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Ryanair Bomb Threat In Belarus – ‘Western’ Media Narrative Disagrees With The Facts
There is still a bit more to learn about the Ryanair flight 4978 from Greece to Lithuania which on May 23 diverted to Minsk after a bomb thread against the plane had been received by several regional airports.
The west has waged a media war over the case claiming that Belarus had invented the bomb threat to capture a Belorussian dissident who was on board. However it is clear that the bomb threat happened and that Belarus acted on it by the book. The quick implementation of a deceiving western narrative leads me to believe that the bomb threat was initiated by those who oppose Belarus. It was probably managed by one of those British narrative managers who also wrote the books for the Skripal and Navalny Novichok dramas.
But there are few actual facts to support the narrative. Its ‘truth’ must thus be constructed by bending the facts to fit the intended story.
An example is this Reuters report which was published on Friday:
DUBLIN (Reuters) – Belarusian air traffic control refused a request by a Ryanair pilot to contact the airline after being told of an alleged bomb threat, leaving him with no alternative but to land in Minsk, the Irish carrier said in a letter seen by Reuters.
Belarus scrambled a warplane on Sunday and used the bomb alert, which turned out to be fictitious, to divert the flight, which was en route from Greece to Lithuania. When it landed in Minsk, a dissident journalist and his girlfriend were arrested.
In a letter to the Belarus transport ministry dated May 26, Ryanair Chief Executive described previous correspondence from Belarusian officials as “false and inaccurate” and said the plane had been “unlawfully diverted under false pretences”.
“The pilot in command was left with no alternative but to divert to Minsk, when he was advised by Minsk ATC (Air Traffic Control) that there was a credible bomb threat to the aircraft, yet Minsk ATC refused to contact Ryanair, falsely claimed that Ryanair Ops would not answer the phone,” the letter said.
The claims in bold are misleading or false.They are not supported by facts but fit the intended narrative.
A day earlier Reuters had published what it called excerpts from the transcript of the radio traffic between the Air Traffic Controller and the airplane. There is nothing in it about a refusal of a request by the Ryanair pilot to contact the airline.
Even in the complete transcript of the radio traffic, published by the Belorussian air authority, there is no request by the pilot to contact the airline.
Instead the pilot is asking the ATC to tell him the radio frequency for Ryanair company traffic. The ATC back office took a while to find it but after a few minutes the frequency was found and submitted to the plane:
Cont. reading: Ryanair Bomb Threat In Belarus – ‘Western’ Media Narrative Disagrees With The Facts
The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-041
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-041
‘Like An Amoral Infant’ – How ProtonMail Contributes To False Media Claims About Belarus
ProtonMail, an encrypted end-to-end email provider in Switzerland which promises ‘Swiss Privacy Data Security and Neutrality’, has been busted for making false claims about bomb threat emails which were sent through its service to Minsk airport in Belarus as well as to airport authorities in other countries.
The despicable behavior of ProtonMail has led to false headlines like the one by UPI depicted below.
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ProtonMail may or may not have made that quite explicit headline claim. It is however 100% false. Belarus received a legit bomb threat against a Ryanair flight via an email sent through the ProtonMail mail servers. After receiving the email it contacted the plane in question and recommended to the pilot to divert the plane to Minsk. The pilot voluntarily followed that advice.
ProtonMail has made no effort to correct the false impression and false headlines its statement has caused. It has instead obfuscated the issue as much as it could. That is neither neutral nor fair behavior but partisan lying in an information war waged by ‘western’ regime changers against the people of Belarus.
Due to the malign behavior of ProtonMail new sanctions against Belarus, which will directly or indirectly hurt every Belorussian citizen, were introduced by the United States, the EU and other countries.
Moon of Alabama has detailed the publicly available evidence of the case and has called on ProtonMail to correct the record. ProtonMail responded and communicated with me via Twitter. In its communication with me ProtonMail indirectly admitted that the above headline is wrong. The complete exchange is of public interest and therefore copied below.
Cont. reading: ‘Like An Amoral Infant’ – How ProtonMail Contributes To False Media Claims About Belarus
How ProtonMail Lost The Public Trust It Needs To Do Business
ProtonMail is a Swiss provider of an end-to-end encrypted email application. The service is free to use for consumers but sold to businesses and other organizations.
ProtonMail claims to have "Swiss Privacy Data Security and Neutrality".
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But how far can one trust ProtonMail's claims of a secure service when it is openly breaking, as we show below, its pledge of neutrality?
During the aftermath of the emergency landing in Minsk of a Ryanair flight between Greece and Lithuania ProtonMail provided fractional information about emails which delivered a bomb threat against the plane to several airports. The partial and seemingly willfully incomplete response by ProtonMail has led to false claims by various media against the government of Belarus.
The 'west' is currently waging an information war against Belarus. It wants to change the government of Belarus by whatever means. By only providing fractional information about the case ProtonMail has taken a side in this war. The 'west' is now imposing sanctions against Belarus which will inevitable have negative consequences for ALL people in that country. If ProtonMail does not clean up its slate on this issue it must take responsibility for these.
This, from today's New York Times, includes several false claims:
The plane, a Ryanair Boeing 737 headed from Greece to Lithuania, was traveling through Belarusian airspace on Sunday when it was diverted and forced to land in Minsk, the capital, with an escort from a fighter jet. Roman Protasevich, a Belarusian opposition journalist who had been living in exile abroad, was detained along with his girlfriend after the plane landed.
Belarus’s president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, a brutal and eccentric strongman, has claimed that he rerouted the plane because of an emailed bomb threat, not to seize Mr. Protasevich. But a Swiss email provider has said that the email cited by the Belarusian authorities was sent after the plane had already been diverted.
As we have show previously the Ryanair plane was not "diverted and forced to land in Minsk". When the plane entered Belorussian airspace at about 12:30 local time (9:30 utc) it was informed by the Air Traffic Control (ATC) of Belarus that an email had been received by several airports that threatened to explode the plane over its destination in Vilnius. The ATC recommended to the pilot to land in Minsk. The pilot decided to do so by himself. The radio traffic between the pilot and the ATC has been published (scroll down) by the aviation authorities of Belarus. It is undisputed.
The NYT claims, relying of partial information by ProtonMail, that "the email cited by the Belorussian authorities was sent after the plane had already been diverted." The claim is false. There were two emails with bomb threats. One was received before the Ryanair plane entered the airspace of Belarus, the other was received after the pilot had already made his decision to land in Minsk. ProtonMail has so far only confirmed that the second email was send to Minsk. It has rejected to make comments about the first bomb threat email sent through its service to Minsk.
Here is how we know about the two emails.
The narrative of the incident (scroll down for the English version) by the Belorussian authorities starts with this:
Cont. reading: How ProtonMail Lost The Public Trust It Needs To Do Business
Ryanair Incident – Email Warning Received Before Plane Entered Belorussian Airspace
This is an update to yesterday's post By The Book – What Really Happened With The Ryanair Flight In Belarus. That piece analyzed the timeline of the Ryanair bomb threat incident in Belarus and the response from Belorussian officials.
As part of that post I discussed the possible manipulation of a screenshot of the bomb threat email by the editor of the western financed opposition media Nexta:
Protonmail, from where the email was received, is a encrypted web-email service hosted in Switzerland which allows more or less anonymous traffic.
An alleged screenshot of the email currently gets peddled around by the Editor-in-Chief of NEXTA:
Tadeusz Giczan @TadeuszGiczan – 11:59 PM · May 26, 2021
Not that anyone had any doubts but ‘Hamas email’ was sent to Minsk airport 24 minutes after Belarusian air controllers warned Ryanair pilots there’s a bomb onboard.
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Giczan is right in that the time shown in the screenshot is inconsistent with the timing of the Ryanair flight in the Belorussian airspace.
That however proves nothing. Time stamps in emails are notoriously unreliable as they depend on various computer timezone settings and several other variables.
Clocks, computers and phones in Switzerland are currently set to UTC(GMT)+2 hours. Clocks, computers and phones in Belarus to UTC+3. A email sent at 10:57 Geneva time would likely show up as sent at 11:57 in Minsk time. However, if the timezone of the computer/phone that is used to look at the email is set to UTC+4 the email time would be shown as 12:57.
Nice trick Mr. Nexta but that screenshot is unconvincing.
It turns out that my timezone manipulation speculation, while technically correct, might not have been an issue.
Today the Investigative Committee of Belarus, the country's proscecution service, published a note about the case (machine translation, emph. added):
Investigation of a criminal case on a deliberately false report about the "mining" of the Athens-Vilnius flight continues
At the moment, the criminal case initiated on the fact of the "mining" of the plane, which carried out the flight "Athens-Vilnius", is being processed by the USC in the city of Minsk.
These days, through destructive and extremist channels, as well as various Internet resources and Western media, incomplete and unverified information is being disseminated aimed at manipulating public opinion in their own interests. For our part, we urge the public not to popularize innuendo and cynical speculation. We consider it unacceptable to assume that someone has a monopoly on the truth until the preliminary investigation is completed.
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It has already been established, to which we draw special attention, that there were several messages about the "mining" of the aircraft received through the Swiss anonymous mail service ProtonMail – at 12:25 and at 12:56. At the moment, the records of conversations with the pilots of the aircraft are being studied and analyzed in detail, and numerous other investigative actions are being carried out. …
So there have been, if the officials are to be believed, two bomb threat emails. The first one at 12:25 local time (9:25 UTC) arrived five minutes before the Ryanair flight at 12:30 (9:30 UTC) entered Belorussian airspace. That would have left enough time to contact the air traffic controller who then warned the plane. The email in the screenshot received at would have been the second one.
The Ryanair pilot was warned of the bomb threat at 9:30 utc but declared Mayday only at 9:47 utc. It took him several more minutes to change the course. The sender of the emails might have watched the plane's course on Flight Aware and prepared and sent the second email when the plane seemed not to react to the first one.
Cont. reading: Ryanair Incident – Email Warning Received Before Plane Entered Belorussian Airspace
Open Thread 2021-040
By The Book – What Really Happened With The Ryanair Flight In Belarus
We yesterday looked at the record of Roman Protasevich, the western financed neo-nazi arrested on Sunday in Belarus. Another still open issue is how the incident developed.
Protasevich was arrested after a plane he was flying on from Greece to Lithuania was diverted to Minsk due to a bomb threat. There had been an open warrant of arrest against Protasevich which was enforced as he entered the country. NEXTA, the regime change organization in Poland where Protasevich had previously worked to organize a coup in Belarus, had doxxed policemen in Belarus and thereby endangered their families.
The Aviation Department of the Belorussian Ministry for Transport and Communication has published its official report of the incident. It is written in Russian and English language (scroll down for the English version). The report includes what seems to be the full transcript of the radio traffic between the plane and the air traffic control.
The report and the transcript debunk a number of false claims made in the 'western' reporting on the issue.
The main facts:
Cont. reading: By The Book – What Really Happened With The Ryanair Flight In Belarus
The ‘Lab-Leak’ Theory Is Not Of Equal Value – Promoting It Furthers The China Hawks
It is a sad experience to see that several writers I like and often agree with are now propping up a Russiagate like conspiracy theory about the origin of the novel coronavirus.
Let's start with Kit Klarenberg who, in a lengthy cherry picking 'lab escape theory' essay, quotes approvingly from a Technology Review piece:
[Computer modeling] generated a startling result: the spike proteins studding SARS-CoV-2 bound more tightly to their human cell receptor, a protein called ACE2, than target receptors on any other species evaluated. In other words, SARS-CoV-2 was surprisingly well adapted to its human prey, which is unusual for a newly emerging pathogen.
Huh?
BREAKING: Virus which predominantly infects humans is well adapted to predominantly infect humans!
Which proves exactly what?
On May 7 Michael Tracey pushed similar nonsense:
As New Evidence Emerges For COVID "Lab-Leak" Theory, Journalists Who Screamed “Conspiracy” Humiliate Themselves
Over and over again early last year, as the COVID pandemic was ramping up but hadn’t yet reached the US in earnest, journalists working at prominent national publications claimed to have conclusive knowledge about the origins of the virus. It was trafficking in a “conspiracy theory” that had been roundly “debunked” — they collectively declared — to suggest that the virus may have originated in a laboratory that specializes in experimenting on human infectious diseases in Wuhan, China.
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These declarations look dopier than ever after a new article was published this week by the journalist Nicholas Wade, who for many years was a science correspondent for the New York Times. At the very least, Wade demonstrates that the “lab-leak” theory ought not to be discounted. But he also goes much further, showing that the theory is in fact highly plausible.
Is the 'lab-leak' theory as 'highly plausible' as Wade's earlier theory that racial differences in economic success come from genetic differences amplified by culture?
The fact that 140+ well established genetic scientists signed a public letter which rejected the earlier Wade theory as "guesswork" might tell us something?
Two days ago Glenn Greenwald jumped in:
Cont. reading: The ‘Lab-Leak’ Theory Is Not Of Equal Value – Promoting It Furthers The China Hawks
Roman Protasevich – Arrested In Belarus – Is A Western Government Financed Neo-Nazi
There is more to say about the Ryanair incident in Belarus and the arrest of the 'regime change' operative Roman Protasevich.
We will start with the latter.
The sympathetic portraits of Protasevich in the New York Times and in the Guardian are only of interest for what they leave out.
FOIA Research and The Canadafiles have very well sourced and way more complete pieces on him. They link to a mountain of evidence in form of social media postings, photos and videos which support their findings.
From those we learn that Protasevich has long been a member of the fascist "Young Front" militia of Belarus. He has fought alongside the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in Ukraine's post-Maidan civil war.
Here is a 2017 picture of Protasevich during a Belorussian court hearing.
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Here is Protasevich in 2015 on the cover of the recruitment magazine "Black Sun" of the Azov Battalion.
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Here is Protasevich during an Azov parade (video from the event).
Cont. reading: Roman Protasevich – Arrested In Belarus – Is A Western Government Financed Neo-Nazi
Iran Election Preview
The Guardian Council of Iran, which preselects candidates for the presidential election, has today announced the names of those who have passed its tests:
The list of seven presidential hopefuls was unveiled by Iranian state media on Tuesday. The candidates have been picked from nearly 600 people who submitted their bids for approval. The list is dominated by political hardliners, including judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi, believed to be a very close figure to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a favorite in the upcoming polls.
Raisi ran for president before, losing to the incumbent president, Hassan Rouhani, back in 2017 by a wide margin of nearly 20% of the votes. Rouhani is barred from running for office again due to legal limitations, as he has already served the maximum allowed two consecutive four-year terms.
Two candidates who I would have liked to see running were disqualified.
One was former parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani on the reformist side who had supported the current President Rouhani in the Majles (parliament). The reformists, who had banked on the nuclear deal, lost support when Trump shunned it and sanctions brought the economy down. The Majles now has a conservative majority and the upcoming presidential elections will likely also trend towards a conservative candidate.
But if Larijani had been allowed to run the election would also have been a real contest between the conservative and reformist side. Without such a contest the voter participation in the election will be on the lower side. That might damage the system's legitimacy.
Golnar Motevalli @golnarM – 11:19 utc · May 25, 2021
Fars news says the latest poll indicates participation in Iran's presidential election will be 53%.
Of those who said they will definitely turn up and vote, 72.5% said they'll pick Raisi.
On the conservative side I would have liked to see the former president (2005-2013) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being allowed to run. While the establishment – in Iran and in the 'west' – despised his style, working class people in Iran tend to like him. A February poll by the University of Maryland asked "who would you want to be Iran’s next president". 28.2% named Raisi while 15.1% named Ahmadinejad. All other candidates had much lower values.
A confusing aspect of Iranian politics is that the socially conservatives, which the west unfairly calls 'hardliners', are on the social-democratic left on economic issues while the socially liberal reformers tend to favor the bazaari and capitalists. Still, it is not yet clear to me what Raisi's economic preferences and policies are.
The election will be held on June 18. Meanwhile the U.S. and Iran are still negotiating about the U.S. return to the nuclear deal. The Biden administration has been very slow to work on the issue and thereby destroyed all election hopes for the reformists in Iran. It also made it more likely that the attempt to return to the deal will fail as the soon ruling conservatives in Iran will likely oppose any condition the U.S. is trying to attach to it.
Lukashenko’s Revenge (Served Cold)
On yesterday's threat Petri Krohn wrote of:
LUKASHENKO'S REVENGE (Best served cold)
Last summer Ukraine's security service SBU tried to play dirty trick on Lukashenko. Russian volunteers, who had fought on the Novorossiyan side in the Ukrainian civil war were made a fake job offer, "security" work on Syrian oil fields. The Wagnerites (as private military contractors are called in Russia) were to gather in Minsk. A Turkish airways flight would then take them to Syria.
SBU's secret plan was to intercept the Turkish plane while in Ukrainian airspace, force it to land and arrest the "terrorists". Something went wrong. Plan B was to claim the mercenaries had been sent by Russia and Putin to stage a coup against Lukashenko. The Belarusians in fact believed this lie for a week.
Moon of Alabama reported on the events here:
The 'Russian Coup' Plot In Belarus Was Faked By Ukraine
Also remember, that the plane of Bolivian president Evo Morales was forced to land in Austria in July 2013, after France, Spain, Portugal and Italy had closed their airspace on American orders.
Now read this:
‘Hijacked’: President uses fighter jet to force Ryanair flight to land in Belarus – Sidney Morning Herald
Moscow: Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Sunday personally ordered a fighter jet to intercept a Ryanair flight carrying a young opposition blogger, forcing it to redirect and land in Belarus.
The Boeing aircraft, flying from the Greek capital Athens to Vilnius, had almost reached Lithuania when it changed direction and was escorted to the Belarusian capital of Minsk.
On arrival, police detained activist Roman Protasevich, 26, who had been on a wanted list after last year’s mass street protests in the wake of an election in which Lukashenko claimed a landslide but disputed victory.
While the incident unfolded yesterday I amused myself with reading the know-nothing responses from several European prime minister and officials.
The President of Lithuania:
Gitanas Nausėda @GitanasNauseda – 13:14 utc · May 23, 2021
Unprecedented event! A civilian passenger plane flying to Vilnius was forcibly landed in #Minsk. Belarusian political activist & founder of @NEXTA_EN was on the plane. He is arrested. 🇧🇾 regime is behind the abhorrent action. I demand to free Roman Protasevič urgently!
The President of the Nordic Council of Ministers:
Cont. reading: Lukashenko’s Revenge (Served Cold)
The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-039
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
(Sorry for not posting the last two days. There was a private emergency which had to be taken care of. – b.)
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Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-039
Note To Greenwald – The ‘Russian’ Pipeline Is A Germany Need
Glenn Greenwald writes that President Trump acted more hostile to Russia than President Biden does, even while the media claimed that Trump was 'a Russian agent'. It is probably a fair point to make but in his piece Greenwald himself falls for anti-Russian propaganda nonsense.
The problem starts with the headline:
Biden, Reversing Trump, Permits a Key Putin Goal: a New Russian Natural Gas Pipeline to Germany
That Trump was controlled by Putin and served his agenda was the opposite of reality. First Obama, and now Biden, have accommodated Moscow far more.
Greenwald seems to presume that it is the right or the job of a U.S. president to 'permit' pipelines between two foreign country? That is of course completely false. The U.S. has no right, duty or whatever to interfere in regular businesses between foreign partners. Such interference is in fact illegal under international law. Biden, as well as Trump, should be criticized for even thinking about 'permitting' it.
On to Greenwald's main point:
When it came to actual vital Russian interests — as opposed to the symbolic gestures hyped by the liberal cable and op-ed page circus — Trump and his administration were confronting and undermining the Kremlin in ways Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had, to his credit, steadfastly refused to do.
Indeed, the foreign policy trait relentlessly attributed to Trump in support of the media’s Cold War conspiracy theory — namely, an aversion to confronting Putin — was, in reality, an overarching and explicit belief of President Obama’s foreign policy, not President Trump’s.
Obama waged a massive undercover war to overthrow the Syrian government, an old Russian ally. He arranged a fascist coup in the Ukraine and he sent the anti-Russian academic Michael McFaul as ambassador to Russia where McFaul immediately started to prepare a color revolution against President Putin. It was the Obama administration which launched the 'Russiagate' campaign against Trump which further infested U.S. policies with anti-Russian sentiment.
Seen from the Russian side Obama certainly showed absolutely no 'aversion to confronting Putin'.
While Trump ripped up arms treaties with Russia and gave a few useless weapons to the Ukraine, making sure they would not reach the front lines, he otherwise took, thankfully, few other damaging steps.
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Now on to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline of which Greenwald writes:
Cont. reading: Note To Greenwald – The ‘Russian’ Pipeline Is A Germany Need
Open Thread 2021-038
Biden Continues To Support Israel’s Warcrimes
Diplomacy is back!
‘Diplomacy is back’: New U.S. envoy takes U.N. role – Feb 25, AP
Thomas-Greenfield aims to restore U.S. place on global stage
Well, it wasn't back for long.
Israel-Palestine: US blocks UN statement for third time in a week – May 17, Al Jazeerah
A third United Nations Security Council emergency meeting in a week – amid the deadly Israeli offensive in Gaza – has again ended with no concrete outcome after the United States blocked a joint statement calling for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
But:
Biden administration approves $735 million weapons sale to Israel – May 18, Washington Post
The bulk of the proposed sale to Israel, according to three people based on Capitol Hill familiar with the notification, is of Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMS — kits that transform so-called “dumb” bombs into precision-guided missiles. Israel, which has purchased substantial quantities of JDAMS from the United States in the past, ..
Ceasefire?
Israel and Hamas trade attacks after Biden calls for ceasefire – May 18, CBS
Nah, just fake news. No ceasefire:
Alex Ward @AlexWardVox – 11:49 UTC · May 18, 2021
From @PunchbowlNews this AM:
“The White House readout said Biden ‘expressed his support for a cease-fire.’ But administration officials quickly clarified that Biden didn’t call for a cease-fire, just said he’d be supportive of one if it happened.”
Meanwhile, aside from killing hundreds of people and wounding many more Israel bombed Gaza's powerlines, several highrises, media offices, UNRWA schools, Gaza's biggest library and publishing house and damaged six hospitals and eight clinics including the only Covid-19 laboratory in Gaza.
How The Military Slow Rolled Trump
Axios has a series of deep dives into the last two and a half months of the Trump administration. Yesterday it publish Episode 9: Trump's war with his generals which explains how a weak Trump was pushed and tricked into approving policies which were contrary to his own preferences and instincts:
Once in office, though, Trump's ambitions to withdraw from Afghanistan and other countries were subdued, slow-rolled, and detoured by military leaders.
Trump was not assertive enough to use the power of his office to get things done. He also was not smart enough to beat the deep state in its own game.
As Kelley Vlahos of Responsible Statecraft comments:
This is an important read, which also includes new speculation about whether Gen. Milley was actively working against the civilian leadership in the Pentagon during this period. Interestingly, while Trump was railing about “stop the steal” he wasn’t doing what everyone had accused him of doing on the military side: he wasn’t using Macgregor, Miller, et al., to stay in office. Rather, he seemed to believe that following through with his pledge to “end forever wars” would be the ultimate revenge against Esper, Milley, and Generals H.R. McMaster and Jim Mattis. Too bad he did not achieve this one post-election fantasy.
Yep.
The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-037
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
> In a recent book, Luke Harding, an investigative reporter at The Guardian, described how Mr. Steele had dispatched his “collector” to surreptitiously approach a real estate broker, Sergei Millian, who was a peripheral figure in the Trump/Russia saga. “Millian spoke at length and privately to this person, believing him or her to be trustworthy — a kindred soul,” Mr. Harding wrote.
But the trouble for Mr. Harding, who is close to both Mr. Steele and Mr. Simpson, was that he wrote those lines before the release of the F.B.I. interview of Mr. Danchenko.
In the interview, the collector said that he and Mr. Millian might have spoken briefly over the phone, but that the two had never met.
Mr. Harding did not respond to requests for comment. <
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Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-037
Israel Punishes Media For Reporting Its Escalation In Palestine
Today is Nakba day which commemorates the violent expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes which began 74 years ago and is still continuing.
Just yesterday Fares Akram. Associated Press reporter in Gaza, wrote in a diary about his families expulsion and his life under colonist bombing:
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — On Friday morning, a military airstrike smashed my family’s farm in the northern Gaza Strip into a jagged mass of metal and splintered trees. An Israeli bomb had slammed into the yard, carving a crater into the dirt and leaving rubble in its wake.
The conflict, once again, hit home.
The first Gaza war taught me that while our lush citrus grove might offer some breathing space from the congestion and difficulties of city life, it’s no refuge. A previous Israeli airstrike killed my father, Akram al-Ghoul, on January 3, 2009. As fighting raged, he’d insisted on sleeping at the farm to tend to the cattle and chicken, and to nurture the trees.
In all, six of my relatives, three close friends and several colleagues have died in the three bloody wars and countless battles between Israel and Hamas. Each time the violence erupts and I report as a journalist on the people who lost their homes, their children or their lives, the memories creep back. I always think, “That could be me.” When the thundering bombs, buzzing drones and pounding artillery refresh the pain and trigger the old fear, I seek refuge in work.
The Associated Press office is the only place in Gaza City I feel somewhat safe. The Israeli military has the coordinates of the high-rise, so it’s less likely a bomb will bring it crashing down.
Today Fares Akram and Joseph Krauss report:
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — An Israeli airstrike destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed offices of The Associated Press and other media outlets hours after another Israeli air raid on a densely populated refugee camp killed at least 10 Palestinians from an extended family, mostly children, on Saturday.
The strike on the high-rise came nearly an hour after the military ordered people to evacuate the 12-story building, which also housed Al-Jazeera, other offices and residential apartments. The strike brought down the entire structure, which collapsed in a gigantic cloud of dust. There was no immediate explanation for why it was attacked.
This was the second high rise housing media studios, offices, telecommunication equipment as well as residential apartments that Israel destroyed in its current attack.
Earlier today AP had accused the Israeli military of intentionally misinforming the media to trick the resistance in Gaza. (The trick did not work.)
In a statement AP's president condemned today's strike and wrote:
The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today.
Well, yes. The Israeli military will congratulate itself for achieving that aim.
Tow days ago I developed the idea that the resistance, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Ansar Allah in Yemen, may be planing more of the events than a superficial view reveals:
Cont. reading: Israel Punishes Media For Reporting Its Escalation In Palestine
Turning The Clock Back To 2001 – CIA, Others Prepare A New Resistance Against The Taliban
On September 9 2001 Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of an anti-Taliban front in north Afghanistan, was killed by two suicide bombers. Massoud, an ethnic Taijik, had fought against the Soviet occupation, then against rival warlords and finally against the Taliban. Massoud and the groups under his command controlled less than 10% of Afghanistan. They were financed by U.S., French and British secret services. (In the late 1990s Amrullah Saleh, Massouds intelligence chief, received CIA training.)
After 9/11 the CIA and U.S. special forces met with Massoud's allies, gave them lots of money to hire more fighters and supported their march on Kabul with massive airstrikes. Two month later the Taliban gave up, went home or retreated to Pakistan. The U.S. installed the various warlords and criminals who had fought under Massoud as the new government.
That was a mistake. It had been the utter criminal behavior of those warlords that had led to public support for the rise of the Taliban in the first place. To install the warlords who looted the country as government guaranteed that the Taliban would come back.
By 2006 the Taliban were back. Since then they have regained control of more than half of Afghanistan. Despite the enormous amount of 'western' firepower the U.S.and its allies applied they found no way to prevent the reestablishment of the Taliban's rule. Finally President Trump negotiated a ceasefire with the Taliban that would allow a retreat from Afghanistan without taking further casualties.
Yesterday the last U.S. soldiers left Kandahar airport, once the largest U.S. base in south Afghanistan:
The United States has completed its withdrawal from Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan, once the second largest military base in the country for US forces, officials said Friday.
Kandahar province was the birthplace of the Taliban and has in recent months seen intense clashes between the resurgent militants and Afghan forces.
US airstrikes were launched from the base just last week to help Afghan forces push back a major Taliban offensive.
“They have not officially handed over the base to us but I can confirm they left the base on Wednesday,” said Khoja Yaya Alawi, a spokesman for the Afghan army in Kandahar.
“They have handed over all the facilities to Afghan forces,” added Massoud Pashtun, the director of Kandahar Airport.
The retreat from Afghanistan does not sit well with the CIA and other secret services. They know that the Taliban will soon overwhelm the Afghan government and again rule the country. But they want to keep their foothold in Afghanistan to continue their meddling and to act against various presumed enemies be they Iran, Pakistan or China. There is also the drug business which makes for some nice off-the-books funding.
They now think about turning the situation back to September 2001 and to have a do over:
Cont. reading: Turning The Clock Back To 2001 – CIA, Others Prepare A New Resistance Against The Taliban
Escalation In Palestine – Hizbullah Is Ready To Join The Fight
The current war the occupiers of Palestine wage on the indigenous population has some unusual features.
While the conflict was, without doubt, started by the colonial occupiers the course of the recent escalation seems to be managed by the resistance side. It may well be part of a larger plan.
The Israeli army had for some time planned a large scale 30-days long maneuver to rehearse an attack on Hezbullah in Lebanon. Last week Hizbullah reacted to that:
The Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror organization has announced it is on high alert following the IDF’s launching of its largest-ever military exercise.
The IDF launched on Sunday its “Chariots of Fire” month-long exercise simulating war on several fronts, and primarily against Hezbollah in the north, including the massive firing of missiles and rockets from all arenas on the home front.
This is the largest and most comprehensive IDF maneuver in its history…
The maneuver had been announced for some time. Hizbullah has feared that the maneuver was a deception for a planned Israeli assault on Lebanon. It came at an interesting moment.
The International Day of Al-Quds (Jerusalem) was inaugurated by Imam Khomeini in 1979, the year of the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, to revive the Palestinian cause, and is celebrated on the last Friday of the month of Ramadan.
The last Friday of Ramadan was May 7. On May 5 the Secretary General of Hizbullah Hassan Nasrallah gave his yearly Al-Quds day speech:
[O]ur responsibility for Al-Quds Day is to provide all possible help to the Palestinian people, to the Palestinian Resistance; the Axis of Resistance must be even more united and attached to the cause, and it already is, it must increase its readiness (for the final war), it must strengthen itself further, because it is the Axis of Resistance that will shape the future of the Middle East.
If we follow the development of the current phase of the conflict in Palestine those words may getting a deeper meaning:
Cont. reading: Escalation In Palestine – Hizbullah Is Ready To Join The Fight
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