fiance', but adds Gullen to the mix and makes Erdy out to be an
instigator. Good to have a viewpoint from someone who has lived in Sawdi land.
Some goals are difficult to accomplish directly but can be easy with cunning and patience.
To wit:
How do you move a society to the right?
By allowing 'radicals' on the left to act up via a Potemkin 'resistance'.
'Open Borders' and gender are fluff compared to issues like Cold War II and inequality (which
the Democratic Party is silent about)
How do you discredit a Movement like #MeToo?
You "invite" them to discredit themselves by prompting them to go too far. Accusations with
no substance against Kavanaugh did just that.
How do you take down a King and crown prince?
By indulging his whims and flattery and creating opportunities for him to cross a moral line
that was deliberately blurred.
How do you control what people believe to be true?
By controlling narrative and timing. First news reports get the widest audience - subsequent
clarifications are mostly ignored. And people believe news sources that align with mythology
that they are emotionally invested in.
Trump has invested a lot in taking control of MBS and with him control of Saudi Arabia.
Because of this, I think MBS is important, if not key to Trumps plans in the middle east, the
main part of which is war with Iran. With the anti Trump factions riding this for all its
worth, the Khashoggi killing is at least a spanner in the works for Trump's plans, if not
derailing them completely.
Trump has been and is building the US military up for war with some countries and perhaps
trying to bluff others. Going by Trump's actions to date, pulling out of the missile treaty
was perhaps inevitable.
Eric Zuesse writes 'the eartbhquake ininternational alliances' at off-guardian. It is well
worth the time and delves into aspects of sunni schism as the background to current shifts.
Thanks b this khashoggi bone saw massacre and the Palestine and Yemen genocide are most
significant stories right now.
I don't think its strange at all, The Media has received the talking points from their
"Deep State" contacts and now their piling on with the allegations against MbS. It's quite
possible that the Whitehouse is still trying to craft a deal to minimize the fallout from the
murder and save MbS (and their Iran plans), but there are elements within the government that
are trying to undermine the deal to get rid of MbS. I wouldn't be surprised if the body parts
were found, but the Whitehouse / Turkey is not confirming to prevent the situation from
escalating and save the possibility of a deal, but the Deep state elements are leaking
details to the Media to keep the pressure on.
Well, let's see what he does about it! He can start by granting K's son and brother
asylum. They shouldn't have to endure this threatening farce on top of what they're
suffering.
The best insights in this drama can be found (IMHO) at Scott Crieghtons American everyman
blog. MbS has reneged on a huge Lockheed Martin Arms deal. That alone can get you in deep
shit with the establishment( just ask Sth Korea's Pres.)However, Scott goes on to explain
that MbS has committed a even greater sin.
Also... 4 seconds of video and a drip feed of "facts" from Turkeys Prez. Mmmmmm No body as
yet.... Put on ya Tin-foil hat boys... something bit fishy bout the whole story.
Bit o/T but while MSM and alt media have us mesmorized with Khashoggi gate 4 days ago
Vladimir Putin said ISIS had taken 700 hostages in the US-controlled area of Syria. The
hostages captured in Syria by ISIS terrorists include US and European citizens and are being
killed off 10 people a day.
Putin "This is just horrible, it is a catastrophe.....Some US and European citizens are
among the hostages....everyone is silent as if nothing has happened."
Cant have that being an issue before elections. Save it for November. MBS saves Trump
Thanks for the wonderful journalism to the estimable owner of this cantina, Mr b. I have no
idea how he does it. The quality of investiigation, the quality of writing, the synthesis and
pointed questions,
all these are first-rate and deserve applause and attention.
To me the Kashoggi thing is simple, the Skirpal assassins (yes they were involved, amazing
as this
may seem) screwed up. They confused Riyad Time with London time; they were still in bed
together and
not available to routinely refine orders issued by the young King's secretary, an addict of
pep pills
I agree with Mina. It IS a unique world-historical event. Kashoggi's gory death might be
the one thing
that saves us. After all, it seems to be a very rare non-staged world-historical event, we
have not
seen actual organic accidental purely human events since telephone operators asked: "Number
please?
Still Erdowan hit HIS number, with a natural four. Even Erdo could hardly believe it when
the casino manager rolled up the rack of his winnings. He had doubled down twenty-four
times-in-a-row and the figurative Strip was totally silent as the awed gamblers and their
molls saw him hit that fantastic roll.
Putin doesnt gamble. He doesnt smoke or drink. He likes to work and he loves his country
like other Russians: from Solzyanetzin, to Sholokhov, to Dostoyevsky, to Chekov, to Tolstoy,
to Gogol...
he lets the sharp operators wheel-and-deal, he's otherwise engrossed in the life of his
nation.
Like a magician's trick, with Russia's blessing, the Palestinians are given Saudi Arabi as
theirs;
so long as they promise to preserve sacred traditions of Mecca and Medina, the Ka'aba and so
forth.
Everyone says "wow that was easy!; now that's settled let's relax and get back to building
things
and to normal lives with our families..." It's so very easy. There is NO need to force
anybody to do that."
The Balfour Document is cited as precedent and everything is solved in a happy way that is
not a war.
The Royal family of Arabia becomes a You Tube Channel, with Nancy Pelosi and the Houses of
Congress
Evil fights evil. Who loses? Evil loses. That's the only possible chance we good people
have: it is
to make it so the worst evil is killed by the less worse evil; that's how human history
progresses
and we are all stuck with this moral Universe the way it is, whether it makes sense at first
or not.
Sorry for the mono-thematic posting. I am also working on several other themes and will
post those in time. But for now the Khashoggi issue is the event with likely the most
consequences and I try to stay on top of it.
Posted by: b | Oct 23, 2018 2:27:46 PM | 1
Khassogi theme has been milked for all that it could deliver, yet the large Russian
delegation to Saudi Arabia Direct Investment Fund - headed by Cyril Dmitriev and the
following international corporations Trafigura, Total, Hyundai, Norinco, Schlumberger,
Halliburton, Baker Hughes.
Total also signed a 15 billion deal with the Saudi's.
Russian-Saudi partnership particularly is about deals being made between corresponding
State Funds of each country. This means they are important.
Probably Erdogan and Mossad didn't like that, as the whole Khassogi case seems as an
Erdogani-faction, possible pro Mossad Saudi elements from within the closed circle of MbS and
the Mossad itself.
There is no Heaven or Hell. There is only the Mossad.
Las Vegas Massacre 1st Octobr 2017
Khassogi assasination October 1st 2018.
Mossad actions are all about dates/numbers/and cabala magic rituals. It's how they
roll.
from: Joe Vialls internet investigator research.
Three major investigations
The first major Vialls investigation was into the 1984 murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher
outside the Libyan embassy in St. James's Square . He concluded that the fatal shots
had come not from within the embassy but from a penthouse flat next-door-but-one to the
Libyan embassy, and were fired by CIA/Mossad agents .[7]
The second investigation concerned the 1988 Lockerbie bombing together with
day-by-day summaries of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial . Vialls developed his
own theory about the true cause of the bombing. Again, Vialls linked the CIA and
Mossad to the crime.[8]
The third major investigation was into the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania,
Australia . Vialls claimed that an intellectually impaired man, Martin Bryant, was
wrongly convicted for this crime and did not receive a fair trial. Vialls claimed that this
case, also, was an Israeli operation carried out by Mistaravim .[9]
Other controversies
Vialls was a self-proclaimed private investigator dedicated to "exposing media
disinformation," and made many claims in his reports disputing official explanations for
events. The website thewebfairy.com wrote a comprehensive report, rebutting Vialls' claims
regarding the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on 11
September 2001 . The rebuttal centred mainly on Vialls' comparison of the Pentagon
crash with an incident in which an Israeli El Al 747-200F cargo plane, flight 1862 ,
crashed into a 12-story apartment block in the Amsterdam suburb of Bijlmer on 4 October
1992 .[10]
He also disputed the official explanation for the bombings of the Australian
embassy and Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital. Vialls asserted that
the explosives that authorities claimed were used in the Indonesian bombings were
not powerful enough to have caused the damage and casualties that resulted. He claimed to
demonstrate from photographs of the aftermath of each of the bombings, compared to the
photographs taken in Northern Ireland where a 1,000 pound IRA bomb did not
leave a crater or strip concrete from buildings, that a "micronuke" from Mossad's Dimona
research and development facility in the Negev desert had been used. Vialls claims a
device similar to the smallest United States nuclear weapon known as the Davy Crockett or
M-388 round, a version of the W54 warhead, a very small sub-kiloton fission device, was
used in the attacks. The Mk-54 weighed about 51 lb (23 kg), with a selectable yield
of 10 or 20 tons, which Vialls claimed was consistent with the damage inflicted in
Bali and elsewhere. A complete Mk-54 round weighed 76 lb (34.5 kg). One
criticism of Vialls' theory was the absence of any radiation in Bali after the explosion.
Vialls explained this flaw by arguing that Geiger counters cannot effectively detect
alpha radiation , the most likely radiation to be present after the detonation of a
plutonium fission bomb, since alpha particles are large and do not penetrate the walls
of the Geiger-Muller tubes adequately enough to register radiation.[11] In his
investigation of the first Bali bomb, Vialls cited an opinion article in the Jakarta Post,
Indonesia's largest English-language newspaper by circulation, written by an expatriate
editor at the Post, which expounded a similar theory.[12]
Vialls' theories have received popular support among leaders of some Muslim factions
in Indonesia, who have cited his theories as fact. Indonesian internet forum Swara Muslim
('Muslim voice') wrote an opinion piece stating that Vialls' claim that the bombing of the
Australian embassy was conducted by the CIA and Mossad was "based on solid fact."[13]
Indonesian Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir told Australia's ABC radio that he believed
Vialls' theory regarding the first Bali bomb was a correct one.[14]
Mossad has two parallel structures going through its hierarchy from top to bottom.
One is directly influenced/assisted/funded by the Rothchilds.
They do the ussual hacking/killing/maiming/disposing by the "their magick numbers"
principle.
The best insights in this drama can be found (IMHO) at Scott Crieghtons American everyman
blog. MbS has reneged on a huge Lockheed Martin Arms deal. That alone can get you in deep
shit with the establishment( just ask Sth Korea's Pres.)However, Scott goes on to explain
that MbS has committed a even greater sin.
Posted by: The cycnic | Oct 23, 2018 5:39:38 PM | 34
I am willing to bet it is plausible it would have to do with these guys:
Lockheed Martin Space Systems
Lockheed Martin Space is one of the four major business divisions of Lockheed Martin. It
has its headquarters in Denver, Colorado with additional sites in Sunnyvale, California;
Santa Cruz, California; Huntsville, Alabama; and elsewhere in the US and UK. The division
currently employs about 16,000 people, and its most notable products are commercial and
military satellites, space probes, missile defense systems, NASA's Orion Multi-Purpose Crew
Vehicle, and the Space Shuttle External Tank.[1]
They are the guys that ussualy go KABOOM or missing because of possible meddling/messing
around with cosmic frequencies/energies they shouldn't be messing with, from the days
Operation Paperclip ended and so forth.
So now that Trump sent Gina Haspell to Turkey he's changing his tune and calling this the
worst cover-up in the history of cover-ups!
Posted by: Circe | Oct 23, 2018 4:59:29 PM | 26
Just quoting some interesting timing here.
This (as it seems) is high level negotiation and secret ops preps between both sides.
Against whom I wonder.....
To where else our friend Gina has traveled abroad since her inaguration?Is this her first?
Her first cup of coffee abroad was at Erdogan's palace in Konstantinople?
That's a little over the top, even for smarmy Merkelian arms dealers trying to get their
mercantile horns into the hog sty.
Something tells me Marmeladebrüders would hold their noses and sell $100B of German arms
to MbS in a NYC Sekunde.
Trump has been and is building the US military up for war with some countries and perhaps
trying to bluff others.
Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Oct 23, 2018 4:42:09 PM | 23
He is changing the configuration and introducing new doctrines for the End Game.
It's goose stepping at Rothchild's orders.
It's for moving the chess pieces on the board before the actual full blown WWIII events in
such a way to favor the Rothchild devised plan for the world domination. The actual war is a
scheme in order to divide resources and strategic possitioning, while getting rid of the
excess poppulations here and there. They have huge plans concerning energy management
projects and new technologies. Real energy management like terrawats think about Tesla style
technologies, not mundane stuff like oil/gas and pipelines which is only there just for show
about controlling the narrative for the masses. They want to become gods. They will suck
everything on this plane of existence dry for their purpose to succeed. The war is
innevitable. It's a must do for them. We are near the End Game.Prepare accordingly.
Someone convinced Khashoggi he would be safe entering that Consulate. This was a man who had
lived his life next to Middle Eastern power so it must have been a persuasive argument.
MbS did what he did, and the shite hit the fan.
So now what? Turkey doesn't want to leave northern Syria (or Iraq?), and while she doesn't
control oil, she does control the water.
Putin (Putin again) emerges as the new best friend to the House of Saud. What would happen if
Saudi oil were to start trading in a mix of Yuan/Rouble/gold?
I can't decide if this is all fortuitous or orchestrated, but the waters are roiling.
Currently, the extraterritorial judgement is to Magnitsky
Act those responsible , which amounts to yet another illegal action. Given what Khashoggi
promoted--Daesh and the wider aims of Outlaw US Empire designs on the region plus visiting
genocide on Yemenis--I applaud his demise as I've written previously. And yes, I wouldn't
mind seeing the same fate befall those who killed him along with those who supported him.
Much of what we read amounts to deploring the gangland murder of a gangster, and we're
supposed to lament that--WHY? And what's worse overall: A recession caused by the removal of
Saudi oil from global market or the Climate Crisis generated by burning that oil?
Seems we've reached Through the Looking Glass extremes with no end in sight.
"... Btw, the CIA knew Riyadh was planning to kidnap the unfortunate guy, if the Turks recorded the slaughter they must have been recording before, too, the same goes for the police who couldn't have missed the team of 15 equipped with the bone saw. No one of these agencies tipped K. Aren;t they complicit in the sickening atrocity? More the point, why didn't they warn him? ..."
Since the Russian entry into Syria, the self labeled friends of Syria group of countries have
taken to infighting and slowly disintegrating. First Turkey then Qatar, Jordan now seems on
more diplomatic terms with Syrian government opening border and so forth. Russia's
geo-political power has been perhaps more important in saving Syria than its military power.
Is it by accident or design that the 'friends of Syria group' have been so affected
Putin is one of the best in setting up and carrying out long term strategy, putting it
together in seemingly unconnected steps so that the setting up goes unnoticed.
The Erdogan Russia deal on Idlib seemed odd at the time even with the genuine threat of a
US attack. Russia said there where no, and had not been any plans for an offensive on Idlib.
Syrian government seemed unhappy with the deal at the time but then a few weeks ago came out
publicly in support of what Turkey was trying to achieve in the buffer zone. What is going on
here.
Khashoggi - purely MBS stupidity or an easily set trap knowing MBS character.
On Crooke's bit about a snowflake touching of an avalanche, as the same time, an unstable
mass can easily be set in motion by a deliberate action. Both Erdogan and Putin would have a
sharp eye for these unstable masses.
Except for the Caligula outcome that cannot be ruled out, the Prince will stay, removing him
would suggest the old King's judgement's at fault, a sign of unforgivable weakness in any
autocracy that could be exploited by others in the future, the Prince's power may be
curtailed for a while, but that's about it.
The Americans should be careful not to get too harsh on the Kingdom, the old King visited
Moscow last November, nobody knows why, it may well be the old man's smarter than anyone
thinks, he senses the Americans are losing their grip e.g. Syria, the era of the Far East
approaches, his timing may be about right. 'The Kingdom must switch alliances before it's too
late to secure its future', he may think.
Btw, the CIA knew Riyadh was planning to kidnap the unfortunate guy, if the Turks
recorded the slaughter they must have been recording before, too, the same goes for the
police who couldn't have missed the team of 15 equipped with the bone saw. No one of these
agencies tipped K. Aren;t they complicit in the sickening atrocity? More the point, why
didn't they warn him?
"... Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare ..."
"... This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs , by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; Zen Cash ; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom ; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott ; and TheBumperSticker.com . ..."
Gareth Porter is interviewed on his article for Truthdig, " Can Trump Take
Down the American Empire? " Porter talks about revelations in the Bob Woodward book "Fear",
about the Trump presidency, and how they may pertain to the American Empire. Porter also talks
about the Trump presidency, North Korea, and Iran.
Alastair Crooke
explains why the Khashoggi murder, while not unusual, has this large effect: When a single additional,
undifferentiated, snowflake can touch off a huge slide whose mass is entirely disproportionate to the single grain that
triggers it. Was Khashoggi's killing just such a trigger? Quite possibly yes – because there are several
unstable accumulations of political mass in the region where even a small event might set off a significant slide.
Or was is "an externality" of MbS reneging on a huge Lockheed Martin Arms deal in favor os S400? .
Notable quotes:
"... Photo needs a caption: MbS explains all to Khashoggi Jr. "We came, we sawed, he died". ..."
Photo needs a caption: MbS explains all to Khashoggi Jr. "We came, we sawed, he died".
pogohere | Oct 23, 2018 5:37:36 PM | 33
Barbara Ann @29
Best summary yet!!!!
You've been nominated for the 2018 Hildabeast Award.
To me the Kashoggi thing is simple, the Skirpal assassins (yes they were involved, amazing as this may seem)
screwed up. They confused Riyad Time with London time; they were still in bed together and not available to routinely
refine orders issued by the young King's secretary, an addict of pep pills
Looks like an intelligence operation to remove MBS was launched after this blunder. BTW was it MBS blunder or a set-up?
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... This death is kabuki "wag the dog" type theatre for the masses while the real geo-political arm wrestling goes on behind the scenes ..."
"... Khashoggi met his fiance (36 year old to his 59) in May 2018. By October 2018, they were looking to get married. One little problem. He is already married and had to arrange a separation. Did he go to the consulate of his own free will or was he 'pushed' (ie he went very reluctantly as he realized he was taking a big risk). His fiancée is documented as a PhD candidate (in what subject? At which institute? What was her background?) They managed to meet at some high level think-tank get-together. That sounds a bit unlikely for some random unconnected outsider. How did she manage to get invited to the meeting? In other circumstances (Assange, Vanunu, etc) a honeypot would come to mind. ..."
"... Qui bono? Trump is negotiating with SWIFT to disconnect Iran from the world economy (an act of war?). Presumably once Iran reacts, it will be used as an excuse for an all out military attack against Iran, using Saudi airspace and ground facilities. Given Saudi has been making nice with Russia (and potentially Iran via Russian mediation), some 'encouragement' seems necessary for that to go ahead. Not so long ago, Trump stated that Saudi wouldn't last two weeks without US support, possibly a not-so-subtle hint. Corrupt leaders desire nothing more than holding on to power and the benefits of said power. ..."
No one seems to care how many Yemeni's Mohammad bin Salman kills each day. There was no harsh reaction when MbS kidnapped the
Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri, nor when he incarcerated nearly 400 princes and tortured them to steal their money. Why would
anyone care about Khashoggi?
Because that is how human psychology works:
The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
Josef Stalin
We humans care way more for a single persons we know, than for a mass of people we have no relations with.
Khashoggi was a personal friend of Erdogan. He was a columnist at the Washington Post , the CIA's most favored news
outlet. Mohammad bin Salman is an enemy of both. Neither the neocon opinion editor of the Post , Fred Hiatt, nor Erdogan
have any love for the Saudi clown prince. They would of course raise a ruckus when given such a chance.
They will pile on and air the Saudi's dirty linen until MbS is gone. Yesterday the New York Timesexposed the twitter
brigades the Saudis hired to manipulate the public. Today the Washington Post has a
detailed report of Saudi influence peddling through U.S. stink tanks. The Middle East Institute, CSIS and Brookings get called
out. Lobbyists for the Saudis are
canceling their contracts. More such reports will come out. Years of lobbying and tens of millions of dollars to push pro-Saudi
propaganda have now gone to waste.
The affair is damaging to Trump. He built his Middle East policy on his relations with Saudi Arabia. But he can not avoid the
issue and has to call out MbS over the killing. His own party is pressing for it. Yesterday the Republican Senator Bob Corker,
chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, dismissed the Saudi version of the story on CNN and
called (vid) for consequences:
"It is my sense, I don't know yet, but based on the intel I have read, based on the other excerpts that I have read, it is
my thinking that MbS was involved in this, that he directed this and that this person was purposefully murdered. "
...
There has to be a punishment and a price paid for that.
...
Do I think he did it? Yes, I think he did it. [...] We obviously have intercepts from the past that point to involvement at
a very high level, so let's let play this out.
On Sunday Erdogan was on the phone with Trump. The Turkish readout of the call
hints at
negotiations over Syria, the lifting of sanctions against Turkey and other issues. But the Khashoggi case has now
gone too far to allow for a deal to be made over it.
Erdogan's mouthpiece, the somewhat lunatic columnist Ibrahim Karagül,
gives an insight into Erdogan's thinking and sets out his aims:
The real trap was set against Saudi Arabia. Even though a Saudi Arabia-U.S.-Israel rapport was established and discourse about
shielding the Riyadh administration from Iran, the objective was to destroy Saudi Arabia through Salman and Zayed. The next
front after the Syria war was the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia. They never understood this, they could not understand it. Turkey
understood it, but the Arab political mind was blinded.
Now Saudi Arabia is in a very difficult situation. The world collapsed over them. Crown Prince Salman is going through a
tough test via Zayed, who has control over him. If the gravity of the situation after the facts revealed with the Khashoggi
murder is not comprehended, we will witness a "Saudi Arabia front" in less than a few years.
...
The Riyadh administration must dethrone Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at once . It has no other choice. Otherwise, it is
going to pay very heavy prices. If they fail to quash the trap set up targeting Saudi Arabia through bin Zayed, they will be
victims of Trump's "You won't last two weeks" statement, and the process is going to start to work in that direction.
...
This duo must be taken out of the entire region and neutralized. Otherwise they are going to throw the region in fire.
Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed is Mohammad bin Salman's mentor and partner in crime in Yemen. MbZ is smarter
than MbS - and will be more difficult to dislodge.
Erdogan announced that he will describe more details of the case on Tuesday in a speech to his party's parliament group. He
will probably not yet play the tape from inside the consulate that Turkish intelligence claims to have. But he may well confirm
the revealed phone calls and threaten to release their content.
Erdogan's aim seems clear. The chance for deal is gone. MbS has to go. He will try to play the case out until that is achieved.
Posted by b on October 22, 2018 at 11:47 AM |
Permalink Here are some cables that Wikileaks released in 2015 showing how the Saudi royal family tries to control the world's
media:
It appears like a very ambitious plan to get rid of MbS and MbZ, but I have to agree that it's critical. They along with Netanyahoo
are the biggest threat in the ME.
"No one seems to care how many Yemeni's Mohammad bin Salman kills each day. There was no harsh reaction when MbS kidnapped the
Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri, nor when he incarcerated nearly 400 princes and tortured them to steal their money. Why would
anyone care about Khashoggi?
Because that is how human psychology works:
The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
Josef Stalin
We humans care way more for a single persons we know, than for a mass of people we have no relations with."
You are naive person, b, and this section does not belong to MoA articles.
This is not about human psychology. Its about targeted media attention. Media could create a hysteria about Yemen too, but
only if the elite wanted that. Then you would see lots outraged people and large protests against the war in Yemen. But elites
do not want that. So that is not going to happen.
It is very simple how that works. When elites want, they bring massive media attention to something. When elites do not want,
they cover up things and the media is silent.
If elites wanted to adress the issue of the Yemen war, you will see similar media hysteria to the ones about Idlib or Aleppo.
Since the elites do not want that, media will be generally silent about the killings in Yemen and will keep things under control.
In this case, there are important western elites behind this, so you are getting lots of media coverage. So this has nothing to
do with what Stalin said or with human psychology, and everything to do with the fact that elites control media and public attention.
This is being used as a way of attacking Trump.
For more information, you can check Adam Garrie and Andrew Korybko, it seems that some european, US deep state (behind Trump's
back), and of course turkish interests are behind the increased media attention.
Where is the body (or its parts)? Having arrested 18 the Saudis must know the answer to this question. Why the delay on this question?
But as Pieraccini hinted a few days ago the
American Congress and its associates want MbS gone because he's a bad business manager. (Look at what happened to the "Vision"
thing although Munchkin today indicated business deals more important than anything else.) Trump will need to get over his sentimentalism
to go along, and he needs to do this fast with midterms two weeks away.
The same could be said of Palestine as Yemen, along with Zionist manipulation of "Western" policy. Clearly, having to justify
his actions is something MbS has seldom faced previously and has failed abysmally when it was actually very simple at the outset.
If MbS gets demoted, will he flee or stay and fight? The arms contracts were never signed, so they're likely dead, which I view
as a plus. I wonder if a pro-Palestinian/Anti-Zionist non-CIA captured Prince exists within Saudi that Salman might name to replace
MbS, or is such a beast wishful thinking?
All this proves that the spy-craft of the Saudi assassination team was abysmal. All cellphone networks store records of each
call. Any foreign official's phone in Turkey is under surveillance of the country's intelligence service. Only some throw-away
phone with an anonymous prepaid card could have given some protection.
Perhaps some, but not much. Even anonymous cellphone connections can be geo-located with a maximum error of a few meters, so
calls to Saudi Arabia from within the consulate could be noted. What more, the dim-witted Saudis probably would not have bothered
with tack-on encryption devices.
The one death is a tragedy quote is often misattributed to Stalin. See
here and
here and here .
What is apparent, however, is that the large American media outlets suddenly have discovered Yemen as a club to use in retribution
for the murder of one of their own.
B's point on human psychology is good on the question why this event has attracted so much attention. Obviously in the congress
the event is working in two ways: to facilitate removal of MbS, yes, by those annoyed with his and Trump's amateurish bullshit;
and to appeal for votes via all the outrage. Even Trump has to play to this sentiment.
But cynical deal-making on the inside aside, the ordinary person is amused and appalled at this naked display of the psychopath
with his thuggish sadism as increasingly it becomes apparent Mohammed Been Sawbones has done the deed. Plus trying to excuse it
and cover it up, as Trump et al are trying to do, clashes obscenely with the usual rhetoric/propaganda.
So, yes, the specific content here is much easier and clearer to grasp than abstractions and generalities. It's a case for
JQ Ordinary of "Got you! And we'll rub your face in it while we can!" In short, it's another reflection of how pissed off people
are with the globe's honorable leaders.
It is obvious that Erdogan didn't get the deal he was hoping for probably due to Trump's arrogance thinking that this one will
blow over as well and they can fix it. Gross miscalculation.
MBS is small potatoes. MBZ as mentioned is the target. He is the ambitious one with a brain, at least he thinks so. And he
has pissed off most of the gulf monarchies that have no interest in war and hegemony. They want to live quiet and make their money
and get along, especially with Iran.
What is interesting here, is that this event seems to have not been a random thing, but a carefully laid out trap they walked
right into.
This might be the undoing of Trump, Bolton and the rest, in the midterms first and then in their ME plans. Watch for the Russians
to come out as victors, yet again.
"B's point on human psychology is good on the question why this event has attracted so much attention."
No, it's not. If elites did not want, there would be zero attention about it. In the same way, there would be huge attention
for the killings in Yemen or Palestine, if only the elites wanted that. In fact, it would be number one news story every day and
the topic of the year if they wanted that.
All bets are off until we see how the impetuous one in the White House takes the growing "global consensus" and accepts defeat.
I think MBS was "supposed" to be gone 2 weeks ago ... being a well-documented loose-cannon. He was given temporary reprieve
(again) as Trump and the money men "negotiated" various terms of his survival and that of the arms deal....
Erdogan may well end up with a "better" deal than he hoped for due to impeccable stage craft and and slam-dunk evidence (we'll
see).
I believe I read that MBS personally assured Erdogan that Khasoghogi would be save ... assurances passed on to that gentlment
before he entered the compound. If true, that also speaks massively about MBS and his "word" as a gentleman (perhaps part of reason
for claims it was a "hot-headed accident")
The Saudis have such an embarassing history of failure at "stealth" like this ... if they'd just managed to abduct Khashoggi
like so many others currently disappeared or simply waited. This is also riding the crest of journalist complaints of state-sponsored
threats of violence towards journalism under the "fake news claims" internationally and by Donald Trump specifically in the American
heart land which is pretty much bled out already when it comes to "keep 'em honest" investigations.
If, when MSB goes, it will be -imho- the first major defeat of the Trump administration, both foreign and domestic.
There are some who want that, in the US and especially Europe, as well as medium level ones such as Erdogan. And some who do
not want that (the US administration, or Israel).
For Europe, the reaction was relatively harsh, as they use that to hit back at the US admin for its belligerent behavior. In
the US, it is used by those who oppose Trump, as well as due to other reasons. Check Adam Garrie and Andrew Korybko for more on
this.
As for Erdogan, it is already mentioned in the article here.
Forget advisors. Seems that in his purge, MbS eliminated everybody with a functioning brain. At least, from the ranks responsible
for "special actions". Some princes were kidnapped shortly after he got ministerial portfolios so at that time the art of committing
atrocities on kith and kin without raising undue noise was not lost.
"What is interesting here, is that this event seems to have not been a random thing, but a carefully laid out trap they walked
right into.
This might be the undoing of Trump, Bolton and the rest, in the midterms first and then in their ME plans. Watch for the Russians
to come out as victors, yet again.
Posted by: Alpi57 | Oct 22, 2018 1:18:50 PM | 17"
In retrospect, it seems that Khashoggi was "suicidal", but probably he thought that his government will not be so monumentally
stupid to kill him or kidnap in a consulate that is under monitoring of an unfriendly government. Perhaps he was persuaded by
his princely mentors who knew that he is a sacrificial pawn. The purge of people with functioning brain could eliminate the threat
of assassination by MbS own protecters, but it made him vulnerable in other ways.
Khashoggi may have thought Erdogan was his friend. From what I have read, they worked on a number of the same Muslim Brotherhood
projects.
Turkey have the goods on the killing which means Turk intel was most likely watching or listening in real time to what was occurring
in the consulate. Erdogan seems quite ruthless when setting a trap.
This death is kabuki "wag the dog" type theatre for the masses while the real geo-political arm wrestling goes on behind
the scenes
The world is being brought to a climax by the real or feigned death of empire and its too early to tell how the elite infighting
will work out but the elite still expect to be in control with private finance when it is over.
The link between Khashoggi and Erdoğan is not "fiendship", but the Muslim Brotherhood. Erdoğan made a similar scene about the
Morsi's overthrow in Egypt. This is a Ikhwan vs Wahabbi spat.
I couldn't imagine with the faux friendship that MBS has developed with Kushner/Mossad that they didn't know about this and
allowed him to do something like this. There is a larger play here. Why this and why now? On the surface, this will derail the
Iran plan entirely, not to mention a big dent in Trump and the midterms. This a gift to democrats. Why would they risk that over
Khashoggi?
well, so far in the "damage control" column we have not seen vast alarms about "targeted assassinations" (of journalists or scientists)
or much mention of the large-scale arrests of various Trump / Israel buddies and allies or -- for that matter --- the wholesale
slaughter of Mexican journalists (not to mention the usual Putin fingerpointing). There is an intersection between international
crime/money laundering and this sort of "pointless" ad hoc killing of the messengers which could also be "ripe" for discussion.
The Trump "coverup" has been quite successful in protecting the usual suspects.
#2 : he gets called "journalist" but his true vocation was professional ass kisser. it's not a huge leap of faith to assume he
went from directly kissing saudi royal ass to smooching various high level turkish ones. maybe not a "friend" (but who really
is at that level?) but probably a useful acquaintance.
now that we have the silly minutiae out of the way...this is still an increasingly amusing game of "let's you and him fight".
the whole "ultimate game of taking down saudi arabia" idea floated by the turkish writer is just silly but it will make the royals
slightly more malleable and it distracts from the "OMG iran is teh devul!!!1!!" bullshit we've been force-fed for the last few
years (and decades). whether it disrupts the newish israel/saudi axis has yet to be seen but i doubt it.
i also keep thinking of the odd selective outrage - not just when it comes to yemen but going back to 9/11. 15 of those guys
(going by the official story here) were saudis. relations barely skipped a beat after they offed ~3,000 of our own folks.
15 saudi guys butcher one saudi stenographer turned bezos/CIA company man and everyone shits their collective pants (including
many of the most virulent "STFU trutherz!" establishment idiots and Brennan CIA types who have 9/11 stink all over them). Seems
like a good time to dredge up any unfinished 9/11 business. after all, 3K americans = like 9 quadrillion yemenis, amirite?
The Khashoggi Affair has been messier than a dog's breakfast from the get go. Is it possible that MBS is using the same team of
UK "Intelligence Experts" as the nonchalant and sleazy Theresa (Would I Lie To You) May?
And what's with this continuing blather about malign forces operating behind Trump's back to make him look bad? He went
all in with a psychopath, sidelined all the seasoned diplomats, and left his fucking son-in-law in charge of his entire
ME policy.
Khashoggi met his fiance (36 year old to his 59) in May 2018. By October 2018, they were looking to get married. One little
problem. He is already married and had to arrange a separation. Did he go to the consulate of his own free will or was he 'pushed'
(ie he went very reluctantly as he realized he was taking a big risk). His fiancée is documented as a PhD candidate (in what subject?
At which institute? What was her background?) They managed to meet at some high level think-tank get-together. That sounds a bit
unlikely for some random unconnected outsider. How did she manage to get invited to the meeting? In other circumstances (Assange,
Vanunu, etc) a honeypot would come to mind.
Qui bono? Trump is negotiating with SWIFT to disconnect Iran from the world economy (an act of war?). Presumably once Iran
reacts, it will be used as an excuse for an all out military attack against Iran, using Saudi airspace and ground facilities.
Given Saudi has been making nice with Russia (and potentially Iran via Russian mediation), some 'encouragement' seems necessary
for that to go ahead. Not so long ago, Trump stated that Saudi wouldn't last two weeks without US support, possibly a not-so-subtle
hint. Corrupt leaders desire nothing more than holding on to power and the benefits of said power.
The situation is much more complicated than your rather arrogant comment suggests. The elites in the US are divided and have
been since the election of Trump. The Democrats and their media have found an ideal weapon in the brutal demise of Khashoggi with
which to bash Trump and bolster their chances in the mid-terms. We are perfectly aware of the hypocrisy involved by all elites.
But another section of the elites, namely the military industrials and Wall Street (weapons and petrodollar) do not want any problems
with Saudi Arabia, whatever MBS does or does not do. They want the story to go away. If they can get a more placid figure to lead
the country all well and good but, if they can't they will stick with "bone saw man."
The situation has maybe come about because Saudi Arabia is concerned about lashing its future so completely to a sinking ship
and a young upstart like MBS feels he is able to challenge the US, just as the Philippines' Duterte did when he cursed Obama;
just as Turkey and India and indeed the Saudis have done by ordering the S-400 from Russia. Rebellion is in the air as everyone
looks East.
I don't see how this would have any effect on the mid-terms. Most US-ians don't care. Also, pretty sure KSA is no friend to Muslim
B-hood, so hard to believe that the sultan and MbS would have worked on any such projects. OTOH, it is "highly likely" that somewhere,
MbZ lurks in the background. In some form or shape, he is a part of the trap (including that the trap could turn against him).
This was an interesting discussion (and hear what Sharmine Narwani has to say at the end):
https://www.rt.com/shows/crosstalk/441490-saudi-murder-journalist-trump/
He ran social media for Saudi Arabia's crown prince. He masterminded the arrest of hundreds of his country's elite. He detained
a Lebanese prime minister. And, according to two intelligence sources, he ran journalist Jamal Khashoggi's brutal killing at
the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by giving orders over Skype.
...
Qahtani himself once said he would never do anything without his boss' approval.
"Do you think I make decisions without guidance? I am an employee and a faithful executor of the orders of my lord the king
and my lord the faithful crown prince," Qahtani tweeted last summer.
...
According to one high-ranking Arab source with access to intelligence and links to members of Saudi Arabia's royal court, Qahtani
was beamed into a room of the Saudi consulate via Skype.
He began to hurl insults at Khashoggi over the phone. According to the Arab and Turkish sources, Khashoggi answered Qahtani's
insults with his own.
... ... ...
A Turkish intelligence source relayed that at one point Qahtani told his men to dispose of Khashoggi. "Bring me the head
of the dog", the Turkish intelligence source says Qahtani instructed.
...
The Arab source and the Turkish intelligence source said the audio of the Skype call is now in the possession of Turkish President
Tayyip Erdogan. The sources say he is refusing to release it to the Americans.
Erdogan said on Sunday he would release information about the Turkish investigation during a weekly speech on Tuesday. Three
Turkish officials reached by Reuters declined to comment ahead of that speech.
Yonatan, please read the articles linked by b before asking wrong questions;
he was not married since right after he fled to the US in 2015 (trying to escape what happened to a number of his rich friends)
the KSA regime made pressure on his family until his wife filed for divorce.
But Turkish law requests a proof of such a divorce to allow a man marrya Turkish woman.
Some good rants by PLang lately https://tinyurl.com/yc9fg9xu https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/10/did-the-chihuahua-do-it.html
Trump has unilaterally begun economic warfare wherever and whenever he wants. He does not conduct foreign policy in consultation
with anyone, least of all the Republican Party. If he or his own are taking bribes from Saudi, then he is likely going to retain
MbS no matter the whining. It's not like the US is a democracy. If Kashoggi gave up something against Trump, so that Erdogan thinks
he has something, Erdogan is overplaying his hand.
Trump is bullet proof politically, and he will almost certainly resort to violence if needed. Although cell phones can be cloned
and placed from a car in front of an embassy, it is likely there were nineteen calls to MbS personally. The thing is, this is
rather strong evidence the murder either was not premeditate...or the real point was the interrogation. We know nothing about
what Kashoggi said. All this blather about the incident is drivel until we know that.
The effects of the midterm elections depend entirely on turnout. The Democrats have been trying to run to the right, which
suppresses popular turnout. The centerpiece has been the Kavanaugh nomination, which they lost. Losing depresses turnout. The
Republicans are consciously suppressing turnout. If people turn out, yes, there's a blue wave. But every indication is there's
not going to be the kind of turnout. If turnout is low, the Democrats may even fracture as the few Democratic Party winners will
be anathema to the moderate conservative paymasters. And, after Trump pretends not being massively rejected at the polls means
he is massively popular instead of people being in despair at having no one for them, Trump will be even less inclined to dump
MbS.
Erdogan is soft on Iran and Russia because the US insists on limiting his slice of the pie, in favor of Israel and Saudi. He's
miscalculated the balance of forces.
Tomorrow will be the opening of the Arab Economic Summit (that MBS's was staking KSA's future on) apparently competing with Erdogan's
"weekly speech" ... Watch what happens (except KSA/MBS could have scarcely engineered quite as effective a "kick me" sign to affix
on the back of their robes.
KSA's economic development/innovation (rather like US infrastructure investment) is decades shopworn with little to show for
it (AFAICT) AP Saudi prince's future put to the
test at investment forum . Millions of bitterly disappointed over-educated young Saudis could be hard to contain given how
long they've been fed empty promises of jobs-jobs-jobs and meaningful lives.
Erdogan has been handed a "golden football" to run with wrt knocking KSA's "dominance" into proportion (American's don't know
there are any non-KSA lover's except evil Iran) I'm curious what the summit will produce, from whom ... strange to realize the
Saudi's are publicly admitting to need to recruit investment to bankroll their future ...
Agree with GoraDiva @46 that this will have negligible impact on midterms as Trump and 2/3s of Senate aren't on ballot. It may,
however, have some impact on Trump's ability to help stump for other Reprehensibles.
Passer by @25--
I disagree with Korybko's take that Russia will be happy to fill the vacuum caused by the Outlaw US Empire's abandonment of
its longtime ally if MbS remains. Most important is the media war being waged on Russia--Russia will be further demonized if it
befriends MbS, which comes at a time when its image is recovering. IMO, Russia won't launch any new initiatives until the situation
eases being content to continue its current policy.
"... why would MBS risk a Khashoggi scandal as he was assiduously promoting his image abroad as an enlightened reform-minded Saudi leader? ..."
"... We lack the evidence and official candor needed to study these questions, as is usually the case with covert, secretive, disinforming intelligence operations. But the questions are certainly reason enough not to rush to judgment, as many US pundits do. Saying "we do not know" may be unmarketable in today's mass-media environment, but it is honest and the right approach to potentially fruitful "analysis." ..."
1. National intelligence agencies have long played major roles, often not entirely visible, in international politics. They are
doing so again today, as is evident in several countries, from Russiagate in the United States and the murky Skripal assassination
attempt in the UK to the apparent murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. Leaving aside what President Obama
knew about Russiagate allegations against Donald Trump and when he knew it, the question arises as to whether these operations were
ordered by President Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) or were "rogue" operations unknown in advance by the leaders
and perhaps even directed against them.
There have been plenty of purely criminal and commercial "rogue" operations by intelligence agents in history, but also "rogue"
ones that were purposefully political. We know, for example, that both Soviet and US intelligence agencies -- or groups of agents
-- tried to disrupt the Eisenhower-Khrushchev détente of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and that some intelligence players tried
to stop Khrushchev's formal recognition of West Germany, also in the early 1960s.
It is reasonable to ask, therefore, whether the attacks on Skripal and Khashoggi were "rogue" operations undertaken by political
opponents of the leaders' policies at home or abroad, with the help of one or another intelligence agency or agents. Motive is a
-- perhaps the -- crucial question. Why would Putin order such an operation in the UK at the very moment when his government
had undertaken a major Western public-relations campaign in connection with the upcoming World Cup championship in Russia? And
why
would MBS risk a Khashoggi scandal as he was assiduously promoting his image abroad as an enlightened reform-minded Saudi leader?
We lack the evidence and official candor needed to study these questions, as is usually the case with covert, secretive, disinforming
intelligence operations. But the questions are certainly reason enough not to rush to judgment, as many US pundits do. Saying "we
do not know" may be unmarketable in today's mass-media environment, but it is honest and the right approach to potentially fruitful
"analysis."
Was the assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald still getting as much media coverage three
weeks after his death as it did that first week after Nov. 22, 1963? Not as I recall.
Yet, three weeks after his murder, Jamal Khashoggi, who was not a U.S. citizen, was not
killed by an American, and died not on U.S. soil but in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, consumes
our elite press.
The top two stories in Monday's Washington Post were about the Khashoggi affair. A third,
inside, carried the headline, "Trump, who prizes strength, may look weak in hesitance to punish
Saudis."
On Sunday, the Post put three Khashoggi stories on Page 1. The Post's lead editorial bashed
Trump for his equivocal stance on the killing.
Two of the four columns on the op-ed page demanded that the Saudis rid themselves of Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the prime suspect in ordering the execution.
Page 1 of the Outlook section offered an analysis titled, "The Saudis knew they could get
away with it. We always let them."
Page 1 of the Metro section featured a story about the GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate in
Virginia that began thus:
"Corey A. Stewart's impulse to use provocative and evidence-free slurs reached new heights
Friday when the Republican nominee for Senate disparaged slain Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal
Khashoggi
"Stewart appears to be moving in lockstep with extremist Republicans and conservative
commentators engaging in a whisper campaign to smear Khashoggi and insulate Trump from global
rebuke."
This was presented as a news story.
Inside the Business section of Sunday's Post was a major story, "More CEOs quietly withdraw
from Saudi conference." Featured was a photo of JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon, who had canceled his
appearance.
On the top half of the front page of the Sunday New York Times were three stories about
Khashoggi, as were the two top stories on Monday.
The Times' lead editorial Monday called for a U.N. investigation, a cutoff in U.S. arms
sales to Riyadh and a signal to the royal house that we regard their crown prince as
"toxic."
Why is our prestige press consumed by the murder of a Saudi dissident not one in a thousand
Americans had ever heard of?
Answer: Khashoggi had become a contributing columnist to the Post. He was a journalist, an
untouchable. The Post and U.S. media are going to teach the House of Saud a lesson: You don't
mess with the American press!
Moreover, the preplanned murder implicating the crown prince, with 15 Saudi security agents
and an autopsy expert with a bone saw lying in wait at the consulate to kill Khashoggi, carve
him up, and flee back to Riyadh the same day, is a terrific story.
Still, what ought not be overlooked here is the political agenda of our establishment media
in driving this story as hard as they have for the last three weeks.
Our Beltway elite can smell the blood in the water. They sense that Khashoggi's murder can
be used to discredit the Trump presidency, expose the amorality of his foreign policy and sever
his ties to patriotic elements of his Middle American constituency.
How so?
First, there are those close personal ties between Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, son
of the King, and Jared Kushner, son-in-law of the president of the United States.
Second, there are the past commercial connections between builder Donald Trump, who sold a
floor of a Trump building and a yacht to the Saudis when he was in financial straits.
Third, there is the strategic connection. The first foreign trip of the Trump presidency
was, at Kushner's urging, to Riyadh to meet the king, and the president has sought to tighten
U.S. ties to the Saudis ever since.
Fourth, Trump has celebrated U.S. sales arms to the Saudis as a job-building benefit to
America and a way to keep the Saudis as strategic partners in a Mideast coalition against
Iran.
Fifth, the leaders of the two wings of Trump's party in the Senate, anti-interventionist
Rand Paul and interventionist Lindsey Graham, are already demanding sanctions on Riyadh and
an ostracizing of the prince.
As story after story comes out of Riyadh about what happened in that consulate on Oct. 2,
each less convincing than the last, the coalition of forces, here and abroad, pressing for
sanctions on Saudi Arabia and dumping the prince, grows.
The time may be right for President Trump to cease leading from behind, to step out front,
and to say that, while he withheld judgment to give the Saudis every benefit of the doubt, he
now believes that the weight of the evidence points conclusively to a plot to kill Jamal
Khashoggi.
Hence, he is terminating U.S. military aid for the war in Yemen that Crown Prince Mohammed
has been conducting for three years. Win-win.
An interesting fact that Khashoggi father was a well known and very rich Saudi arms merchant and he himself was very close to
jihadists, especially those who belong to Muslim brotherhood.
Notable quotes:
"... Mr. Trump bought the Trump Princess, as the well-known yacht is called, for $30 million in 1987 from the Sultan of Brunei, who had secured it as collateral for a multimillion-dollar loan to Adnan M. Khashoggi. ..."
"... Mr. Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian arms dealer, reportedly spent $85 million to build and outfit the vessel with such features as a helicopter landing pad, a screening room and 800-film library, a discotheque, a hospital, sleeping quarters for a crew of 52, bathrooms of hand-carved onyx, and refrigerators that can carry a three-month supply of food for 100 people. The yacht has 14 fuel tanks that allow it to travel 8,500 miles without refueling. ..."
Mr. Trump bought the Trump Princess, as the well-known yacht is called, for $30 million in
1987 from the Sultan of Brunei, who had secured it as collateral for a multimillion-dollar loan
to Adnan M. Khashoggi.
Mr. Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian arms dealer, reportedly spent $85 million to build and outfit
the vessel with such features as a helicopter landing pad, a screening room and 800-film
library, a discotheque, a hospital, sleeping quarters for a crew of 52, bathrooms of
hand-carved onyx, and refrigerators that can carry a three-month supply of food for 100 people.
The yacht has 14 fuel tanks that allow it to travel 8,500 miles without refueling.
In 1989, the Princess was leased by the Trump's Castle hotel and casino and berthed at an
Atlantic City marina. It was used for promotion and entertainment by the Castle and several
other Trump enterprises.
Mr. Trump disclosed on a recent television appearance that the yacht was cruising the waters
of the Far East while he sought a buyer for it.
"... Hatice graduated from the Sharia college in the University of Istanbul in 2013 and got her MA in 2017 from the Faculty of Social Sciences – History Department at Salahaddin University after finishing a field study about sects in Oman. ..."
"... Sources close to Hatice's family said the family did not know their daughter was engaged to Khashoggi and were surprised to hear the news which they only learnt via media reports, adding that Hatice does not live in the same house with her family. ..."
Ever since Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi went missing in Istanbul, the name Hatice Cengiz
has dominated the scene and remained at the forefront of news headlines amid the mysterious
aura of the past 13 days.
So who is this Turkish woman that emerged from behind her Twitter account to claim that she
is Khashoggi's fiancée?
Hatice graduated from the Sharia college in the University of Istanbul in 2013 and got her
MA in 2017 from the Faculty of Social Sciences – History Department at Salahaddin
University after finishing a field study about sects in Oman.
She later joined a study program at the Ibn Khaldun University which is affiliated with the
Justice and Development Party, and where Bilal Erdogan holds the post of Vice Chairman of the
Board of Trustees.
The Ibn Khaldun University which was founded in 2015 signed educational and cultural
cooperation agreements with the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies where the Chairman of the
Board of Trustees is Azmi Bishara.
Hatice presented herself as a freelance researcher of Gulf countries and presented academic
studies about Oman, but the most important question is: Which party was Hatice Cengiz working
for then, and which center did her studies and articles serve?
On July 13, 2018, she interviewed Dar Al-Arab media group's Executive Director Jaber
al-Harmi for the foreign policy magazine, which is a periodical that is published in the
Turkish and English languages and which is affiliated with the Institute of Foreign Policy
that's affiliated with the Turkish Foreign Ministry.
In the interview, she addressed the convergence between Qatar and Iran and the stance of the
countries that have boycotted Qatar.
The topic was under the headline "Qatari-Iranian relations and the region's developments
after America's withdrawal from the nuclear deal," and in it, Hatice criticized Saudi Arabia in
exchange for extending the "olive branch of peace" to the Khomeini regime.
Sources close to Hatice's family said the family did not know their daughter was engaged
to Khashoggi and were surprised to hear the news which they only learnt via media reports,
adding that Hatice does not live in the same house with her family.
"... As a Muslim, Mr. Khashoggi could have gone to any country that upholds Muslim marriage rites and remarried without having to formally divorce his first wife, and then go to America and live with his "new wife" under the guise of a de-facto relationship. So why would he risk his life and walk into a potential death trap? ..."
"... Logic stipulates that Khashoggi entered the Consulate after he was given vehement assurances that his safety was guaranteed by the Saudi Crown. He would have never entered the Consulate had he not been given this assurance. ..."
"... Hatice Cengiz (Turkish for Khadijeh Jengiz) it is claimed, raised the first alarm for Khashoggi's disappearance, announcing at the same time that she is/was his fiancée. But that latter announcement of hers came as a surprise even to Khashoggi's own family. ..."
"... Some reports allege that Hatice has had a colourful history, including Mossad training https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SPuKo7WMSA&feature=youtu.be . The same YouTube alleges that she was a Gülenist and was arrested by Erdogan and released under the condition that she works for his security apparatus in order to guarantee her freedom. If such is the case, do we know if she has been also blackmailed in exchange for security of family members, loved ones, property etc? We don't know. ..."
"... In reality, irrespective of what his family members are saying now, Khashoggi has never introduced her to the world as his fiancée; and this is fact. So was she his fiancée? It is at least possible that she wasn't? So, who was she to Khashoggi and what role did she possibly play? ..."
"... Gülen is falling out of America's favour as he seems to have outlived his use-by date, and the Gülenist movement would be in dire need of a new benefactor. ..."
"... Cengiz, a former Gülenist, released on the above-mentioned conditions and possible threats, might have introduced herself to Khashoggi as an undercover Gülenist, and she had a history to support her claim. Being a former Gülenist, she might have indeed kept a foot in the Gülenist camp, and with the diminishing support of the American Government to the Gulenist movement, she might have been recruited to source finance. The Gülenists might have eyed Saudi Arabia to take this role, and as the rift between the Saudi royals and Erdogan intensified after their former joint effort to topple the legitimate secular government of Syria ..."
"... MBS himself would have inadvertently invited the Gülenists to approach him when he announced, back in March 2018 during a visit to the Coptic Pope Tawadros II in Egypt, that the triangle of evil in the Middle East is comprised of Iran, Islamist extremists groups and Turkey, and, in naming Turkey, he obviously meant Erdogan personally. ..."
"... With the Saudi-led Wahhabi version of fundamentalist Islam competing with the Muslim Brotherhood side, politically and militarily headed by Erdogan, it is not far-fetched to believe that either party is conspiring to topple the other. ..."
"... It is highly likely that Saudi officials had several contingency plans for Khashoggi's visit; depending on its outcome and the information that he had to offer. Those plans might have included giving him a wide range of treatments, ranging from a red carpet reception in Saudi Arabia, to beheading and dismembering him within the Consulate's grounds. ..."
"... It is possible that the Saudi officials in Turkey have had their own contacts with the Gülenists prior to the supposed ground-breaking visit of Khashoggi. In such a case, if the story Khashoggi may have offered did not fall in line with the story the Saudi's already know, then Khashoggi would have automatically been branded as suspicious and his safe entry would have been revoked. In such a case, he would have walked into his own trap. ..."
"... If any of the above scenarios are accurate, then the role of Erdogan in this story is not that of a scavenger who capitalized on the rift generated between the Saudis and America, but that he was instrumental in conjuring up and orchestrating the whole drama. Erdogan might have subjected the Saudi Government to the Gülen litmus test, and in such a case, the victim is Saudi Arabia and the scavenger is America seeking silence money in lieu of continued protection of Saudi interests. ..."
"... In all of the above scenarios, Khashoggi would have been driven into the trap by his alleged fiancée and had his impunity revoked by the Saudi officials because he failed the test. ..."
"... Most likely, Khashoggi was after amnesty from the Saudi Crown, and this would be a safety concern not only for Khashoggi himself, but also for his family that continued to live in Saudi Arabia ..."
"... Arabic media are inundated with posts and YouTube videos that are very damning of Hatice Cengiz ..."
"... . In reality however, her sudden emergence as Khashoggi's "fiancée", the fact that she allegedly waited for nearly 24 hours before reporting his disappearance and her personal, professional and political history are all factors that cast much doubt about her innocence and instead, portray her as a possible key element in the series of events that led to the disappearance of Khashoggi. ..."
"... And if Trump is seizing the opportunity to grab MBS, and this time he will be grabbing by the wallet, if Erdogan smells a hint of preparedness of MBS to support Gülen, then Erdogan would want MBS's wallet and head. Any whichever way, the silver lining of this story is that for once, Saudi Arabia is finally running for cover. Few around the world will give this brutal royal family any sympathy. ..."
"... MBS has committed heinous war crimes in Yemen and has made huge errors of judgment with regard to Syria and Qatar. He made many enemies, and it seems that Erdogan is out to get him. ..."
"... It does seem possible that the Assad-must-go curse has reached the neck of the Saudi throne ..."
"... Interestingly enough apparently K handed his two phones to fiancée before he went in ..any good journalist would have left a cache somewhere to be opened incase of certain events?????? ..."
"... why enter the consulate in Turkey? And, not in USA? And, why not the Embassy as the Ambassador has more power, than the Consular? Also, both the Muslim Brotherhood have Wahhabism have been friends for ages, as their theology is very similar with each other. And, if fact Erdogan is not Muslim Brotherhood but a Sufi. ..."
"... I've read several articles about Khashoggi and my feeling right now is everyone is lying, including B and Ghassan Kadi. ..."
"... Seems to me that also the Old US Establishment, along with the EU Establishment, both anti-Trump, never wanted MbS in the first place. Israel, and therefore Trump, are happy with MbS but a lot of people would like to see him gone and get the old "safe" gang back (who paid handsome bribes/salaries for decades). MbS is similar to Trump, way too impulsive, unpredictable and manic, and a special kind of crazy on top to make for a reliable partner in crime. ..."
"... The Establishment wants the Saudis to sell them their oil, then to recycle the money back into their economies. They'd prefer that they do this quietly, without any big fuss. They can get rich doing so, but they shouldn't disrupt the world. And this is the role that the Saudis have played mostly for the last 60-70 years. ..."
"... Until MbS. So yes, it is conceivable that some other powerful people are getting a bit tired of him. The same powerful people who really don't want the disruption of the world that a Shiite-Sunni war over the oil fields would cause. The same powerful friends who are also worried about Trump upsetting apple carts. Perhaps these powerful people are moving against a war, which means against Trump on Iran, and against MbS if they feel he keeps stirring things up too much. ..."
"... One problem throughout this whole affair is that I don't believe the Turks. Erdogon shutdown or converted the independent media that they once had. And in a case like this, all information comes from the government anyways. The Sauds have been rightly attacked for changing their story. But the Turks have been too. I've gotten the feeling that the 'news' reports from Turkish leaks (supposedly) have simply been the plot lines of various Hollywood movies. The body was cut up (with a chainsaw? like in Texas?), the body was dissolved in acid, the killers watched on Skype (always good to get that hip tech tie-in to a story). It can't all be true. ..."
"... Like The Salisbury Affair, The Case of the Disappearing Lover in Instanbul simply is going to have to be one to sit back and wait and see what if anything actually emerges as the truth. ..."
"... Seems pretty clueless to drop the bits in a well. Maybe the "local contact" was actually the consul, suggesting: Hey, I have an idea! How about dropping the body parts down the well? ..."
"... That is about the dumbest thing I have heard yet in the Story of K. Except, the idea of the body double. The people who thought up the body double idea must be the same Einsteins who figured the well in the consul's garden was a solution to disposal. Keystone Konsul. ..."
"... That bit of imagination leads to the idea that one of Khashoggi's last thoughts was "shit, I knew getting married again was a bad idea." ..."
"... The interesting thing was watching the US media go crazy about this. I kept thinking how different was this from Obama ordering Anwar Al-Awaki executed by drone strike? Al-Awaki received no trial, or even some kind of demand. Obama and his team just had him executed. So MBS is a horrible monster for doing exactly what Obama did. ..."
"... Khashoggi seemed to be working to "end dictatorship" and spread "free speech," democracy, voting, opinion polls, feminism, gender theory, lgbt washrooms, all that. All the great stuff of democracy. Worked out great in Sweden, why not Saudi Arabia? ..."
"... It was Khashoggi beating the Assad must go drum. The last Saudi represented on this site said Assad is harmless as long as he understands Saudi interests exist in Syria. Not ideal, but a better offer than London's. Further, the dead "journalist" believed Syria should be divided, and worse, that we should now act as if Assad is already gone ..."
"... Seems to come down to him being lied to, conn'd or lured into the consulate and his death. Then we come to the whole other point of why on earth did the Saudis use their consulate as an assassination killing ground? ..."
"... Governments killing people within their consulates is very rare. For reasons that are now very obvious, if they weren't before. ..."
"... The pundits who say MBS wanted to send a message set off alarms in my brain. Because that is exactly the reason we are supposed to believe that Putin uses all sorts of bizarre assasination methods that are obviously traced back to him. He wants to send a message. Yeah, right. And that's why they brought a bleep-storm of trouble down on top of their heads. To send a message? ..."
When I worked and lived in Saudi Arabia, one of the first things I learnt was that
the company I worked for had a fulltime employee with the job description of "Mu'aqeb". The
best translation of this title is "expeditor". This man was in charge of every matter that had
to do with dealing with government. He is the one who takes one's passport and sees that a
Saudi "Iquama" (temporary certificate of residence) is produced. He is the one who renews
driving licenses. He is the one that does the necessary paperwork to grant employees exit and
re-entry visas when they go away on holidays. He even applies on one's behalf for visas to
visit other countries. He even paid water and electricity bills. He did it all, and of course,
on top of his salary, he expected a present from employees on their return to work from
holidays, and some employees would risk big penalties smuggling in Playboy magazines to reward
him with. But the company I worked for was not alone in this regard; all other companies had
their own "Mu'aqeb".
It is against the Saudi psyche, culture and "pride" to go to a government office, wait in
line and make an application for anything. Not even uneducated poor Saudis are accustomed to go
through the rigmarole of government red-tape and routine.
Mr. Khashoggi was from the upper crust, and it is highly doubtful that he would have been
willing and prepared to physically enter the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul seeking an official
document.
Jamal Khashoggi was no fool. He knew the modus operandi of the Saudi Government too well. He
knew that what he had said was tantamount to a death sentence in the brutal Kingdom of Sand. So
what incited him to walk into the Consulate? To receive a divorce certificate so he could
remarry as the reports are trying to make us believe? Not a chance.
But this is not all. As a Muslim, Mr. Khashoggi could have gone to any country that upholds
Muslim marriage rites and remarried without having to formally divorce his first wife, and then
go to America and live with his "new wife" under the guise of a de-facto relationship. So why
would he risk his life and walk into a potential death trap?
Logic stipulates that Khashoggi entered the Consulate after he was given vehement assurances
that his safety was guaranteed by the Saudi Crown. He would have never entered the Consulate
had he not been given this assurance.
But why would the Saudi Government give him this assurance even though he had been very
critical of MBS? A good question.
Once again, a logical hypothetical answer to this question could be that Khashoggi had some
important meeting with a high ranking Saudi official to discuss some issues of serious
importance, and this normally means that he had some classified information to pass on to the
Saudi Government; important enough that the Saudi Crown was prepared to set aside Khashoggi's
recent history in exchange of this information.
If we try to connect more dots in a speculative but rational manner, the story can easily
become more interesting.
Hatice Cengiz (Turkish for Khadijeh Jengiz) it is claimed, raised the first alarm for
Khashoggi's disappearance, announcing at the same time that she is/was his fiancée. But
that latter announcement of hers came as a surprise even to Khashoggi's own family.
Not much is said and speculated about Hatice in the West, but she is definitely making some
headlines in the Arab World, especially on media controlled and sponsored by Saudi Arabia. To
this effect, and because the Saudi neck is on the chopping board, it is possible that for the
first time ever perhaps, the Saudis are telling the truth.
But the Saudis are the boys who cried wolf, and no one will ever believe them. But, let us
explore how they might have got themselves into this bind.
As we connect the dots, we speculate as follows:
Some reports allege that Hatice has had a colourful history, including Mossad training
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SPuKo7WMSA&feature=youtu.be . The
same YouTube alleges that she was a Gülenist and was arrested by Erdogan and released
under the condition that she works for his security apparatus in order to guarantee her
freedom. If such is the case, do we know if she has been also blackmailed in exchange for
security of family members, loved ones, property etc? We don't know.
It has also been reported that Jamal Khashoggi met her only as early as May 2018 and later
introduced her as an expert on Omani history and politics. In reality, irrespective of what his
family members are saying now, Khashoggi has never introduced her to the world as his
fiancée; and this is fact. So was she his fiancée? It is at least possible that she wasn't? So, who was she to Khashoggi and what role did she possibly play?
The following speculation cannot be proved, but it makes sense:
To explain what a Gülenist is for the benefit of the reader who is unaware of this
term, Erdogan blamed former friend and ally Fethullah Gülen for the failed coup attempt of
July 2016 and persecuted his followers, putting tens of thousands of them in jail. Erdogan's
relationship with America was already deteriorating at that time because of America's support
to Syrian Kurds, and to add to Erdogan's woes, America was and continues to give Gülen a
safe haven despite many requests by Erdogan to have him extradited to Turkey to face trial. But
Gülen is falling out of America's favour as he seems to have outlived his use-by date, and
the Gülenist movement would be in dire need of a new benefactor.
Cengiz, a former Gülenist, released on the above-mentioned conditions and possible
threats, might have introduced herself to Khashoggi as an undercover Gülenist, and she had
a history to support her claim. Being a former Gülenist, she might have indeed kept a foot
in the Gülenist camp, and with the diminishing support of the American Government to the
Gulenist movement, she might have been recruited to source finance. The Gülenists might
have eyed Saudi Arabia to take this role, and as the rift between the Saudi royals and Erdogan
intensified after their former joint effort to topple the legitimate secular government of
Syria
The Gülenists would have found in Al-Saud what represents an enemy of an enemy, and
they had to find a way to seek Saudi support against Erdogan. MBS himself would have
inadvertently invited the Gülenists to approach him when he announced, back in March 2018
during a visit to the Coptic Pope Tawadros II in Egypt, that the triangle of evil in the Middle
East is comprised of Iran, Islamist extremists groups and Turkey, and, in naming Turkey, he
obviously meant Erdogan personally.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/08/saudi-crown-prince-sees-a-new-axis-of-evil-in-the-middle-east/
Khashoggi, with his expansive connections, looked like a good candidate to introduce the
would-be new partners and broker a deal between them.
Back to what may have incited Khashoggi to enter the Saudi Consulate and to why the Saudi
Government would have, in that case, given him a safe entry despite his history. Possibly,
Khashoggi believed that he had a "big story" to relay to the Saudi Government; one that most
likely exposed big time anti-Saudi dirt about Erdogan.
With the Saudi-led Wahhabi version of fundamentalist Islam competing with the Muslim
Brotherhood side, politically and militarily headed by Erdogan, it is not far-fetched to
believe that either party is conspiring to topple the other. If Khashoggi had a story to this
effect, even if it was fake but credible enough for him to believe, it would have given him the
impetus to seek an audience at the Saudi Consulate and hence an expectation for the Consulate
to positively reciprocate. In reality, given the history and culture involved, it is hard to
fathom that any scenario short of this one would have given either Khashoggi and/or the Saudi
officials enough reasons to meet in the manner and place they did.
It is highly likely that Saudi officials had several contingency plans for Khashoggi's
visit; depending on its outcome and the information that he had to offer. Those plans might
have included giving him a wide range of treatments, ranging from a red carpet reception in
Saudi Arabia, to beheading and dismembering him within the Consulate's grounds. What happened
after Khashoggi entered the precinct of the Consulate is fairly muddy and hard to speculate on.
If the above speculations thus far have been accurate, then these are the possible scenarios
that followed the fateful CCTV coverage of Khashoggi's entry to the Consulate:
1. It is possible that the Saudi officials in Turkey have had their own contacts with the Gülenists prior to the supposed ground-breaking visit of Khashoggi. In such a case, if the
story Khashoggi may have offered did not fall in line with the story the Saudi's already know,
then Khashoggi would have automatically been branded as suspicious and his safe entry would
have been revoked. In such a case, he would have walked into his own trap.
2. On the other hand, if Khashoggi indeed gave Saudi authorities vital information, so vital
that it clearly is vehemently pro-Gülen, and as Gülen is no longer an American
favourite, then upon his return to America he may have become a Saudi liability that can
potentially muddy the Saudi-American waters that the Saudis desperately try to keep clear. In
such an instance, it would be opportune for the Saudis to finish him off before he could return
to America.
3. A third possibility is that some Saudi officials already working covertly with Gülen
saw in Khashoggi an already persona non grata, a dangerous Erdogan implant and decided to take
action against him.
If any of the above scenarios are accurate, then the role of Erdogan in this story is not
that of a scavenger who capitalized on the rift generated between the Saudis and America, but
that he was instrumental in conjuring up and orchestrating the whole drama. Erdogan might have
subjected the Saudi Government to the Gülen litmus test, and in such a case, the victim is
Saudi Arabia and the scavenger is America seeking silence money in lieu of continued protection
of Saudi interests.
In all of the above scenarios, Khashoggi would have been driven into the trap by his alleged
fiancée and had his impunity revoked by the Saudi officials because he failed the
test.
But what triggered him off personally to walk into this possible trap? What was in it for
him? Definitely not divorce documents. Most likely, Khashoggi was after amnesty from the Saudi
Crown, and this would be a safety concern not only for Khashoggi himself, but also for his
family that continued to live in Saudi Arabia. He may well have thought that by providing vital
and sensitive information to his government, his previous "sins" would be set aside and he
would be treated as a hero, his family would feel safe, despite that fact that he has
criticized the Crown Prince in the past.
Arabic media are inundated with posts and YouTube videos that are very damning of Hatice
Cengiz. Most of them perhaps are Saudi propaganda and should not be taken without a grain of salt.
In reality however, her sudden emergence as Khashoggi's "fiancée", the fact that she
allegedly waited for nearly 24 hours before reporting his disappearance and her personal,
professional and political history are all factors that cast much doubt about her innocence and
instead, portray her as a possible key element in the series of events that led to the
disappearance of Khashoggi.
Furthermore, why would a person in her position make rules and conditions about meeting the
President of the United States of America, even if this President is Donald Trump? (
Jamal Khashoggi's fiancee I will only visit Trump if he takes action World news The Guardian ) How many
people in history have refused the invitation of American Presidents? Who does she think she is
or who is she trying to portray herself as?
And if Trump is seizing the opportunity to grab MBS, and this time he will be grabbing by
the wallet, if Erdogan smells a hint of preparedness of MBS to support Gülen, then Erdogan
would want MBS's wallet and head. Any whichever way, the silver lining of this story is that
for once, Saudi Arabia is finally running for cover. Few around the world will give this brutal
royal family any sympathy.
There are other rumors spreading in the Arab world now alluding to the removal of MBS from
office and passing over the reins to his brother. MBS has committed heinous war crimes in Yemen
and has made huge errors of judgment with regard to Syria and Qatar. He made many enemies, and
it seems that Erdogan is out to get him.
It does seem possible that the Assad-must-go curse has reached the neck of the Saudi
throne.
Erdogan presentation to his party today too most media seemingly reporting deep
international concern and hubris from arms suppliers... Interestingly enough apparently K
handed his two phones to fiancée before he went in ..any good journalist would have left a
cache somewhere to be opened incase of certain events??????
No confirmation of victims "screams", etc although a there is one report he was held in a
stranglehold which would prevent such vocalisation?
You left the elephant out of the room. You are right that Jamal Khashoggi had no need to
enter the consulate for his divorce, and you suggested the reason being quid pro quo. But why enter the consulate in Turkey? And, not in USA? And, why not the Embassy as the Ambassador has more power, than the Consular? Also, both the Muslim Brotherhood have Wahhabism have been friends for ages, as their
theology is very similar with each other. And, if fact Erdogan is not Muslim Brotherhood but
a Sufi.
So, why did you leave out the elephant in the room, Israel. With the fall of Saudi
Arabia, Israel has more to loose and Iran has more to gain.
I was waiting for this article.
Looks B is not buying this version.
"There seem to be a lot of conspiracy theories being weaved around the case. Some of them
were mentioned in the comments here. I don't buy it. Turkey did not arrange the incident. I
see no sign that the U.S., Israel, Qatar or the UAE had a hand in this. This was a very
stupid crime committed by Mohammad bin Salman. Or even worse, a mistake. The wannabe-sultan
Erdogan is a crafty politician. He is simply riding the wave." https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/10/how-will-caligula-fall.html#more
I've read several articles about Khashoggi and my feeling right now is everyone is lying,
including B and Ghassan Kadi. (wrote this article. Mod.)
B ignores all said by Ghassan Kadi . And Ghassan Kadi is being soft on
SA cuz Russian wants it.
SA is a prize big enough to the bear get out of his cave. Deep State set the trap and SA fell like a kid cuz they are very predictable. They simply
kill a lot! Everybody is trying to profit and only one thing is sure about all this:
we will never know!
Seems to me that also the Old US Establishment, along with the EU Establishment, both
anti-Trump, never wanted MbS in the first place. Israel, and therefore Trump, are happy with
MbS but a lot of people would like to see him gone and get the old "safe" gang back (who paid
handsome bribes/salaries for decades). MbS is similar to Trump, way too impulsive,
unpredictable and manic, and a special kind of crazy on top to make for a reliable partner in
crime.
The Establishment wants the Saudis to sell them their oil, then to recycle the money back
into their economies. They'd prefer that they do this quietly, without any big fuss. They can
get rich doing so, but they shouldn't disrupt the world. And this is the role that the Saudis
have played mostly for the last 60-70 years.
Until MbS. So yes, it is conceivable that some other powerful people are getting a bit tired of him.
The same powerful people who really don't want the disruption of the world that a
Shiite-Sunni war over the oil fields would cause. The same powerful friends who are also
worried about Trump upsetting apple carts. Perhaps these powerful people are moving against a
war, which means against Trump on Iran, and against MbS if they feel he keeps stirring things
up too much.
One problem throughout this whole affair is that I don't believe the Turks.
Erdogon shutdown or converted the independent media that they once had. And in a case like
this, all information comes from the government anyways. The Sauds have been rightly attacked for changing their story. But the Turks have been
too. I've gotten the feeling that the 'news' reports from Turkish leaks (supposedly) have
simply been the plot lines of various Hollywood movies. The body was cut up (with a chainsaw?
like in Texas?), the body was dissolved in acid, the killers watched on Skype (always good to
get that hip tech tie-in to a story). It can't all be true.
To some extant, I get the feeling I'm watching Qatar money buying news stories to get back
at the Sauds. If so, good for them.
Like The Salisbury Affair, The Case of the Disappearing Lover in Instanbul simply is going
to have to be one to sit back and wait and see what if anything actually emerges as the
truth.
Could not be sulphuric acid the "traditional acid" for dissolving bodies you would need more
than 25 litres the most dangerous lethal fumes and smell would have filled the whole building
which would have been contaminated other people choking with deadly fumes. How to get acid in
and out/disposed ..people in PPE hosing down etc etc
I actually thought the "local contact" who supposed disposed of the body took it rolled up in
a rug and cremated it. Seems pretty clueless to drop the bits in a well. Maybe the "local contact" was actually the
consul, suggesting: Hey, I have an idea! How about dropping the body parts down the well?
That is about the dumbest thing I have heard yet in the Story of K.
Except, the idea of the body double.
The people who thought up the body double idea must be the same Einsteins who figured the
well in the consul's garden was a solution to disposal. Keystone Konsul.
Maybe I'm being sexist, but I imagine a discussion between the couple, with the future wife
saying she wants to get married, while the future husband is saying "Ah, aren't things great
now? Why change it? We can just live together." That bit of imagination leads to the idea that one of Khashoggi's last thoughts was "shit,
I knew getting married again was a bad idea."
The interesting thing was watching the US media go crazy about this. I kept thinking how
different was this from Obama ordering Anwar Al-Awaki executed by drone strike? Al-Awaki
received no trial, or even some kind of demand. Obama and his team just had him executed. So
MBS is a horrible monster for doing exactly what Obama did.
Khashoggi seemed to be working to "end dictatorship" and spread "free speech," democracy,
voting, opinion polls, feminism, gender theory, lgbt washrooms, all that. All the great stuff
of democracy. Worked out great in Sweden, why not Saudi Arabia?
All I'm getting out of this article is a desire to see the house of Saud fall. Plus some
dense little leaguer stuff about a marriage or something. Come on!
It was Khashoggi beating the Assad must go drum. The last Saudi represented on this site said Assad is harmless as long
as he understands Saudi interests exist in Syria. Not ideal, but a better offer than London's. Further, the dead "journalist"
believed Syria should be divided, and worse, that we should now act as if Assad is already gone – said the guy who got
sawed up and buried under a flower bed.
Seems to come down to him being lied to, conn'd or lured into the consulate and his death. Then we come to the whole other point of why on earth did the Saudis use their consulate
as an assassination killing ground? Governments wanting to kill people is nothing new. That's
what governments do. Governments killing people within their consulates is very
Thanks for the link. Thanks
for the link. Interesting news. Good to know those ruling elites are all alike. Greedy as all
hell and indifferent to how they murder people and how many. Some just like to hide their
atrocities, others don't.