OPCW Manipulation Of Its Douma Report Requires A Fresh Look At The Skripal 'Novichok' Case
With regards to the revelations about the OPCW management manipulation of its staff reports the former UN weapon inspector Scott Ritter makes a very valid point:
Thanks to an explosive internal memo, there is no reason to believe the claims put forward by the Syrian opposition that President Bashar al-Assad’s government used chemical weapons against innocent civilians in Douma back in April. This is a scenario I have questioned from the beginning. It also calls into question all the other conclusions and reports by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which was assigned in 2014 “to establish facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals, reportedly chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic.”
Besides its activities around dubious 'chemical' incident in Syria there is another rather famous case in which the OPCW got involved: The alleged 'Novichok' attack on Sergei and Julia Skripal in Salisbury, Britain.
We discussed the OPCW involvement in the Skirpal case in our April 15 2018 report: Were the Skripals 'Buzzed', 'Novi-shocked' Or Neither?
The Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, Sergey Lavrov, threw a bombshell at the British assertions that the collapse of the British secret agent Sergej Skripal and his daughter Yulia on March 4 in Salisbury was caused by a 'Novichok' nerve agent 'of a type developed by Russia'. (See our older pieces, linked below, for a detailed documentation of the case.)
- The Skripal poisoning happened on March 4.
- Eye witnesses described the Skripals as disoriented and probably hallucinating. The emergency personal suspected Fentanyl influence.
- A few days later the British government claimed that the Skripals had been affected by a chemical agent from the 'Novichok' series which they attributed to Russia. It insinuated that the Skripals might die soon.
- A doctor of the emergency center at the Salisbury District Hospital publicly asserted that none of its patients was victim of a 'nerve agent'.
- On March 14, after much pressure from Russia, Britain finally invited the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to analyze the blood of the victims and to take environmental samples.
- The OPCW arrived on March 19 and took specimen on the following days. It also received a share of the samples taken earlier by the British chemical weapon laboratory in Porton Down, which is only some 10 miles away from Salisbury.
- The OPCW split the various samples it had in a certified laboratory in the Netherlands and then distributed them to several other certified laboratories for analysis.
- One of those laboratories was the highly regarded Spiez Laboratory in Switzerland which is part of the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Protection and fully certified.
- On April 12 the OPCW published a public version of the result of the analyses it had received from its laboratories.
- A more extensive confidential version was given to the state members that make up the OPCW.
During a public speech yesterday Lavrov stated of the OPCW report:
[A] detailed and fairly substantial confidential version was distributed to the OPCW members only. In that report, in accordance with the OPCW way of conduct, the chemical composition of the agent presented by the British was confirmed, and the analysis of samples, as the report states, was taken by the OPCW experts themselves. It contains no names, Novichok or any other. The report only gives the chemical formula, which, according to our experts, points to an agent that had been developed in many countries and does not present any particular secret.After receiving that report Russia was tipped off by the Spiez Laboratory or someone else that the OPCW report did not include the full results of its analysis.
According to Lavrov this is what the Spiez Laboratory originally sent to the OPCW:
“Following our analysis, the samples indicate traces of the toxic chemical BZ and its precursor which are second category chemical weapons. BZ is a nerve toxic agent, which temporarily disables a person. The psycho toxic effect is achieved within 30 to 60 minutes after its use and lasts for up to four days. This composition was in operational service in the armies of the US, the UK and other NATO countries. The Soviet Union and Russia neither designed nor stored such chemical agents. Also, the samples indicate the presence of type A-234 nerve agent in its virgin state and also products of its degradation.”The "presence of type A-234 nerve agent", an agent of the so called 'Novichok' series, in its "virgin state", or as the OPCW stated in "high purity", points to later addition to the sample. The 'Novichok' agents are not stable. They tend to fall rapidly apart. Their presence in "virgin state" in a sample which was taken 15 days after the Skripal incident happened is inexplicable. A scientist of the former Russian chemical weapon program who worked with similar agents, Leonid Rink, says that if the Skripals had really been exposed to such high purity A-234 nerve agent, they would be dead.
The whole case, the symptoms shown by the Skripals and their recuperation, makes way more sense if they were 'buzzed', i.e. poisoned with the BZ hallucinogenic agent, than if they were 'novi-shocked' with a highly toxic nerve agent.
The OPCW had send blood samples from the Skripals to the Spiez laboratory in Switzerland which found BZ, a psycho agent 25 times stronger than LSD. The OPCW hid this fact in its reports.
An attack with BZ on the Skripals would be consistent with the observed symptoms that bystanders had described. The Skripals were indeed hallucinating and behaved very strangly with Sergei Skipal lifting his arms up to the sky while sitting on a bench. Exposure to BZ would also explain the Skripals' survival.
The OPCW explained the BZ find by claiming that it had mixed BZ into the probe to test the laboratory. Something which it said it regularly does. At that time I still believed in the OPCW and found that explanation reasonable:
The OPCW responded to Russian question about the BZ and high rate of A-234 in the Spiez Laboratory probe and report.OPCW said today that it was a control probe to test the laboratory. Such probes are regularly slipped under the real probes to make sure that the laboratories the OPCW uses are able to do their job and do not manipulate their results.
That explanation is reasonable.
I guess we can close the BZ theories and go back to food poisoning as the most likely cause of the Skripals' illness.
In light of the OPCW management manipulation or suppression of the reports of its own specialists for the purpose of attributing the Douma incident to the Syrian government I have to change my opinion. I hereby retract my earlier acceptance of the OPCW's explanation in the Skripal case.
As we now know that the OPCW management manipulates reports at will we can no longer accept the 'control probe' excuse without further explanations or evidence.
Here is what seems to have happened.
The OPCW did not send a control sample to Spiez to test the laboratory. It sent the original samples from the Skripals. Spiez found BZ and reported that back to the OPCW. The OPCW suppressed the Spiez results in its own reports. Somehow Russia got wind of the Spiez results and exposed the manipulation.
Acceptance that the Skripals had been 'buzzed', not 'novi-shocked' is central to the Skripal case. It makes the whole Skripal case as a British operation to prevent the repatriation of Sergei Skripal to Russia much more plausible.
Posted by b on November 30, 2019 at 19:34 UTC | Permalink | Comments (109)
OPCW Manufactured A Pretext For War By Suppressing Its Own Scientists' Research
Leaks from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) prove that the OPCW management ignored or manipulated reports its Fact Finding Mission had written about the April 2018 Douma incident in Syria.
The history of the Douma incident and the OPCW and media manipulation around it is available from the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media under the headline: How the OPCW’s investigation of the Douma incident was nobbled. Our own posts around the incident are linked below.
The OPCW management ignored that the technical, chemical and medical analysis of its own specialists exculpated the Syrian government from the allegation that it poisoned some 40 people in Douma by dropping Chlorine canisters from a helicopter.
The OPCW scientific staff found that dropping the canisters could not have created the damage that was found. Those canisters must have been placed by hand. The amount of chlorinated organic chemicals found at the two scenes was very low and it is very unlikely that they are the result of a reaction with chlorine gas. The medical symptoms of the casualties as was seen in various videos at the time of the incident were inconsistent with death by chlorine inhalation.
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The OPCW management twisted the interim and the final OPCW report on the incident to make it look as if the Syrian government was guilty of dropping chlorine canisters. The detailed internal technical analysis was ignored. It was replaced by external analysis from unknown sources who claimed the opposite of what the OPCW engineers and chemists had found. The wording of the report suggests that high levels of chlorinated organic chemicals were found without giving the very low concentrations (in parts per billions) that were actually found. The internal medical analysis was eliminated from the official report.
OPCW emails and documents were leaked and whistleblowers came forward to speak with journalists and international lawyers. Veteran journalist Jonathan Steele, who has spoken with the whistleblowers, wrote an excellent piece on the issues. In the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens picked up the issue and moved it forward:
The 'citizen journalists' of the U.S. government financed Bellingcat propaganda shop made a laughable attempt to refute the claims the whistleblower made. Caitlin Johnstone took it apart.
Hitchens also responded to the Bellingcat scam: Bellingcat or Guard Dog for the Establishment?.
Quoting Bellingcat Peter Hitchens (PH) writes:
Bellingcat:
However, a comparison of the points raised in the letter against the final Douma report makes it amply clear that the OPCW not only addressed these points, but even changed the conclusion of an earlier report to reflect the concerns of said employee.PH:
Apart from the words ‘a’, and ‘the’, everything in the above paragraph is, to put it politely, mistaken. Bellingcat have been so anxious to trash the leak from the OPCW that they have (as many did when the attack was first released) rushed to judgment without waiting for the facts. More is known by the whistleblowers of the OPCW than has yet been released, but verification procedures have slowed down its release. More documents will, I expect, shortly come to light.One, which I have seen, is very interesting. It is a memorandum of protest, written many months after the e-mail of protest published at the weekend. This was sent to the OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias (there is some doubt about whether it ever reached him) by an OPCW investigator (one of those who actually visited Douma), on 14th March 2019. It has reached me through hitherto reliable sources. This is nearly two weeks *after* the release of the ‘final’ report (on Friday 1st March 2019) which is supposed to have resolved the doubts of the dissenters.
In his discussion of the issue Hitchens also mentions this blog:
[The OPCW report claim] ‘Various chlorinated organic chemicals were found in samples from Locations 2 and 4, along with residues of explosive. These results are reported in Annex 3. Work by the team to establish the significance of these results is ongoing.’ resulted in some quite remarkable media reports. These are explored here:Bellingcat and its supporters may not like the source, and I do not much like it myself, but it is a unique record, as far as I know, of the initial media response to the issue of the July 6 report. I have in fact checked its claims with Reuters and the BBC and they do not dispute what it says, though they say they later corrected the output.
It is sad, Peter, that you don't like this blog much but I am afraid I can do nothing about it.
A few hours ago Hitchens published another piece: In defense of journalism - ‘Citizen journalists’ are no such thing. In it he again takes on Bellingcat and other such 'citizen journalists' and 'researchers' to then reveal that he himself has now talked to an OPCW whistleblower:
Luckily for me I have had the backing of people who know deep down that journalism must take risks to be any good. Someone had to say ‘yes’ to me when I headed off at short notice a few days ago, on my complicated way to a safe house somewhere in a major city on the European continent.Someone had to fork out for my train fares and my cheap station hotels. Someone had to have the guts to let me tell my story about what I found when I got there — which was an honest man in turmoil. His job was to tell the truth and he was being prevented from doing so. So I could help him. In four decades of journalism, I have seldom felt closer to the Holy Grail, truth that had to be told, and truth that would shake power. Here it was. A pretext for war had been manufactured by suppression of research.
The "pretext for war" can not refer to the missile strike F-UK-US launched on April 16 2018, 8 days after the Douma incident and before any OPCW inspectors had visited the site.
Hitchens must refer to an upcoming war that was supposed to be based on the now disgraced OPCW report.
There is indeed a possible path to war.
The original agreement for OPCW investigations in Syria stipulated that the OPCW would report the results of investigations to a Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) at the United Nations where the Security Council would then attribute guilt to either side of the conflict. The U.S. tried to use the JIM process to attribute dubious chemical incidents in Syria to the government. Russia vetoed those attempts. The U.S. then decided to circumvent the UN process.
In 2018 the U.S. and its proxies manipulated the OPCW statute and added the task of identifying the guilty party of chemical incidents to the OPCW's agenda:
[The decision] also calls upon the [OPCW] Secretariat to put in place arrangements “to identify the perpetrators of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic by identifying and reporting on all information potentially relevant to the origin of those chemical weapons in those instances in which the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission determines or has determined that use or likely use occurred, and cases for which the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism has not issued a report”.The decision further affirmed that whenever chemical weapons use occurs on the territory of a State Party, “those who were the perpetrators, organisers, sponsors or otherwise involved should be identified” and it underscored “the added value of the Secretariat conducting an independent investigation of an alleged use of chemical weapons with a view to facilitating universal attribution of all chemical weapons attacks”.
The manipulated OPCW report, which omitted the OPCW scientists' findings, will now be the basic document which the new OPCW attribution group, the Investigation and Identification Team, will use to find the Syrian government guilty. That guilty verdict can then be used to publicly justify a war on Syria without further UN Security Council interference.
This is what Hitchens means when he writes that "A pretext for war had been manufactured by suppression of research."
Russia, China and several other governments have protested against the change in the OPCW statute. The Russian statement to this year's Chemical Weapon Convention (CWC) conference says:
The decision to vest the OPCW Technical Secretariat with functions to identify parties responsible for the use of chemical weapons adopted in June 2018 at the CSP-SS-4 in contradiction of the Convention is illegitimate. This innovation forced on the OPCW goes beyond the scope of the CWC and the Organization, the decision itself was adopted in violation of the Convention, and its implementation is nothing other than an interference with the exclusive competence of the UN Security Council.As a clearly foreseeable result of this questionable decision, fundamental problems with its realization ensued, namely, the lack of transparency and accountability of the "attribution" mechanism, which is the Investigation and Identification Team, to the OPCW governing bodies. The States Parties have yet to learn about the terms of reference of this entity, its operating conditions, its criteria for selection of "incidents"to investigate or sources and modalities of its financing.
The OPCW scientists found serious evidence that the Syrian government can NOT be guilty of the Douma incident. Under U.S. pressure the OPCW management suppressed its scientists' technical reports or replaced them with those from "external experts" to make it look as if the Syrian government caused the incident. The new attribution group at the OPCW will use that manipulated report to find Syria guilty of causing the incident. The U.S. and others could then use that guilty verdict as pretext to launch a war.
We only learned of this plan because courageous scientists and engineers at the OPCW do not want to see their organization abused to find pretexts to wage wars on the innocent. They came forward and told the public what it needs to know. They deserve our gratitude.
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Previous Moon of Alabama coverage of the Douma incident and its aftermath:
Posted by b on November 29, 2019 at 19:02 UTC | Permalink | Comments (66)
Open Thread 2019-70
No Turkey for me ...
Posted by b on November 28, 2019 at 14:04 UTC | Permalink | Comments (203)
New Study: "Russian Trolls" Did Not "Sow Discord" - They Influenced No One
The U.S. has claimed that the Russia government tried to influence the 2016 election through Facebook and Twitter.
Russia supposedly did this through people who worked the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg (Leningrad), Russia. The IRA people ran virtual persona on U.S. social networks which pretended to have certain political opinions. It also spent on advertising supposedly to influence the election. U.S. intelligence claimed that the purpose of the alleged Russian influence campaign was to "sow discord" within the United States.
But the IRA had nothing to do with the Russian government. It had no interests in politics. And a new study confirms that the idea that it was "sowing discord" is blatant nonsense.
IRA influencer
The Mueller investigation indicted 13 Russian persons and three Russian legal entities over the alleged influence campaign. But, as we wrote at that time, there was more to it than the media reported:
The published indictment gives support to our long held believe that there was no "Russian influence" campaign during the U.S. election. What is described and denounced as such was instead a commercial marketing scheme which ran click-bait websites to generate advertisement revenue and created online crowds around virtual persona to promote whatever its commercial customers wanted to promote. The size of the operation was tiny when compared to the hundreds of millions in campaign expenditures. It had no influence on the election outcome.
The IRA hired people in Leningrad for little money and asked them to open accounts on U.S. social media. The virtual persona they created and ran were to attract as many persons to those accounts as possible. They did that by posting funny dog pictures or by taking strong political positions. They were 'influencers' who sold their customers' products to the people they attracted.
The sole purpose was the same as in any commercial media. Create content to attract 'eyeballs', then sell those eyeballs to advertisers.
As Point 95 of the Mueller indictment said:
Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the [financial] accounts to receive money from real U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions and advertisements on the ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages. Defendants and their co-conspirators typically charged certain U.S. merchants and U.S. social media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content on their popular false U.S. persona accounts, including Being Patriotic, Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist.
The was no Russian government campaign to influence the 2016 election. There was only a Russian commercial media enterprise that used sock-puppet accounts with quirky content to attract viewers and sold advertisement space to U.S. companies.
The IRA also bought advertisement to attract more people to its accounts. But the amount it spent was tiny. The final price tag for the 2016 election was $6.5 billion for the presidential and congressional elections combined. The IRA spend a total of $100,000 to promote its own accounts. But only some $45,000 of that was spend before the election. It was 0.000007 cent for every election dollar that was spend during that time. It is statistically impossible that the mostly apolitical IRA spending had any effect on the election.
That the IRA ran a marketing machine and not a political operation was also obvious when one analyzed the content that those sock puppet accounts posted. Most of it was apolitical. Where it was political it covered both sides. Some IRA accounts posted pro-Trump content, others posted anti-Trump stuff. Some were pro-Clinton others against her.
U.S. intelligence services tried to explain that away by claiming that the Russians wanted to "sow discord". There is zero evidence that this was really the case. It is simply an explanation that was made up because they failed to find a better one.
The real answer to the question why different IRA accounts posted on different sides of the political spectrum is that the IRA wanted to maximize its income. One has to cover both sides if one wants to optimize the number of eyeballs one attracts.
FOX News is not pro-Trump because it wants to sow discord. Nor is CNN anti-Trump to serve that purpose. Both are in the business of attracting viewers to - in the end - sell advertisements. People flock to the TV station that fit to the opinion they already have. Both stations promote by and large similar products.
The virtual IRA persona worked in a similar ways. They took political positions to attract people who already had a similar one. One persona did that for the left, another one for the right. Neither changed the opinions of their followers.
A recently published study which looked at Twitter users who followed IRA sock puppet accounts and their content confirms that. It found that the IRA sock puppets had no influence on the opinions of their followers.
The study by U.S. and Danish researchers is headlined Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017. It found:
Using Bayesian regression tree models, we find no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts substantially impacted distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors over a 1-mo period. We also find that interaction with IRA accounts were most common among respondents with strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network, high interest in politics, and high frequency of Twitter usage. Together, these findings suggest that Russian trolls might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized.
Most hardcore Republicans watch FOX New, most hardcore Democrats watch CNN. Neither TV station changes the core opinions of their viewers. They reinforce them.
The "Russian trolls" were virtual persona created to cover -in total- a wide spectrum. Some persona played hardcore Republican, other played hardcore Democrats. They created and posted content that fit to the role they played. Each attracted followers with opinions similar to those the virtual persona pretended to have. No opinion was changed through those contacts. No discord was sown.
The IRA then sold advertisement space to vendors to monetize all eyeballs its virtual personas attracted.
The U.S. intelligence agencies pretended that the commercial IRA was a political agency. It helped them to sell animosity against Russia and to pretend that Trump was somehow colluding with Putin.
But it all never made any sense.
Posted by b on November 27, 2019 at 18:33 UTC | Permalink | Comments (82)
The House Will Not Vote On Impeachment. It Will Censure Trump.
The live TV impeachment inquiry circus is for now over. The procedural parts are ready to begin. Both sides, the Republicans and Democrats, will have to decide which tactical moves they will now make.
Adam Schiff, who presided over the investigative part, wrote to his colleagues that he wants to immediately move forward:
As required under House Resolution 660, the Committees are now preparing a report summarizing the evidence we have found this far, which will be transmitted to the Judiciary Committee soon after Congress returns from the Thanksgiving recess.
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Chairman Nadler and the Members and staff of the Judiciary Committee will proceed in the next phase of the impeachment inquiry.
Nadler will write up articles of impeachment which will be referred to the whole House to vote on them. No Republican is likely to vote for impeaching Trump. It would be political suicide to do so. The Democrats have 233 Representatives and need 218 votes for a majority decision. They can afford a few abstentions but not too many.
At least one House Democrat, Brenda Lawrence from the swing state Michigan, has said that she will no longer support impeachment but that she prefers to censure the president instead of impeaching him. A censure is a formal reprimand by a majority vote that has no further consequences.
More are likely to follow that path as several recent polls show that impeachment is no longer en vogue:
The latest national poll from Emerson College finds 45 percent oppose impeaching President Trump, against 43 percent who support it. That’s a 6-point swing in support from October, when 48 percent of voters supported impeachment and only 44 percent opposed.More importantly, the poll shows more independents now oppose impeachment than support it, a significant change from Emerson's polling in October. The new poll found 49 percent oppose impeachment compared to 34 percent who support it. In October, 48 percent of independents polled supported impeachment, against 39 percent who opposed.
Since October, Emerson has found Trump’s job approval rating jump by 5 points, from 43 percent to 48 percent.
This is the second poll this week to show voters are increasingly likely to oppose impeachment, ..
Even Democrats are losing interest in the issue. There is also this curious issue:
Josh Jordan @NumbersMuncher - 13:32 UTC · Nov 26, 2019CNN Poll: There is a *forty* point gender gap with regards to impeaching and removing Trump.
Men oppose impeachment 40-53 while women favor it 61-34.
That's a pretty stunning contrast.
If more Democratic swing-state representatives defect from the impeachment camp, which seems likely, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will have a big problem. How can she proceed?
- If the House votes down impeachment Donald Trump wins.
- If the House holds no vote on the issue Donald Trump wins.
- If the House votes for censure Donald Trump will have won on points and the issue will be over.
- If the House votes for impeachment the case goes to the Senate for trial.
The Republican led Senate has two choices:
- It can decide to not open an impeachment trial by simply voting against impeachment. Trump wins.
- It can open a impeachment trial, use it to extensively hurt the Democrats and, in the end, vote against impeachment. Trump wins big time.
Should the House vote for impeachment the Senate is likely to go the second path.
During impeachment the whole Senate sits as the High Court. The House of Representatives sends 'managers' who act as prosecutors. The chief justice of the U.S. presides. A vote for impeachment at the end of the trial requires a two-third majority.
The Republican majority in the Senate could use such a trial to bring disarray into the Democrats' primary. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet are all senators and Democratic primary candidates. They would probably have to stop campaigning to attend the trials. Another leading Democratic candidate would be a top witness.
The Republican senators would immediately call up a number of people for questioning. These would include Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, his business partner Devon Archer, John Kerry who was Secretary of State when Biden intervened for Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky and of course the CIA spy and (not-)whistleblower Erik Ciaramella. It would also be of interest to hear how deep the former CIA director John Brennan was involved in the issue.
The Senators could use the impeachment trial to dig into all the crimes the Democrats under Obama committed in Ukraine. They would concentrate not on the Maidan coup but on the aftermath when the deals were made. There surely is a lot of dirt out there and it is not only Joe Biden's.
Then there is Russiagate. Did the Obama administration use illegal means to spy on the Trump campaign? As the issue is related to whatever Trump did there is good reason to include it into the trial.
The circus the Senate would open if the House votes for impeachment would play for many many months. The media would be full of this or that crime some Democrat or deep state actor supposedly committed. All this would play out during the election season.
An impeachment trial in the Senate would be a disaster for the Democrats.
I can not see why the Democrats would want to fall into such a trap. House leader Nancy Pelosi is experienced enough to not let that happen. But she will have to do some serious talking to convince the party that a vote on impeachment is not the best way to proceed.
The only sensible alternative is to censure Trump and that is why it is likely the way Nancy Pelosi will want to go. A partisan vote to censure Trump will do no damage to him but the Democrats would have at least done 'something' - even if it was only gesturing.
The whole impeachment show did little damage to Trump. His approval numbers are still fine. The show has given Trump another chance to run as the underdog who will drain the swamp in Washington DC. A major Democratic candidate is now damaged goods. Joe Biden no longer has any chance to win the presidency and it would be astonishing if he survives the primaries. The U.S. relations with the Ukraine have also been seriously damaged.
All this was easily predictable two months ago when the Democrats launched their impeachment show:
Instead of running on policy issues the Democrats will (again) try to find vague dirt with which they can tarnish Trump. This is a huge political mistake. It will help Trump to win his reelection.After two years of falsely accusing Trump of having colluded with Russia they now allege that he colludes with Ukraine. That will make it much more difficult for the Democrats to hide the dirty hands they had in creating Russiagate. Their currently preferred candidate Joe Biden will get damaged.
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The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump will again present himself as the victim of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the bad politicians in Washington DC. Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will motivate them to vote for him.
The Democrats should ask themselves how they put themselves into the current situation. Who was the genius who came up with the (not-)whistleblower idea and pushed for the move. The shallow-brained Adam Schiff? The devious John Brennan?
Whoever it was the Democrats should shun that person before it creates more damage to their party.
Posted by b on November 26, 2019 at 19:41 UTC | Permalink | Comments (117)
It Is True That Corruption Caused The 737 MAX Accidents. But It Was Not Foreign.
The New York Times blamed the foreign pilots for the crashes of two 737 MAX airplanes. It now takes a shot at the foreign airlines:
With Boeing in Cross Hairs, Lion Air Gets a Pass on Poor Safety Record
The lead investigator of Lion Air’s first fatal accident, in which 25 people died in 2004 after a pilot overshot the runway, was Ertata Lananggalih. Four years after releasing a report that critics said underplayed Lion Air’s culpability in the crash, he joined the company, working his way up to managing director. He left Lion Air in 2012 and returned to government work as a senior air safety investigator.“Indonesia is a corrupt country, but the corruption at Lion is the biggest of all,” said Wicaksono Budiarto, a former pilot for the airline who joined 17 others, including Mr. Eki and Mr. Kalebos, in a lawsuit against the company for dismissing them after they refused to fly in what they considered unsafe flying conditions.
So someone from Indonesia's air safety agency took another job in the industry. Three years later he changed back into a government role.
That shows that Indonesia is a corrupt country and that Lion Air is the most corrupt, says a former pilot with an ax to grind.
Changing from a regulator to industry and back would of course never happen in the U.S. of A. Except when it does:
[Ali] Bahrami joined the FAA as an engineer in 1989, then rose to become in 2004 manager of the Transport Airplane Directorate in Renton, which oversees the safety of the operating fleet of U.S. commercial aircraft as well as the certification of new airplane models.During his tenure in Renton, Bahrami spearheaded efforts to delegate more inspection and certification work to industry, and specifically to outsource much of the safety analysis of new Boeing jets to Boeing itself.
In 2013, Bahrami made a move reflecting the tightly intertwined relationship between regulator and industry.
Just months after overheated batteries in flight caused the worldwide grounding of Boeing’s recently introduced 787 Dreamliner — a jet that Bahrami had shepherded through certification — he left the FAA for a lucrative lobbying job as a vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association, representing the big U.S. aerospace companies.
...
“We urge the FAA to allow maximum use of delegation,” Bahrami told Congress, now wearing an industry hat. “It would be detrimental to our competitiveness if foreign manufacturers are able to move improved products into the marketplace more quickly.”Then in 2017, he returned to the FAA executive ranks at just one level below the top job: Based at FAA headquarters, he’s now associate administrator for aviation safety, overseeing 7,200 employees and a budget of $1.3 billion.
Former National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chairman Jim Hall succinctly summed up his view of Bahrami: “He’s been the agent for Boeing’s self-certification.”
Boeing spends $15 million per year to bribe members of Congress.
Congress has made the laws that compelled the FAA to hand off oversight to the manufacturers. It was Congress that pressed the FAA to give Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) to Boeing so Boeing could self-certify its safety related work. As a 2017 Government Accountability Office report to Congress laid out:
The 2012 FAA Modernization and Reform Act required FAA to work with industry to resolve issues related to the efficiency of its certification processes and varying interpretations and applications of its regulations in making compliance decisions during certification.
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In January 2015, we noted that industry stakeholders favored expanding the ODA program, while the employee unions were concerned about FAA resources to effectively expand it. With completion of all five ODA-related initiatives, FAA has completed all items in its ODA action plan, deployed specialized audit training for personnel conducting supervision of ODA inspections, and expanded delegation to authorize designees to approve instructions for continued airworthiness, emissions data, and noise certification.
The Joint Authorities Technical Review board (JATR) which investigated the 737 MAX accidents criticized the FFA's oversight over the ODA program:
The JATR recommended that FAA review its staffing levels to ensure it can adequately oversee the so-called designees. The Boeing organization that conducts such work has about 1,500 people, while the FAA team overseeing their work has 45. Of that FAA group, only 24 are engineers.
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“There are signs of undue pressure” on Boeing employees doing this work, the JATR said, “which may be attributed to conflicting priorities and an environment that does not support FAA requirements.”
Boeing has again and again paid corrupt Congress critters to change the FAA regulation process so it can maximize its income. It continues to do so.
But that the FAA is fully under control of the industry it is supposed to oversee is not a new phenomenon.
D.P. Davies was for decades the chief test pilot of Britain's Civil Aviation Authority. He is the author of the commercial pilots bible - Handling The Big Jets. In 1992 he was interviewed about the certification process of the various planes he had test flown including the Concorde. He had a quite devastating opinion about the FAA (@37m):
"The FAA lacks courage, political cloud. All the American constructors can dominate the FAA for political and economic gain. And they do. And the DC-10 cargo door was the very best expression of that ever. I have no tie for the FAA flight certification of an aeroplane. If people say to me but FAA has certificated it that is supposed to generate confidence in the listener. It does around the world. [..] If someone tells me the FAA certificated something I am instantly skeptical of it because I know how they work."
D.P. Davies, the test pilots’ test pilot, doubted the FAA's judgment because he knew that the U.S. system is utterly corrupt.
It is true, as the NYT writes, that a Lion Air mechanic did not test the new Angle-of-Attack sensor on the accident plane after he had replaced a broken one. The new sensor was miss-calibrated and became one cause for the Lion Air crash. But the sensor had been overhauled by a U.S. company that was supposedly controlled by the FAA. It was the FAA which allowed that company to use test equipment which did not conform with the regulations, resulting in unintentional miss-calibrate the sensor. Only on the very same day the Lion Air final accident report came out revealing that the FAA had (again) failed in its oversight did the FAA revoke the certification of that company.
It is the U.S. Congress, heavily bribed by Boeing, that sets the FAA's budget and tells it what to do or not to do.
It was the FAA which allowed Boeing to put a defective MCAS system on the 737 MAX. It was the root cause of two accidents which caused the death of 347 people. A senior Canadian safety official now calling for the removal of MCAS from the 737 MAX and trials of an alternative approach. But the FAA, where one Ali Bahrami is now responsible for the re-certification of the plane, will allow whatever Boeing wants to be done. The corrupt members of Congress will take care of that.
If D.P. Davies were still around he would probably say: "The U.S. is a corrupt country, but the corruption by Boeing is the biggest of all."
---
Previous Moon of Alabama posts on Boeing 737 MAX issues:
- Boeing, The FAA, And Why Two 737 MAX Planes Crashed - March 12 2019
- Flawed Safety Analysis, Failed Oversight - Why Two 737 MAX Planes Crashed - March 17 2019
- Regulators Knew Of 737 MAX Trim Problems - Certification Demanded Training That Boeing Failed To Deliver - March 29 2019
- Ethiopian Airline Crash - Boeing Advice To 737 MAX Pilots Was Flawed - April 9 2019
- Boeing 737 MAX Crash Reveals Severe Problem With Older Boeing 737 NGs - May 25 2019
- Boeing's Software Fix For The 737 MAX Problem Overwhelms The Plane's Computer - June 27 2019
- EASA Tells Boeing To Fix 5 Major 737 MAX Issues - July 7 2019
- The New Delay Of Boeing's 737 MAX Return Will Not Be The Last One - July 15 2019
- 737 MAX Rudder Control Does Not Meet Safety Guidelines - It Was Still Certified - July 28 2019
- 737 MAX - Boeing Insults International Safety Regulators As New Problems Cause Longer Grounding - September 3 2019
- Boeing Foresees Return Of The 737 MAX In November - But Not Everywhere - September 12 2019
- 14,000 Words Of "Blame The Pilots" That Whitewash Boeing Of 737 MAX Failure - September 18 2019
- Boeing Failed To Consider Pilot Workload When It Designed and Tested The 737 MAX - September 29 2019
- Boeing's New Problems Reach Beyond The 737 MAX - October 12 2019
- 737 MAX Produces More Bad News For Boeing - October 21 2019
Posted by b on November 25, 2019 at 19:10 UTC | Permalink | Comments (36)
The Moon of Alabama Week In Review - OT 2019-69
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
- November 19 - There Are Riots In Iran And The Usual Suspects Are On It
Related:
As predicted in the piece above the riots are over and internet access has for most parts been restored. Another 'regime change' attempt has been defeated.
Iran’s Security Counter Attack to A Three Year Plan! / Behind the Iran’s Recent Riots, Part 1 - ISW News
- November 20 - Impeachment Circus - Today's Bombshell Is Another Dud
Related:
RAY McGOVERN: The Pitfalls of a Pit Bull Russophobe - Consortium News
Two month ago we assessed that the Democrats' impeachment attempt is a huge mistake as it would help Trump to win the next election. Now evidence trickles in:
Trump approval ticks up amid impeachment battle: Gallup - The Hill
New Polling Suggests Democrats’ Impeachment Push Could Alienate Key Voters - Vanity Fair
- November 22 - Why The Hong Kong Riots Are Coming To An End
Related:
The elections today went without a hitch and had a record turnout of 71% of all eligible voters.
Polls close in Hong Kong after record number of voters at district council elections - SCMP
Beyond parody:
Hong Kong university siege: two men trapped on campus for more than a week slam police for ‘depriving them of right to vote’ - SCMP
Will the pan-dems claim voting fraud if they do not get a majority?
- November 23 - News? A Russian Operation, U.S. Intelligence Says
Related:
Ukraine and Meddling in 2016 - Yes, it happened. - Yasha Levine
---
Other issues:
OPCW / Douma:
A third leak from the OPCW in form of an internal email is additional evidence that the OPCW report on the Douma incident was massively manipulated.
OPCW Douma Docs - Wikileak
"The author of the e-mail was a member of that team and claims the redacted preliminary version of the report, misrepresents the facts he and his colleagues discovered on the ground."
OPCW management accused of doctoring Syrian chemical weapons report - Stundin
New sexed-up dossier furore: Explosive leaked email claims that UN watchdog's report into alleged poison gas attack by Assad was doctored - so was it to justify British and American missile strikes on Syria?- Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail
737 MAX:
The Long-Forgotten Flight That Sent Boeing Off Course - Atlantic
Canadian air safety official urges removal of key software from Boeing 737 MAX - Seattle Times
Aerospace suppliers prepare for prolonged grounding of 737 MAX - Reuter
The most ridiculous 'liberal' headline ever:
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Well-meaning sanctions?
Left I on the News points out that the State Department at times spelled out what sanctions are really supposed to do.
Washington, April 6, 1960.
SUBJECT - The Decline and Fall of Castro
Salient considerations respecting the life of the present Government of Cuba are:
1. The majority of Cubans support Castro (the lowest estimate I have seen is 50 percent).
...
6. The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.If the above are accepted or cannot be successfully countered, it follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.
...
Would you wish to have such a proposal prepared for the Secretary?(Rubottom initialed the “yes” space provided on the source text.)
Some seventy years later its is evident that sanctions are a blunt tool that only harms the people, not their governments.
Use as open thread ...
Posted by b on November 24, 2019 at 17:06 UTC | Permalink | Comments (293)
News? A Russian Operation, U.S. Intelligence Says
The CIA, and its stenographers at the New York Times, explain to us that the three news pieces below were the result of a Russian operation.
Ukraine's leaders campaign against 'pro-Putin' Trump
full article
16 people who shaped the 2016 election: Alexandra Chalupa
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Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire
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We now learn that the facts about Ukrainian meddling, which those three pieces describe, must be false. They were part of a 'Russian operation'.
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Charges of Ukrainian Meddling? A Russian Operation, U.S. Intelligence Says
Fiona Hill, a respected Russia scholar and former senior White House official, added a harsh critique during testimony on Thursday. She told some of Mr. Trump’s fiercest defenders in Congress that they were repeating “a fictional narrative.” She said that it likely came from a disinformation campaign by Russian security services, which also propagated it.In a briefing that closely aligned with Dr. Hill’s testimony, American intelligence officials informed senators and their aides in recent weeks that Russia had engaged in a yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow’s own hacking of the 2016 election, according to three American officials. The briefing came as Republicans stepped up their defenses of Mr. Trump in the Ukraine affair.
...
The revelations demonstrate Russia’s persistence in trying to sow discord among its adversaries — and show that the Kremlin apparently succeeded, as unfounded claims about Ukrainian interference seeped into Republican talking points.
So there was no Ukrainian meddling, no Ukrainian interference. Claims thereof are unfounded!
But just a few sentences later the piece curiously says something different:
The accusations of a Ukrainian influence campaign center on actions by a handful of Ukrainians who openly criticized or sought to damage Mr. Trump’s candidacy in 2016.
Just keep in mind that those claims are unfounded.
The 'handful' of Ukrainians managed, with help from the Democratic National Council, to push Trump's campaign manager to resign. They even bragged about it. Ukrainians were also the biggest foreign donors to Hillary Clinton's foundation.
However, because Putin once pointed that out, those claims must be unfounded. They must be Russian disinformation:
During a news conference in February 2017, Mr. Putin accused the Ukrainian government of supporting Hillary Clinton during the previous American election and funding her candidacy with friendly oligarchs.It is not clear when American intelligence agencies learned about Moscow’s campaign or when precisely it began.
...
One target was the leak of a secret ledger disclosed by a Ukrainian law enforcement agency that appeared to show that Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, had taken illicit payments from Ukrainian politicians who were close to Moscow. He was forced to step down from the Trump campaign after the ledger became public in August 2016, and the Russians have since been eager to cast doubt on its authenticity, the former official said.
Those are "unfounded claims about Ukrainian interference". Because Putin pointed them out.
However, let me assure you that neither the Times nor the CIA would ever make unfounded claims of a Russian operation.
It is Russia that is trying 'to sow discord'. It is not an unfounded Democratic impeachment inquiry that does that.
Posted by b on November 23, 2019 at 18:08 UTC | Permalink | Comments (101)
Why The Hong Kong Riots Are Coming To An End
The U.S. sponsored riots in Hong Kong are mostly over. They were sustained much longer than we had expected.
The "marginal violence" campaign of the "pro-democratic" students has failed to win more support for them. Regular Hongkongers are increasingly willing to take a stand against further provocations:
Demonstrators gathered at about 12.30pm on a bridge outside Exchange Square, which houses Hong Kong’s stock exchange in the city’s financial heartland, in another round of lunchtime protests that have been staged most days over the past two weeks.Scuffles broke out after a pro-police group of about 50 people showed up about an hour later, but police arrived soon after to clear the area.
During at least two altercations between some members of each group, an anti-government contingent yelled “go back to China” at their adversaries, and one of their number kicked a woman walking towards the smaller group.
Ten days ago the core of the black clad rioters began to paralyze Hong Kong's traffic during regular workdays. They ransacked nearly every metro stations and barricaded large thoroughfares and tunnels. Schools were closed, businesses and workers were severely harmed.
One 70 year old street cleaner was killed when he was hit by a stone thrown by the rioters against civilians who tried to remove a barricade. A 57 year old man was drenched with gasoline and set alight after he verbally disagreed with the rioter's ransacking of a metro station. A policeman was shot with an arrow.
The rioters occupied the Chinese University and the Polytechnic University (PolyU) which are next to large streets and the important Cross-Harbor-Tunnel. Using the universities as logistic bases and fortifications they managed to keep many roads closed throughout day and night. After some negotiations with the president of the Chinese University the rioters evacuated from there while leaving some 8,000 petrol bombs behind. They concentrated in the PolyU next to the Cross-Harbor-Tunnel.
That was a mistake.
Last Sunday the police surrounded the PolyU and let no one leave. Those who wanted out were either arrested or, when under 18, identified and handed to their parents. There were several violent battles when the rioters attempted to break through the police cordon but only a few escaped.
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After a few days most of those inside PolyU surrendered to the police.
Today there are still some 30 rioter holed up in a PolyU building. The police are waiting them out. They said that they had made more than a thousand arrests. The university is ransacked and there was significant battle damage. The rioters again left thousands of Molotov cocktails and other weapons behind.
The blockage of the city traffic and the increasing damage caused by rioter vandalism has alienated even those who earlier supported them. As the police now have most of the core rioters under arrest there is little chance that such violent protests will continue.
On Sunday there will be citywide district council elections in Hong Kong. China had pushed for the elections to go forward under all circumstances. Riot police will guard all polling stations.
Weeks ago the "pro-dem" candidates, who supported the rioters, were still poised to win more seats than they had held before the protests. But they now fear that the general public will punish them for the mayhem they have caused and will choose establishment candidates:
Chinese University political scientist Ivan Choy Chi-keung said while the turnout could set another record, the overall situation was more unpredictable than before.“The pan-democrats could have won a landslide victory if the elections had been held in the summer, when the protests erupted,” Choy said. “But after the recent clashes at two universities, undecided voters may be worried about public order and be discouraged from voting.
He was referring to fiery battles protesters fought with police outside Chinese University on November 12, followed by more confrontations outside Polytechnic University last week.
“It will be difficult for the camp to win more than half of the seats, as some originally envisaged,” Choy said.
The Hong Kong government has conceded none of the protesters' "five demands". The only thing that the protesters have won is the passing of legislation by the U.S. Congress:
The House of Representatives on Wednesday followed the lead of the Senate in overwhelmingly approving two pieces of legislation: The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which requires the president to annually review the favourable trading status that the US gives to Hong Kong, threatening to revoke it and impose penalties against officials if freedoms are determined to have been quashed; and the Protect Hong Kong Act, which will block the sale of tear gas and other policing items.The former, although largely symbolic, could alter Washington’s relationship with Hong Kong and Beijing.
US President Donald Trump has a straightforward choice on legislation passed on to him by the United States Congress supporting the protests that have engulfed Hong Kong – approve or veto. Coming amid tough bargaining on his trade war with China, he may be tempted to make his decision part of the negotiations.
...
But Beijing sees such measures as striking at the heart of Chinese sovereignty. Radical protesters could be spurred to greater violence. Unspecified countermeasures are promised should Trump give his approval.
...
But the trade war, violence and legislation have damaged business sentiment in Hong Kong. Approval or not, pessimism and uncertainty have already been deepened. There can be no winners.
Trump wants the trade deal with China and will therefore likely veto the bill:
Speaking on the “Fox & Friends” morning program, the president said that he was balancing competing priorities in the U.S.-China relationship.“We have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi [Jinping], he’s a friend of mine. He’s an incredible guy, but we have to stand … I’d like to see them work it out, okay?” the president said. “I stand with freedom, I stand with all of the things that I want to do, but we are also in the process of making one of the largest trade deals in history. And if we could do that, it would be great.”
A veto would only have a temporary impact as the law has passed the House and Senate by veto proof majorities.
The idea behind the protests and the rioters In Hong Kong was all along to provoke another Tian An Men incident. This has been quite obvious since the start of the protest. It now gets publicly acknowledged:
BBC Newsnight @BBCNewsnight - 11:00 UTC · Nov 19, 2019“Some of the protesters seem to have an objective to provoke a military confrontation with China. They seem to want a Tiananmen Square outcome as success.”
Fmr Foreign Sec @Jeremy_Hunt says he is “concerned with the tactics” with some of #HongKong’s protesters
Had China moved troops to Hong Kong, or allowed more force to be used against the protesters, the U.S. would have used that to press its allies to put strong sanctions on China. The protesters' violence was designed to achieve that outcome. The plan was part of the larger U.S. strategy of decoupling from China.
The plan failed because China was too smart to give the U.S. what it wanted. Now it is Trump who is under pressure. He needs the trade deal with China because the current trade war is doing harm to the U.S. economy and endangers his reelection.
Which is probably the real reason why the protests have died down.
Posted by b on November 22, 2019 at 19:02 UTC | Permalink | Comments (132)
Netanyahoo, Indicted For Bribery, Fraud And Breach Of Trust, Becomes More Dangerous
The Attorney General of Israel just indicted Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahoo in three cases. The announcement comes at a time of political stalemate. It might help to resolve it.
Israel had two parliament elections this year which both ended in a political stalemate. Neither Prime Minister Netanyahoo of the Likud Party nor Blue and White coalition leader Benny Gantz managed to form a government. Both were unable to find enough additional votes to form a coalition and to gain a majority.
Now the parliament has 21 days to find a majority. It will likely fail and a third election seems inevitable.
It is curious that Israel's Attorney General used this point in time to finally charge Netanyahoo:
Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit announced Thursday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be charged with bribery, fraud and breach in three corruption cases, dubbed Cases 4000, 2000 and 1000.
In the most serious case Netanyahoo is alleged to have changed regulations in exchange for more positive press coverage:
Case 4000 is considered the most serious, and revolves around an alleged bribery deal between Netanyahu and businessman Shaul Elovich, who controlled the Bezeq telecommunications company and the Walla News site. According to the indictment, Netanyahu and Elovich engaged in a quid-pro-pro deal in which Netanyahu – as communication minister – led regulatory steps directly tied to Elovich's businesses and interests that yielded the tycoon some $500 million.In return, according to the indictment, Netanyahu and his wife Sara made consistent requests to alter the coverage on the Walla News website in order to serve the Netanyahus' interests and target their opponents. Elovich allegedly pressed the editors of the website to comply with the Netanyahus' demands.
Walla publisher Elovich as well as Arnon Mozes, publisher of the Yedioth Ahronot media group, will also be indicted for bribery.
The charges have been known for quite some time and the timing of the official announcement seems political.
Netanyahoo will now come under intense pressure to resign. It is very much his personality that blocked the forming of a new government. Should he be removed over the next 21 days it might be possible for the parliament to form a government and to avoid a third election.
But Netanyahoo will fight tooth and nail to gain and keep immunity. He will try to delegitimize the judicative and he will use any available trick to stay in office.
That makes him even more dangerous than he usually is.
He might even decide to do something, like starting a big war, to prevent his removal from power.
Lebanon, Syria and Iran must watch out.
Posted by b on November 21, 2019 at 17:31 UTC | Permalink | Comments (80)
Impeachment Circus - Today's Bombshell Is Another Dud
The impeachment circus continued today with a refreshingly candid opening statement from Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the EU. Sondland was involved in diplomatic efforts in Ukraine. Instead of stonewalling Sondland just let it all out:
Gordon D. Sondland testified that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed off on the pressure campaign, and that he told Vice President Mike Pence about an apparent link between military aid for Ukraine and investigations of Democrats. Mr. Sondland confirmed there was a “clear quid pro quo” for a White House meeting between President Trump and Ukraine’s president.
The anti-Trump media see this as another "bombshell" that will hurt him.
But it is more likely that Sondland's testimony will help President Trump and those involved on his side.
The President of the United States thought it to be in the interest of the United States to press Ukraine's government into publicly announcing investigations into two issues:
- The successful meddling by Ukrainian officials in the 2016 U.S. election.
- The evident intervention by then Vice President Biden into Ukrainian politics to the benefit of the owner of a company that paid his son more than $50,000 per month.
Sondland and other U.S. officials were negotiating with the Ukrainians about these demands. There were two potential points that they could use to pressure the Ukrainians into announcing investigations:
- The Ukrainian request for a visit by President Zelensky to the White House.
- The Ukrainian desire to receive military aid that Congress had allocated for that purpose.
It is not clear at all that Trump wanted those issues to be used to pressure Ukraine. Trump never told Sondland that these issues were connected:
Aaron Maté @aaronjmate - 15:58 UTC · Nov 20, 2019Sondland's testimony is not as damning as it's being portrayed. He says Trump never told him that money for US weapons ("security assistance") was conditioned on investigations. Sondland says that such a condition is what he came to believe based on his own inference.
His interpretation may well be correct (I'd bet it was). But his own interpretation is not direct evidence -- it's an interpretation. Given he's the star witness who spoke to Trump -- & he says Trump never even mentioned "security assistance" -- it's actually an evidentiary hole.
Sondland: "I've never heard from Trump that the aid was conditioned on the investigations." Also says Trump never mentioned “security assistance.” This is the star witness who spoke to Trump, & who relayed conditions to Ukraine — which he now says was based on his interpretation.
Sondland: “President Trump never told me directly that the aid was conditioned on the meetings. The only thing we got directly from Guiliani was that the Burisma and 2016 elections were conditioned on the White House meeting. The aid was my own personal, you know, guess.”
The negotiators, including Sondland, presumed that the demands and pressure points were linked. But Trump had never said so.
The negotiations around the Ukraine issues were going slow. It was not clear to the negotiators what Trump actually wanted. Sondland said that at one point he called up Trump and asked an open questions: "What do you want from Ukraine?".
According to Sondland Trump responded: "I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing."
Trump is a crook. It is fair to presume that he wanted his aides to use all potential pressure points to deliver the desired results from the Ukrainians. But Trump is also a smart enough crook to never say that.
Today he read the above quote from Sondland's testimony to the press. Some photographer took a picture of his notes.
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Zelensky got the meeting with Trump, though it was in New York not in the White House. The Ukraine received the military aid. The Ukrainians never announced an investigation into the election interference or into the Biden affair.
It will be difficult for the Democrats to claim that Trump wanted a quid pro quo or wanted to bribe the Ukrainians when, according to one of there main witnesses, Trump said the opposite. Not only that - Trump did not get what it is claimed what he wanted while the Ukraine got everything that it had asked for.
And this was not even the last line of Trump's defenses.
For two years the Democrats insisted on investigating alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election. What is wrong with Trump requesting an investigation into well documented Ukrainian interference?
Ukrainian corruption has been a concern of several administrations. What is wrong with Trump asking the Ukrainians to investigate a well known case that may have involved U.S. officials?
The U.S. is not a welfare organization. Official political White House meetings with the president are only granted if the U.S. hopes that it is to its advantage. Aid or loans are only granted by the U.S. when it is to its own advantage. The granting or withholding of such items are part of most international deals, as are threats. They are part of political deals between nations, not personal bribery.
It is beyond me why the Democrats think they can bring Trump down over this.
Posted by b on November 20, 2019 at 20:08 UTC | Permalink | Comments (133)
There Are Riots In Iran And The Usual Suspects Are On It
There are a few riots in Iran and Amnesty International is on it:
Amnesty International @amnesty - 15:50 UTC · Nov 19, 2019At least 106 protesters in 21 cities have been killed in #Iran, according to reports we have received. Verified video footage, eyewitness testimony & information gathered from activists outside Iran reveal a harrowing pattern of unlawful killings by Iranian security forces.
".. eyewitness testimony .. gathered from activists outside Iran ..."
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The Iranian government decided to increase Iran's super low gasoline prices. The new price will only apply to the amount of gas that exceeds a subsidized 60 liter per family per month. The additionally money will be distributed to the poor.
The move makes economic sense. It had previously been recommended by the IMF.
The usual suspects have used the announcement to launch protests and riots in several Iranian cities. Some banks were set on fire and security personal were attacked. The CIA and the MEK cult are certainly trying to push for additional disturbances. The Iranian government cut internet access to prevent that.
As long as I can remember such protests and riots have happened in Iran every other year or so. They usually die down within a week. I am confident that the same will happen this time.
But that of course does not stop the "regime changers" and their claquers from raising the usual nonsense. So we get "eyewitness testimony" from "activists" who are not in Iran on events that allegedly happen within Iran.
It is interesting that they don't even try anymore to make sense.
Posted by b on November 19, 2019 at 18:09 UTC | Permalink | Comments (116)
The MoA Week In Review - Open Thread 2019-68
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
Related:
Hong Kong protesters hurl PETROL BOMBS at volunteers trying to clear roadblocks and shoot ARROWS at police - RT
- November 12 - Lessons To Learn From The Coup In Bolivia
Related:
A detailed timeline of Brennan's shenanigans.
The Brennan Dossier: All About a Prime Mover of Russiagate - Aaron Maté - RealClearImvestigations
Confirmed: Dems switched from “quid pro quo” to “bribery” because a focus group told them it was better - HotAir
- November 15 - Author Of "Keep The Oil" Mission Already Distances Himself From Its Foreseeable Failure
Related:
25 close relatives of ISIS leader were living in Turkey freely for years, possibly many of them working for IS. - Ahval
- November 16 - OPCW Whistleblowers: Management Manipulated Reports - Douma 'Chemical Weapon Attack' Was Staged
Related:
Aaron Maté interviews Theodor Postol
Syria scandal: New whistleblower claims UN chemical weapons watchdog buried Douma evidence (vid) - Push Back
Postol makes an interesting point with regards to the incident in Khan Sheikhun where, according to the report of the Joint Investigation Mechanism, a quarter of the casualties arrived in hospitals before the incident happened.
Postol says he thinks that the report used graphics and other "expert" information from the British amateur infowar outlet Bellingcat. He also says that some of the graphics in the JIT report are not to size.
That brought me back to the final OPCW report on the Douma incident. This (Pg 62ff) is supposed to be a simulation of the gas cylinder that was found on the bed.
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The proportions of the hole and the simulated cylinder seem not to fit to each other.
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Other issues:
Assange:
- Julian Assange’s judge and her husband’s links to the British military establishment exposed by WikiLeaks - Daily Maverick
- The son of Julian Assange’s judge is linked to an anti-data leak company created by the UK intelligence establishment - Daily Maverick
- Arbuthnot Out as Assange’s Judge, Says WikiLeaks Lawyer Jen Robinson - Consortium News
737:
- Boeing is pressuring the FAA to clear the 737 Max to fly sooner, even as some airline staff beg not to be put back on it - Business Insider
- FAA boss says agency won’t be swayed by ‘pressure’ to approve Boeing’s 737 MAX - Seattle Times
Si tacuisses, ...
- Prince Andrew: 'I couldn't have slept with Virginia Roberts-Giuffre, I was at Pizza Express' - MSN
- High-stakes gamble on TV interview over Epstein backfires on Duke of York - Guardian
- “The Palace… Threatened Us a Million Different Ways”. - Craig Murray
- Prince Andrew & the Epstein Scandal: The Newsnight Interview - BBC News (vid)
Use as open thread ...
Posted by b on November 17, 2019 at 14:58 UTC | Permalink | Comments (353)
OPCW Whistleblowers: Management Manipulated Reports - Douma 'Chemical Weapon Attack' Was Staged
On April 7 2018 Syrian 'rebels' claimed that the Syrian government had used chlorine gas and Sarin in an attack on the besieged Douma suburb near the Syrian capital Damascus. They published a series of videos which showed the dead bodies of mainly women and children.
Before the incident Jaish al-Islam, the main 'rebel' group in Douma, had already agreed to leave towards Idleb governorate. Under those circumstances the claims made no sense. The various details in the produced videos and pictures were inconsistent with a chemical incident.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigated the incident and in July 2018 produced an interim report (pdf) that showed that no Sarin was used in Douma. The OPCW inspectors had only found various chlorinated organic chemicals (COCs) which are common in every household. Media falsely claimed that those finds were proof of a chlorine gas attack.
The interim report did not show any use of chemical weapons but it had, as we noted, some curious anomalies:
The preliminary OPCW report says nothing about the concentrations in which these substances were found. Without knowing the concentrations, which may may be extremely low, one can not come to further conclusion. The report includes none of the witness statements the fact finding mission took. In various TV reports the medical personal of the one hospital involved in the stunt said that none of their patients were affected by chlorine or chemical weapons.
The final report (pdf), published in March 2019, changed the tone. It specifically claimed that gas cylinders found at two places of the incident must have been dropped from the air. As only the Syrian government, not the 'rebels', has used helicopters the report was an indictment of the Syrian government.
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In May 2019 one OPCW inspector came forward and said that the OPCW management had suppressed an internal engineering assessment that contradicted the claim that the gas cylinder fell from the air. OPCW management had used external expertise of unknown provenance that had come to the wrong conclusion. The cylinders must have been positioned by hand. The incident was staged.
Now a second OPCW whistleblower has come forward with additional claims that the OPCW management manipulated the findings of its own inspectors after it had come under pressure from U.S. officials.
Jonathan Steele, a former chief foreign correspondent for the Guardian, writes:
The inspector went public with his allegations at a recent all-day briefing in Brussels for people from several countries working in disarmament, international law, military operations, medicine and intelligence. They included Richard Falk, former UN special rapporteur on Palestine and Major-General John Holmes, a distinguished former commander of Britain’s special forces. The session was organised by the Courage Foundation, a New York-based fund which supports whistle-blowers. I attended as an independent reporter.The whistle-blower gave us his name but prefers to go under the pseudonym Alex out of concern, he says, for his safety.
He is the second member of the Douma Fact-Finding Mission to have alleged that scientific evidence was suppressed.
The OPCW inspector had written the original interim report and, based on his own and his colleagues findings, concluded that the incident was "a non chemical-related event". But the OPCW management rewrote the report and left that conclusion out.
The whistleblower also explained the lack of COC concentration values in the interim report that we had noted:
By then the inspector had learnt that the results of the quantitative analysis of the samples from the allegedly attacked buildings had been delivered to management from the test laboratories but not passed on to the inspectors. He got sight of the results which indicated that the levels of COCs were much lower than what would be expected in environmental samples. They were comparable to and even lower than those given in the World Health Organisation’s guidelines on recommended permitted levels of trichlorophenol and other COCs in drinking water. The redacted version of the report made no mention of the findings.Alex described this omission as “deliberate and irregular”. “Had they been included, the public would have seen that the levels of COCs found were no higher than you would expect in any household environment”, he said.
The inspector who drafted the original report was furious when he realised it was to be replaced by a doctored management version. He wrote an email of complaint to the OPCW’s director general. The DG was Ahmet Uzumcu, a Turkish diplomat but his chef de cabinet, the man considered to have the most power in the OPCW on day-to-day issues was Bob Fairweather, a British career diplomat.
The intervention was unsuccessful and the OPCW management published the manipulated report without the concentration values.
It soon became clear to the inspectors who was behind this manipulation:
On July 4 there was another intervention. Fairweather, the chef de cabinet, invited several members of the drafting team to his office. There they found three US officials who were cursorily introduced without making clear which US agencies they represented. The Americans told them emphatically that the Syrian regime had conducted a gas attack, and that the two cylinders found on the roof and upper floor of the building contained 170 kilograms of chlorine. The inspectors left Fairweather’s office, feeling that the invitation to the Americans to address them was unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence and impartiality.
Under U.S pressure the OPCW management ignored the findings of its own inspectors and published at least two manipulated reports that falsely accused the Syrian government of a chemical attack.
The OPCW management did not respond to questions Jonathan Steele submitted to it.
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Previous Moon of Alabama coverage of the Douma incident and its aftermath:
Posted by b on November 16, 2019 at 17:53 UTC | Permalink | Comments (92)
Author Of "Keep The Oil" Mission Already Distances Himself From Its Foreseeable Failure
The neo-conservatives who have duped President Trump into the "steal the oil" scheme in Syria are already distancing themselves from the plan. They know that it will end in failure.
Yesterday the New York Times tried to insinuate that the U.S. military was behind the idea to steal Syria's oil:
Days after President Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw 1,000 American troops from Syria, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saw a way to turn it around.The businessman in Mr. Trump had focused on the Syrian oil fields that, if left unprotected, could fall into the hands of the Islamic State — or Russia or Iran. So General Milley proposed to a receptive Mr. Trump that American commandos, along with allied Syrian Kurdish fighters, guard the oil.
Today, 800 American troops remain in Syria.
“We’re keeping the oil,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Wednesday before his meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. “We left troops behind, only for the oil."
...
“I credit Milley with convincing the president to modify his Syria decision,” said Jack Keane, the former Army vice chief of staff, who spoke several times with Mr. Trump and General Milley last month during the frenzied days of the president’s zigzagging Syria policy.
But the article later says that it was not General Milley's idea. He had different plans:
One proposal would have kept a small force to help control a small swath of the border between Iraq and Syria, about 10 percent of the area. Another option would try to keep control of a larger part of the country — more than half of the area the American and Kurdish fighters currently controlled.
But after Mr. Trump told General Milley he wanted to keep the oil fields, the Pentagon quickly “operationalized” a new plan wrapped around using American forces and their Kurdish allies to protect the oil ...
The report also conflicts with earlier reporting by NBC which said that it was the head of the neoconservative Institute for the Study of War Jack Keane himself and the neoconned Senator Graham Lindsay who duped Trump into the stupid plan:
In the days after President Donald Trump paved the way for Turkey to invade Syria, several of his closest allies went to the White House — twice — to try to change his mind, according to four people familiar with the meetings.Retired Gen. Jack Keane, a Fox News analyst, first walked the president through a map showing Syria, Turkey and Iraq on Oct. 8, pointing out the locations of oil fields in northern Syria that have been under the control of the United States and its Kurdish allies, two people familiar with the discussion said. That oil, they said Keane explained, would fall into Iran's hands if Trump withdrew all U.S. troops from the country.
Keane went through the same exercise with Trump again Oct. 14, this time with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., at his side, according to four people familiar with the meeting. Keane displayed a map showing that almost three quarters of Syria's oil fields are in the parts of the country where U.S. troops are deployed, the people familiar with the meeting said. They said that Graham and Keane told the president that Iran is preparing to move toward the oil fields and could seize the air space above them once the U.S. leaves.
So why is Keane now trying to blame General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for causing that nonsense?
It may be that he recognizes that the operation will likely go bad.
The fight against ISIS was led by nimble U.S. special force units who are trained to travel light and to work with local proxy forces. These have now been replaced by heavier army units with Infantry Fighting Vehicles.
These tracked vehicles need a lot of gas and maintenance support. Those logistic needs are easy to attack.
The U.S. special forces were previously joined by French and British ones. Those allies are not willing to join the steal-the-oil mission:
At a high-level State Department meeting scheduled for Thursday, diplomats from 35 nations and international organizations will be asked to stick with the campaign to eradicate the extremist group even after its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in an American raid last month.But confusion over the Trump administration’s policy in northeast Syria has discouraged allies, according to several diplomats, who said it has fomented doubt that whatever agreements are struck could be reversed by the president.
...
One foreign diplomat said Thursday’s meeting would focus on what he described as a loss of clear strategy by the United States in Syria. Another predicted the high-level talks would amount to little more than a meet-and-greet.
The diplomats also know that mission creep is part of the new plan:
“It’s quite clear that the president has been convinced to retain troops on the only basis that might have been of interest to him — the existence of oil,” said Charles R. Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “But the much bigger U.S. government apparatus is trying to use that as a cover to form a more meaningful, less ambiguous and more sustainable strategy focused on countering terrorism while reasserting leverage over Damascus.”
The new neo-con plan is still the old one. To use terrorists to achieve "regime change" in Syria. It will (again) fail.
The U.S. army in east Syria will pay some PKK Kurds to use as guards and to screen the area. But the oilfield areas are Arab and the PKK Kurds are very much disliked by the Arab population.
The locals are unlikely to welcome the oil stealing foreigners. They have profited from smuggling oil to government held areas and will resist a U.S. occupation and to Kurds who interfere with their business. A number of people in that area had joined ISIS and slipped back into the 'local civilian' role when it was clear that ISIS had lost the battle. Some of them will (again) be willing to fight.
Yesterday the Syrian President Bashar Assad gave an interview to two Russian TV stations during which he predicted exactly that:
Question 12: Mr. President, according to the media, Trump announced an expansion of American presence in Syria, particularly in the northeast of the country, under the pretext of protecting the oil fields. Is there a military solution to this problem? And when would such a military operation start?President Assad: I have always said that an occupier cannot occupy a piece of land without having agents in that country, because it would be difficult for them to live in a completely hostile environment. Therefore, the immediate and most effective solution is for us to unite as Syrians and as patriots. This would cause the Americans to leave, and they would not be able to stay, neither for oil nor for anything else.
However, with time, when the occupier remains – the Iraq experience is still fresh in the minds of Americans and the result, for them, was unexpected; for us however, it was clear and I did say in one of my interviews after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that occupation will generate military resistance. Similarly, the American presence in Syria will generate a military resistance which will exact losses among the Americans, and consequently force them to leave. Of course, we are not contemplating a Russian-American confrontation, this is self-evident, and it doesn’t serve neither our interests, nor the Russians nor international stability; it is dangerous. However, America cannot believe that it will live comfortably in any area it occupies. We remind them of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Syria will not be an exception.
Assad also expressed a realistic view of the U.S. government system:
Question 13: Concerning the American behavior here, particularly in relation to Syrian oil, don’t you believe that this behavior is that of a government gang? And what are the losses to Syria as a result of Washington’s behavior?President Assad: You are absolutely correct, not only because they are looting oil, but because America is structured as a political system of gangs. The American president does not represent a state – he is the company CEO, and behind this CEO there is a board of directors which represent the big companies in America – the real owners of the state – oil and arms companies, banks, and other lobbies. So, in reference to Syrian oil, this is the expected result of the American regime, which is led by companies acting for their own interests.
Assad goes on to explain that to steal-the-oil was also the Nazi's reason to invade the Soviet Union. He further observes:
[W]e can very simply liken American policy today with Nazi policy: expansion, invasion, undermining the interests of other nations, trampling on international law, international conventions, human principles, and others – all for the sake of oil. What’s the difference between this policy and Nazi policy? Can anybody from the American regime give us an answer to this question? I don’t think so.
In a recent Q&A Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also remarked on U.S. policies in Syria:
[The Turkish] operation Peace Spring was not endorsed by Russia. It was endorsed by the United States, if you are accurate with the facts. They tried to negotiate with Turkey but then said they could not reach the deal so “Kurds, you are on your own, we are leaving.” Then, after they left the Kurds and left Syria, they said they do not have any more obligations to the Kurds but they are coming back for oil (not for the Kurds). It is an interesting zigzagging in foreign policy. Back to Churchill, who said that the Americans always do the right thing after they have tried everything else.
Lavrov also dropped strong hints that the U.S. is still supporting Jihadis:
I have reasons to believe, based on the real examples of the past years, that the United States still supports al-Nusra in spite of the fact that this organisation has been listed in the United States as terrorist. They see al-Nusra as a counterbalance against the Syrian Government. It’s another mistake, after they were banking on the mujahideen, who organised the September 11 terrorist attack. After they did what they did in Iraq and ISIS was born. And now they are grooming al-Nusra in the illusionary expectation that they will be able to control them. It’s an illusion.
In a different interview Lavrov's boss, President Vladimir Putin, also chipped in:
[Putin] added that he considers US presence in Syria as illegitimate because "those armed units are stationed there not on the invitation of the Syrian government or in the framework of a UN Security Council resolution." "This military presence is illegal," he stressed.
The steal-the-oil mission is illegal under international and likely also under U.S. law. That is why no major oil company will want to have anything to do with it.
The whole operation is destined to fail.
The U.S. has sent in heavy units which are quite immobile and require lots of maintenance and supplies that can be attacked. It has no allies except for a few PKK/YPG Kurds who are disliked by the local Arabs. Mission creep will soon set in. Resistance against the occupation will grow and the U.S. troops will take casualties. Then Trump will again order them to pull out.
That is why Keane now claims that to steal-the-oil was not his idea but General Milley's. He does not want to be remembered for causing the all too predictable mess in which the operation will end.
Russian troops have just taken over an airbase that the U.S. special forces had used for their resupply. They found (vid) ready made air conditioned quarters with good mattresses, gym equipment, entertainment and medical supplies. They will put it all to good use.
They will later do the same with the new bases the U.S. army is now building near the oilfields.
Posted by b on November 15, 2019 at 19:06 UTC | Permalink | Comments (117)
Trump And Zelensky Want Peace With Russia. The Fascists Oppose That.
NBC News is not impressed by the first day of the Democrats' impeachment circus. But it fails to note what the conflict is really about:
It was substantive, but it wasn't dramatic.In the reserved manner of veteran diplomats with Harvard degrees, Bill Taylor and George Kent opened the public phase of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on Wednesday by bearing witness to a scheme they described as not only wildly unorthodox but also in direct contravention of U.S. interests.
"It is clearly in our national interest to deter further Russian aggression," Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said in explaining why Trump's decision to withhold congressionally appropriated aid to the most immediate target of Russian expansionism didn't align with U.S. policy.
But at a time when Democrats are simultaneously eager to influence public opinion in favor of ousting the president and quietly apprehensive that their hearings could stall or backfire, the first round felt more like the dress rehearsal for a serious one-act play than the opening night of a hit Broadway musical.
"In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to Ukraine.
But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such?
President Obama was against giving weapons to Ukraine and never transferred any to Ukraine despite pressure from certain circles. Was Obama's decision against U.S. national interest? Where are the Democrats or deep state members accusing him of that?
Which brings us to the really critical point of the whole issue. Who defines what is in the "national interest" with regards to foreign policy? Here is a point where for once I agree with the right-wingers at the National Review where Andrew McCarthy writes:
[O]n the critical matter of America’s interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin’s anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions.But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.
And that’s where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him — not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts — in charge of making policy. If we’re to remain a constitutional republic, that’s how it has to stay.
We have made the very same point:
The U.S. constitution "empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries."
The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col. Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is the duly elected president who does that.
and:
The president does not like how the 'American policy' on Russia was built. He rightly believes that he was elected to change it. He had stated his opinion on Russia during his campaign and won the election. It is not 'malign influence' that makes him try to have good relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.
...
[I]t is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve "at his pleasure" are there to implement them.
There is another point that has to be made about the NBC's assertions. It is not in the interest of Ukraine to be a proxy for U.S. deep state antagonism towards Russia. Robber baron Igor Kolomoisky, who after the Maidan coup had financed the west-Ukrainian fascists who fought against east-Ukraine, says so directly in his recent NYT interview:
Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine’s most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia.“They’re stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations,” he said, comparing Russia’s power to that of Ukraine. “People want peace, a good life, they don’t want to be at war. And you” — America — “are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it.”
...
Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets.Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its geopolitical rival. “War against Russia,” he said, “to the last Ukrainian.” Rebuilding ties with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine’s economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He predicted that the trauma of war will pass.
...
Mr. Kolomoisky said he was feverishly working out how to end the war, but he refused to divulge details because the Americans “will mess it up and get in the way.”
Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received nearly 73% of all votes.
Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They are joined in this with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup:
Zelenskiy’s decision in early October to accept talks with Russia on the future of eastern Ukraine resulted in an outcry from a relatively small but very vocal minority of Ukrainians opposed to any deal-making with Russia. The protests were relatively short-lived, but prospects for a negotiated end to the war in the eastern Donbas region became more remote in light of this domestic opposition.
...
The supporters for war with Russia are ex-president Poroshenko and two parliamentary factions, European Solidarity and Voice, whose supporters are predominantly located in western Ukraine. Crucially, however, they can also rely on right-wing paramilitary groups composed of veterans from the hottest phase of the war in Donbas in 2014-5.
Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25% of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won 5.8%.
By pursuing further conflict with Russia the deep state of the United States wants to ignore the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate. That undemocratic mindset is another point that unites them with the Ukrainian fascists.
Zelensky should ignore the warmongers in the U.S. embassy in Kiev and sue for immediate peace with Russia. (He should also investigate Biden's undue influence.) Reengaging with Russia is also the easiest and most efficient step the Ukraine can take to lift its desolate economy.
It is in the national interest of both, the Ukraine and the United States.
Posted by b on November 14, 2019 at 18:23 UTC | Permalink | Comments (154)
Open Thread 2019-67
News & views ...Posted by b on November 13, 2019 at 16:25 UTC | Permalink | Comments (211)
Lessons To Learn From The Coup In Bolivia
The coup in Bolivia is devastating for the majority of the people in that country. Are their lessons to be learnt from it?
Andrea Lobo writes at WSWS:
Bolivian president Evo Morales of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party was forced to resign Sunday evening by the Bolivian military in a coup backed by the United States. Last night, Morales tweeted that he is “leaving for Mexico” after that country agreed to grant him asylum.After three weeks of protests following the disputed October 20 presidential elections, the imperialist powers and their Bolivian client elite have overthrown the government of Morales. In the context of a deepening crisis of global capitalism and a resurgence of the class struggle internationally, including recent mass strikes among miners and doctors in Bolivia, the ruling class lost confidence that Morales and the MAS apparatus can continue to suppress social opposition.
During his twelve years in office Evo Morales achieved quite a lot of good things:
Illiteracy rates:
2006 13.0%, 2018 2.4%
Unemployment rates
2006 9.2%, 2018 4.1%
Moderate poverty rates
2006 60.6%, 2018 34.6%
Extreme poverty rates
2006 38.2%, 2018 15.2%
But Morales failed to build the defenses that are necessary to make such changes permanent. The leadership of the military and police stood against him. Why were these men in such positions?
Jeb Sprague @JebSprague - 20:19 UTC · Nov 11, 2019
The US coup connection
Officials who forced #Evo to resign worked as #Bolivia's Mil. Attachés in DC. The CIA often seeks to recruit Attachés working in DC.
2013: Gen. Kaliman served as Mil. Attaché
2018: Police Com. Calderón Mariscal was Pres. of APALA in DC
The Agregados Policiales de América Latina (APALA) is supposed to fight international organized crime in Latin America. It is curiously hosted in Washington DC.
These police and military men cooperated with a racist Christian-fascist multi-millionaire to bring Morales down.
Morales had clearly won a fourth term in the the October 20 elections. The vote count was confusing (pdf) because it followed the process defined by the Organization of American States:
The [Tribunal Supremo Electoral, or TSE] has two vote-counting systems. The first is a quick count known as the Transmisión de Resultados Electorales Preliminares (TREP, hereafter referred to as the quick count). This is a system that Bolivia and several other Latin American countries have implemented following OAS recommendations. It was implemented for the 2019 election by a private company in conjunction with the Servicio de Registro Cívico (SERECÍ), the civil registry service, and is designed to deliver a swift —but incomplete and not definitive- result on the night of the elections to give the media an indication of the voting tendency and to inform the public.
The early and incomplete numbers let it seem that Morales had not won the 10% lead he needed to avert a second round of voting. The rural districts in which Morales has high support are usually late to report results and were not included. The complete results showed that Morales had won more than the 10% lead he needed to avoid a runoff.
Kevin Cashman @kevinmcashman - 1:36 UTC · Nov 11, 2019
Eventually, the official count was released: Morales won in the first round 47.08% to 36.51%. If you had been watching the polls before the election, 5 out of 6 of them predicted the same result. Weird to have a fraud that matches up with polls.
Poll Tracker: Bolivia's 2019 Presidential Race
To allege false election results to instigate color revolutions or coups is a typical instrument of U.S. interference. In 2009 Mahmoud Ahmedinejad won his second term in the Iranian presidential elections. The U.S. supported oppositions raised a ruckus even as the results fit perfectly with previous polling.
The OAS which recommended the quick count scheme that allows for such manipulations receives 60% of its budget from Washington DC.
Western media do not call the coup in Bolivia a coup because it was what the U.S. wanted to happen:
Army generals appearing on television to demand the resignation and arrest of an elected civilian head of state seems like a textbook example of a coup. And yet that is certainly not how corporate media are presenting the weekend’s events in Bolivia.
No establishment outlet framed the action as a coup; instead, President Evo Morales “resigned” (ABC News, 11/10/19), amid widespread “protests” (CBS News, 11/10/19) from an “infuriated population” (New York Times, 11/10/19) angry at the “election fraud” (Fox News, 11/10/19) of the “full-blown dictatorship” (Miami Herald, 11/9/19). When the word “coup” is used at all, it comes only as an accusation from Morales or another official from his government, which corporate media have been demonizing since his election in 2006 (FAIR.org, 5/6/09, 8/1/12, 4/11/19).
The poor and indigenous people who supported Morales will have little chance against the far right para-militaries and police (vid) who now go from door to door (vid) to round up leftists and Morales supporters.
Evo Morales found asylum in Mexico. Bolivia will now turn into a neoliberal hell and a quasi-dictatorship. It will take time, a lot of effort and probably a civil war to regain what was lost through this coup.
What can one learn from this?
- As one person remarked to me: "When one wants to win and keep a socialist revolution one has to bring guillotines."
- Socialist movements who come into power must neutralize their biggest local enemies. They need to build their own defenses. They can not rely on those institutions, like the military and police, they inherit from previous regimes.
- Such movements must never rely on U.S. affiliated organizations like the OAS or on military and police personal that had come under U.S. indoctrination.
- A movement needs a public voice. It must build its own media locally and internationally.
Hugo Chavez knew this all this. As soon as he won the presidential election in Venezuela he built the necessary forces to defend the state. It is the only reason why his successor Nicolás Maduro defeated the coup attempt against him and is still in power.
Evo Morales unfortunately failed to follow that path.
Posted by b on November 12, 2019 at 18:08 UTC | Permalink | Comments (282)
Hong Kong - "Marginal Violence" Fails To Win More Protest Support
After nearly six months of violent "protest" the U.S. supported anti-Chinese rioters in Hong Kong are switching into overdrive.
Today there were more than 16 hours of continuous violent rioting by small groups of black clad "protesters":
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor has addressed the press after a day of violence in which at least one protester has been shot with a live round, while another man was set on fire during a dispute, as clashes continue across the city.She condemns the actions of protesters, warning them that it is "wishful thinking" to expect that the government will yield to their political demands if faced with violence.
Commuters are facing transport chaos and disruption. Major thoroughfares across several districts have been blocked and MTR services suspended after objects were thrown onto the tracks of the East Rail line, a fire was set on a train at Kwai Fong and protesters vandalised several other stations.
Today's rampage comes after a "protester" died when he fell from a floor in a parking garage. The rioters claim that police was involved in the incident but surveillance footage shows that the man was all alone.
After peaceful "color revolutions" ceased to work violence was introduced as part of all U.S. "regime change" operations. The thinking behind it was explained in a June 30 New York Times op-ed:
An important idea that has been circulating in online forums is now firmly planted in my mind. It is called the Marginal Violence Theory (暴力邊緣論), and it holds that protesters should not actively use or advocate violence, but instead use the most aggressive nonviolent actions possible to push the police and the government to their limits.
...
The protesters should thoughtfully escalate nonviolence, maybe even resort to mild force, to push the government to the edge.
Violence against the government was supposed to create a violent response which would then increase the support for the protests. That theory seems not to work in Hong Kong. Legit demonstrations are now reduced to a few hundreds of people. The hundred thousands who attended the first demonstrations no longer come. They have recognized that the core protesters' "mild force" is just senseless violence and that these rioters are completely unreasonable.
Today they intentionally burned a man who was verbally opposing them:
By Monday evening, Leung Chi-cheung, a 57-year-old father of two daughters, was fighting for his life in hospital with severe burns to his body as well as head trauma.
...
The video footage then showed Leung returning to confront the protesters, whereupon a dispute ensued.“During the dispute, he was doused with flammable liquid and set alight,” a police source said.
...
Another source described the attack as ruthless.“The victim stood up bravely after the sabotage, but the rioters tried to burn him alive,” the source said. “Such an attack is inhumane.”
There is video of the attack.
The U.S. poster child Joshua Wong has called the arsonists among the rioters "fire magicians". Like other leaders of the "pro-democracy" opposition Wong has refused to condemn the violence.
bigger
Other rioters attacked a traffic cop who was clearing a minor road blockade. One rioter tried to grab his gun and got shot:
In the video, an officer grapples with a protester and points his gun towards another approaching protester. The second protester reaches out towards the gun, the officer dodges, steps back and shoots him in the torso.
A truck driver who was waiting for the road to be cleared applauded the policeman's action. Here is video of the incident.
The police arrested more than 260 rioters today. Unfortunately they will likely be released on bail and go back into the streets to continue their violence.
Hong Kong's leader Carrie Lam can and should change that by an emergency decree. Taking a thousand or more of these misguided upper class students permanently off the street would dramatically decrease the violence.
The severe economic damage the "protests" cause to regular Hongkongers is no longer deniable. A large majority of them would likely welcome a tougher response to the rioters.
Posted by b on November 11, 2019 at 17:32 UTC | Permalink | Comments (130)
The MoA Week In Review - Open Thread 2019-66
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
There are other government funded organization in Britain which, like the Integrity Initiative, write and tweet against the leader of the opposition: Home Office-backed counter-extremism group waging Twitter campaign against Corbyn - Middle East Eye
I am amazed how the Impeachment Circus and the mainstream media continue to ignore the facts of this story:
Joe Biden has been a favorite target for Trump-allied lawmakers. Many have adopted Trump’s unsubstantiated assertion that Biden pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, because he was investigating Burisma.
Other people get it:
Why the Only Thing Democrats Will Succeed in Impeaching Is Their Own Integrity Daniel Lazzare, Strategic Culture
Why Is Christopher Steele Still a Thing? - Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
The “Deep State” Is a Political Party - Jefferson Morley, New Republic
The CIA is emerging as a domestic political party.
...
Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest. “The CIA is not involved in domestic politics,” he said. “Period. That’s on the record.”This he asserted confidently, at an event where he had just spoken about about influence campaigns on swing voters and implied that Hillary Clinton might be right in calling U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset. Even seasoned analysts, it seems, have their blind spots.
Motivation to impeach Trump is about control of Democratic Party - Rick Salutin, The Star
What shifted [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] now? I’d say the answer is: this impeachment isn’t directed at Trump at all, it’s about undermining the rising left-wing opposition in the Democratic party. They are plausibly on the verge of seizing the party agenda away from the neo-liberal consensus of the Clinton-Obama decades — with issues like universal public health-care and equitable taxes. They’ve even found ways to fund campaigns without bowing to the corporate gods.
- November 6 - Turkey's Continued Care For ISIS Will End Badly
Related:
Pentagon Claims US Authority to Shoot Any Syrian Govt Official Who Tries to Take Control of Syrian Oil - Common Dreams
A day after we wrote the above Iran shot down a low flying drone that had penetrated its air space. CentCom made a statement that practically said "It was the CIA's drone, not ours."
This will only intensify U.S. 'regime change' efforts: Iran announces discovery of massive oil field
Iran has discovered a massive new oil field, President Hassan Rouhani said Sunday, a find that would boost its proven reserves by about a third in a rare piece of "good news" for an economy battered by US sanctions.
The police are quite brutally clearing the major protest sites. On Monday Prime Minister Abdul Mahdi will announce some additional reforms.
Iraq factions reach deal to save government, 'end protests'; PM urges return to normal life - Strait Times
Iraq’s feel-good ‘revolution’ - Asia Times
Other issues:
Potential new conflict areas:
Jordan to retake lands leased by Israel in 1994 peace accord
Jordan’s king announced Sunday that two pieces of land leased by Israel would be returned to the “full sovereignty” of Jordan as the two countries marked a chilly 25th anniversary of their landmark peace agreement.Israel has controlled the agricultural lands for over 70 years and had been permitted to lease the areas under the 1994 peace agreement, with the assumption that the arrangement would be extended once again.
Benin President Orders Economic Decolonization From France
France still controls the foreign currency reserves of its former colonies in Africa. But the Françafrique and the Franc zone are coming to an end. The French will not like this and may well intervene, as they did in Libya.
When people in South America rage against rightwing governments the media ignores them or lies about it.
Chilean Protests: A Revolt against Neoliberalism the Media Refuses to Acknowledge - Alan Macleod, Mintpress
When the U.S. collaborates with rightwing extremists to launch coups against elected presidents U.S. media applaud.
US Plotting New Coup d’etat to Oust Bolivian President Evo Morales -21 Century Wire
No Evidence That Bolivian Election Results Were Affected by Irregularities or Fraud, Statistical Analysis Shows - CEPR
Evo Morales just announced new elections which he is likely to win.
737 MAX:
After Lion Air crash, Boeing doubled down on faulty 737 MAX assumptions - Dominic Gates, Seattle Times
The piece includes a link to a Boeing presentation from March 1, MCAS Development and Certification Overview, which has a few new details and includes several whoppers.
Use as open thread ...
Posted by b on November 10, 2019 at 14:32 UTC | Permalink | Comments (205)