How Jack Sullivan Screwed Up The U.S. Relations With France

After reporters in a news room have written up a story it goes to editors who check it, provide a headline and often also rewrite the opening paragraph(s). The piece then  gets published.

That process at times leads to headlines and/or opening paragraphs which contradict the rest of the story. This can happen because the editor is in a rush and has not had the time to really digest a story. At other times it happens because the editor lets his personal political leaning, or a special preference for an involved person, shine through.

This seems to be the case with a New York Times story about the U.S. induced Australian cancelling of a deal to buy French submarines.

The United States says it gave France only a few hours’ notice of defense deal that Paris called a ‘knife in the back.’
By Michael D. Shear and Roger Cohen

The United States acknowledged on Thursday that it only gave France a few hours’ notice of its deal to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, a move that French officials have denounced as a major betrayal by one of its closest allies.

After the headline and the first paragraph any reader will assume that the U.S. indeed informed France a few hours before the deal became public.

That however is an outright lie as paragraph 11 and 12 of the very same piece provide:

Philippe Étienne, the French ambassador to the United States and the host of the party, said on Thursday that he learned about the deal from news reports, followed by a call from Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to Mr. Biden.

A senior American official said that the Biden administration had made efforts to inform the French government about the president’s announcement earlier Wednesday morning, but had been unable to schedule the discussions with their French counterparts before the news reports appeared online.

The U.S. did not say "it gave France only a few hours’ notice". The U.S. did not acknowledge "on Thursday that it only gave France a few hours’ notice of its deal".

The U.S. did the opposite of what the headline and opening graph of the NYT story claim.

"A senior American official" acknowledged that the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan screwed up and informed France only after Politico published the first report on the deal on Wednesday September 15 at 8:55 am.

Sullivan in fact cowardly avoided to tell France about the deal as a separate NYT piece by Roger Cohen provides:

Cont. reading: How Jack Sullivan Screwed Up The U.S. Relations With France

To Protect Itself From U.S. Hostility Australia Decides To Buy U.S. Submarines

Yesterday the U.S., the UK and Australia announced that the later one will buy nuclear powered submarines to do the U.S.' bidding against China:

Australia's next submarine fleet will be nuclear-powered under an audacious plan that will see a controversial $90 billion program to build up to 12 French-designed submarines scrapped.

The ABC understands Australia will use American and British technology to configure its next submarine fleet in a bid to replace its existing Collins class subs with a boat more suitable to the deteriorating strategic environment.

This is a huge but short term win for the U.S. with an also-ran booby price for Britain and a strategic loss of sovereignty and budget control for Australia.

It is another U.S. slap into the face of France and the European Union. The deal will piss off New Zealand, Indonesia and of course China. It will upset the international nuclear non proliferation regime and may lead to the further military nuclearization of South Korea and Japan.

Australia currently has 6 Collins class submarines. These are diesel driven boats based on Swedish designs but partially build in Australia. These boats are relatively slow and have a medium range and endurance. They were built between 1990 and 2003 and are mostly for defensive use. There were lots of trouble during the building of the boats as Australia lacks the technical capabilities and industrial depth to make such complicate products. The operational history of boats is also rather mixed with several scandals following each other. The boats are supposed to be upgraded to be in use for another decade.

In the 2010s Australia began to look for a new generation of submarines. After a long discussion it decided to stick to conventionally powered boats. The new subs were again to be build in Australia after a foreign design.

Germany, Japan and France were asked for proposals. The French state owned ship builder Naval Group (DCNS) won the race for 12 new boats and the €50 billion contract. Ironically the French conventionally driven Shortfin Barracuda design France offered is based on its own nuclear driven Barracuda class design. For Australia France had therefore to design a conventional power plant for a submarine that was originally designed, as all French subs are, to run on a nuclear reactor with low enriched uranium (LEU). It was quite obvious that this unusual conversion would run into difficulties and time delays.

Back in June Peter Lee, aka Chinahand, wrote about the delayed program:

Cont. reading: To Protect Itself From U.S. Hostility Australia Decides To Buy U.S. Submarines

Open Thread 2021-71

What Was Biden's Diktat The Saudis Are So Furious About?

Two seasoned commentators, Abdel Bari Atwan and M.K. Bhadrakumar, note the recent snag in U.S. - Saudi relations. Writes Atwan:

The past two weeks have seen an unprecedented rise in tensions between the two sides, which could lead to political and economic standoffs in the days and months to come. Several recent developments attest to this. Last week the Associated Press, well known for its connections to Washington decision-makers, confirmed that the Biden administration has withdrawn all its Patriot and (more sophisticated) THAAD air defence systems from the kingdom.
...
Then it was announced that a visit to the kingdom by US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin – as part of a Gulf tour that included Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain — had been postponed or cancelled, ostensibly due to ‘scheduling issues’. That was an unprecedented snub reflecting official Saudi anger at the US.

A minor Saudi prince, Sattam Bin-Khaled Al Saud, was assigned to explain that it was Saudi Arabia that called off the visit. The ‘great kingdom’, he tweeted, would not be dictated to, and would only conduct relations on the basis of ‘shared interests and mutual respect’. No ruling family member has spoken about the US this way previously.

The young royal, who is close to Crown Prince Muhammad Bin-Salman, went on to contrast the cancellation of Austin’s visit with the very warm reception the kingdom accorded to Leonid Slutsky, head of the Russian Duma’s international affairs committee. This was intended as a warning to Washington that Riyadh potentially has an alternative ally in Moscow — a ‘brave’ but potentially risky and very costly challenge.

There was also the recent publishing of FBI findings about Saudi involvement in 9/11. And on Afghanistan the U.S. worked with Qatar instead of using Saudi channels. But both issues are neither new nor do they justify such a response.

Bhadrakumar opines:

Cont. reading: What Was Biden's Diktat The Saudis Are So Furious About?

The MoA Week In Review - OT 2021-070

Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:

• Sep 6 - Why You Should Get Vaccinated But Don't Need A Third Shot
  Related:
  - The debate over Covid-19 vaccine boosters, what to call them, and whether they’re needed - STATnews
  - The Surprisingly Strong Supreme Court Precedent Supporting Vaccine Mandates - Politico

• Sep 7 - How U.S. Levant Policies Defeated Themselves
  Related:
  - Lebanon forms new government in effort to slow nation's collapse - UPI
  - New Report Warns of a 'Third Mass Exodus' from Lebanon - Sun/Yahoo

• Sep 8 - CNN 'Exclusive' Repeats MoA's Year Old Reporting - Ukraine/CIA Tried To Snatch Russian Veterans
  Related:
  - UK Defense ministry document reveals Skripals blood samples could have been manipulated - Dilyana
  - HOW THE NAVALNY NOVICHOK OPERATION WAS PREPARED — NEW EVIDENCE FROM GERMANY - John Helmer

• Sep 9 - Afghanistan - State Department Sanctimoniously Laments About 'Lack Of Female Leaders'
  Related:
  - Biden’s Taliban blues - Indian Punchline
  - Strange Crusaders: Diary of the Afghan War - Counterpunch
  - Taliban flag rises over seat of power on fateful anniversary - AP

• Sep 10 - Meta - This Blog(ger) Needed A New Laptop

• Sep 11 - Some Thoughts On 9/11
  Related:
  - In Short 20 Years. - Andrei Martyanov
  - Al-Qaida’s belated victory - Abdel Bari Adwan / Rai al Youm
  - The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11: U.S. Complicity in the Terror Spectacle and the Urgent Need to End It - Covert Action Magazine
  - The new age of American power - Adam Tooze / New Statesman
     Despite forecasts of decline following the Afghanistan withdrawal, the US military is planning another century of global domination.

---
Other issues:

Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review - OT 2021-070

Some Thoughts On 9/11

Twenty years ago I was chief technology officer for a major news website. It was after lunch and I was testing new productivity tools for the news room. Someone came into my office and said that a plane had hit the WTC in New York City. I walked into the news room where several TV screens were filled with pictures of a smoking tower. 

The news folks were busy writing their first takes. Some of it was speculation. I mentioned that this was not the first plane to hit a skyscraper in NYC and called it an accident. That made it into one of the first take stories.

Still - even as an accident it was spectacular news and the page views per minute on the website went towards our capacity limits. Then the second plane hit and it was immediately clear to everyone that these were no accidents. The web traffic went through the roof.

We had had ample capacity to cover news peaks but this was way too much traffic for our normal site to handle. I told the server administrator to take down all side processes on the web-server machines we were using. We then started to minimize the content of the site. Everything that was generated dynamically was switched off. We minimized the numbers of pictures. We stopped all advertisement delivery. Other major news sites I tested were already dead - overwhelmed from the enormous amount of traffic. We were still up - but even loading the much cleaned up front page took more than 30 seconds.

I phoned up a number of IT guys I knew who administered public web sites for other purposes. I asked them to mirror our site through a side channel we had opened for that purpose. We then fiddled with the domain name servers to reroute a part of our traffic to those mirror sites. With those finally up and running we barely made it through the evening traffic peak without crashing everything. 

The traffic stayed above our nominal capacity for over a week. I stopped my news room productivity project and set down to design a new content delivery system which allowed for a dynamic addition of capacity. The design was quite expensive but three month later we implemented it.

9/11 touched a bit on my job but I was lucky to avoid its other deadly consequences.

Before working for that news site I had long worked with Americans on a daily basis. I had been to the U.S. over a dozen times during the previous years. It was immediately clear to me that its people would want revenge. They would not care much against whom it would be waged. That private prediction turned out to be right.

Little has changed since. The catharsis that 9/11 should have brought never happened. Most people still don't care about the wars of terror and who gets killed in them. I blame the media for that.

Today the New York Times and the Washington Post both report on the recent 'righteous' drone strike in Kabul:

Cont. reading: Some Thoughts On 9/11

Meta - This Blog(ger) Needed A New Laptop

Just spent the last two days on buying and configuring a new laptop. I have used the now 'old' one daily for four years and it started to have display problems. Since a month ago the lower part of the screen at times turned into a random mess of colors. Rebooting solved the issue but it is a sure sign that the machines life is coming to an end.

As I no longer had a reserve machine a sudden death of my major tool would have been bad for blogging. So out I went and looked for a new one. I found that laptop prices have gone up by some 100% when compared to four years ago. All those chips Bill Gates is putting into the vaccines have really had an effect on prices and availability.

My old laptop, which was relative high end at its time, had set me back €700. The new, in the same relative quality range, was double that pricey.

Like my old laptop the new one is a 'gaming' machine even though I hardly ever play computer games. The reason to buy 'gaming' laptops are their better displays and the MF II keyboards with a numeric pad. I am used to navigate the editor with it when I write. Many of these machine types were out of stock with new ones deliverable only at the end of the year. After some research I ended up with a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro Gen 6 (16" AMD) and I am, for now, quite happy with it.

The display is excellent! (16:10, 16.0" WQXGA (2560 x 1600) IPS, anti-glare, 165Hz). For someone who reads and writes online 12+ hours per day that display alone is a killer argument. The CPU though is total overkill for what I do. (AMD® Ryzen™ 5 5600H Processor + NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX™ 3050 4GB). But the CPU being overkill helps to keep its ventilator quiet when I only run my usual applications. The laptop makes less noise than the heating radiator next to my desk even when I watch high resolution videos. (I may try to additionally disable the NVIDIA GPU to see if I can get the machine to make no noise at all.)

What took me the better part of two days and led to extensive cursing of Bill Gates were the ridiculous difficulties with transferring my (application) configuration settings and data from one machine to the other. Windows 10 is hopelessly overloaded with completely useless stuff. But a simple 'export my data and settings', 'transfer' and 'import my data and settings' functionality is - some 35 years after Windows was born - still not available.

Well - anyway - just thought I'd let you know why there is no real blog post today. And to let those who thankfully donated for this blog know what their money got spent on.

Open Thread 2021-69

News & views ...

Afghanistan - State Department Sanctimoniously Laments About 'Lack Of Female Leaders'

The Hill is channeling  State Department 'concerns':

State Department voices concerns over all-male Taliban government

The State Department on Tuesday expressed concerns over the makeup of the new interim Afghan government announced by the Taliban, including the lack of female leaders and the past actions of some of those appointed to top posts.

A State Department spokesperson said in a statement shared with The Hill that although the Taliban “has presented this as a caretaker cabinet,” the U.S. “will judge the Taliban by its actions, not words.”

“We have made clear our expectation that the Afghan people deserve an inclusive government,” the spokesperson added.

The statement went on to note that the list of names announced by the Taliban earlier Tuesday “consists exclusively of individuals who are members of the Taliban or their close associates and no women.”

Well, the 'caretaker' government surely reflects the wishlist of the Pakistani spy service ISI. Its boss had flown to Kabul to get it implemented as soon as possible.

Sure, the U.S. does not like that. But a look at the governments of certain U.S. 'allies' lets me wonder how genuine the 'concern' about a 'lack of female members' really is.

Cont. reading: Afghanistan - State Department Sanctimoniously Laments About 'Lack Of Female Leaders'

CNN 'Exclusive' Repeats MoA's Year Old Reporting - Ukraine/CIA Tried To Snatch Russian Veterans

Trust in U.S. media is at a record low:

The United States ranks last in media trust — at 29% — among 92,000 news consumers surveyed in 46 countries, a report released Wednesday found. That’s worse than Poland, worse than the Philippines, worse than Peru. (Finland leads at 65%.)

One reason is that U.S. media are either not reporting important events, are misreporting them, or are very late in covering twisted plots that even a lowly blogger can get right just as they happen.

On August 7 2020 Moon of Alabama reported on a Ukrainian operation designed to lead to the arrest, in Ukraine, of soldiers who had fought on the side of Donbas during the Ukrainian war on its east:

People who had claimed to work for the Russian oil conglomerate Rosneft, but used a fake Rosneft domain for their emails, had hired Ukrainian/Russian veterans who had fought on the pro-Russian side in the civil war in the Ukraine.

The men were told that they would guard oil fields in Syria and in Venezuela. They received some money and were given tickets prepared for them for a flight from Minsk to Turkey. Those tickets were booked by an Ukrainian travel agency in Kiev which seems to have been founded solely for that purpose. But when the mercenaries arrived in Belarus they were told that the flight had been canceled. They were put into a local hotel and told to wait a few days for another flight.

The Ukrainian secret service then informed Lukashenko that a group of Russian mercenaries were in his country to launch a coup during the upcoming election. Lukashenko has publicly acknowledged that the information about the group had come from the Ukraine. Belarus arrested the men and the Ukraine immediately demand their extradition.

the original idea had been to make the plane with the former soldiers land in the Ukraine during its flight from Minsk to Turkey. The former soldiers would then have been arrested.

But some entity on the Ukrainian side - some says its president's office, others blame the CIA - sabotaged the original plan to create a ruckus in Belarus. After Russian media uncovered the whole plot Belarus released the veterans and let them go back to Russia.

On September 21 2020 Moon of Alabama flogged the New York Times over misreporting the story:

Cont. reading: CNN 'Exclusive' Repeats MoA's Year Old Reporting - Ukraine/CIA Tried To Snatch Russian Veterans