Will Trump be Assassinated Like the Kennedy Brothers?

During Donald Trump’s tenure, the White House’s security has been breached several times, and alarms were raised in the media. Most notably, however, a Canadian woman has been charged on September 22 in the US federal court for allegedly posting a letter with deadly ricin poison to President Trump.

Pascale Cecile Veronique Ferrier, 53, is a computer programmer who is originally from France, but became a Canadian citizen in 2015, according to Canadian media. Sources tell BBC [1] she retains dual French-Canadian citizenship. She was living in the Canadian province of Quebec.

In March 2019, she was arrested in Texas for unlawfully carrying a weapon and using a fake driver's license, according to jail records. She was deported to Canada after officials found she had overstayed her visa and committed a crime while in the US, according to the New York Times.

The letter she allegedly sent last week was discovered before it reached the White House. In it, she called on Trump to drop out of the US presidential race. The envelope contained ricin, a poison found naturally in castor beans, but can kill within days if processed to weapon grade.

"I found a new name for you: 'The Ugly Tyrant Clown'," she wrote in the letter to Trump, according to FBI charging documents filed ahead of her first court appearance in New York on Tuesday.

"I hope you like it. You ruin USA and lead them to disaster. I have US cousins, then I don't want the next four years with you as president. Give up and remove your application for this election."

The letter, which the FBI says had her fingerprints on it, referred to the poisoned note as "a special gift," adding: "If it doesn't work, I'll find better recipe for another poison, or I might use my gun when I'll be able to come."

The suspect may have also sent ricin to five addresses in Texas, including a jail and a sheriff's office, according to the court documents.

Senior US Customs and Border Protection official Mark Morgan on Tuesday said that Ms. Ferrier had told border officers "she was wanted by the FBI for mailing envelopes with ricin to the White House and other locations" when she approached the checkpoint on Sunday. Officers found a gun, knife and ammunition in her car at the time of her arrest.

Sending suspected packages containing poison or explosives has become a common occurrence in the run-up to the US elections. Her case closely resembles the parcel bombs sent to the residences of George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, several other leading Democratic Congressmen and The New York Times New York office by Cesar Sayoc in October, 2018, in the run-up to the midterm elections in November.

Although the suspect turned out to be a mentally ill Trump supporter, he was likely instigated by shady hands in the American deep state, which is wary of the anti-establishment rhetoric and non-interventionist tendencies of the so-called “alt-right” administration.

The prank of sending explosive packages to Democratic Congressmen causing no harm lasted from October 22, 2018, to November 1, right on the eve of the elections, clearly impacted the outcome of the midterm elections on November 6, as the Democrats got the sympathy vote following the news of suspicious packages sent to prominent Democrats made headlines.

Even though the Republicans retained their 51-seat majority in the Senate, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives following midterms by gaining 39 additional seats and brought impeachment charges against Donald Trump, though he was acquitted by the Republican majority in the Senate in February.

That the accused had a history of mental illness [2], childhood sexual abuse, substance abuse, including anabolic steroids, cognitive difficulties, including dyslexia, and was apprehended by police several times for grand theft auto and shoplifting doesn’t come as a surprise because it’s always easy to manipulate and trap such gullible patsies into perpetrating heinous crimes.

In fact, the case of Cesar Sayoc can be compared to another iconic “patsy” in the American political history, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy, who was picked up as a scapegoat because he had visited Russia and Cuba before the hit-job in order to put the blame for the high-profile political assassination on the communists.

Not surprisingly, he was silenced by Jack Ruby before he could open his mouth and prove innocence in the courts of law. The cold-blooded murder of the only other non-interventionist president in American history besides Trump was obviously perpetrated by a professional sniper on the payroll of the deep state.

It was not a coincidence that Kennedy was killed in November 1963, and months later, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized Lyndon B. Johnson to directly engage in the Vietnam conflict in August 1964 on the basis of a false flag naval engagement.

It’s obvious that the American deep state was the only beneficiary of the assassination of Kennedy. Most likely, the deep state turned against Kennedy after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s pacifist rhetoric and conciliatory approach toward Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union, in the backdrop of the Cold War.

Similarly, JFK’s brother Robert was a leading Democratic candidate for presidency when he was shot by a Palestinian Christian Sirhan Sirhan in 1968. Being a pacifist himself, Bobby Kennedy opposed the US involvement in the Vietnam War and wrote a book on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 in which he credited his brother JFK for showing restraint and amicably resolving the crisis.

As the former attorney general of JFK, Bobby probably had good leads on the masterminds of the JFK assassination, and wanted to avenge his brother’s shocking murder after being elected president. This was the only reason he was also silenced by the deep state.

Though serving a life sentence at a California penitentiary, Bobby Kennedy’s murderer Sirhan, now 76 years old, is a suspicious and deranged character, who frequently backtracked on his testimonies and confession during and after the trial, had no recollection of the murder and subsequent events, and his defense team had pleaded for a retrial several times but the request was summarily denied.

Shortly before the murder of Bobby Kennedy, Sirhan joined the occult organization Ancient Mystical Order of the Rose Cross, commonly known as the Rosicrucians in 1966. In fact, Sirhan’s esoteric faith closely resembles a medieval cult “Hashishin,” from which the English word “assassin” has been derived.

The Order of the Assassins was a Nizari Isma'ili sect which lived in the mountains of Persia and Syria between 1090 A.D. and 1275. During that time, they founded a clandestine organization that orchestrated the assassinations of leading figures in the Middle East that were considered enemies of their state.

The Nizari Isma'ili State was ruled by Hassan as-Sabbah from 1090 A.D. until his death in 1124. The Western world was introduced to the assassins by the works of Marco Polo who understood the name as deriving from the eponymous narcotic hashish, which indeed was used to put the assassins under a spell for political assassinations.

The more recent examples of such murderous cults are the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a cultist political organization founded by the Rajavis of Iran that relocated first to Iraq and then to Albania, or the Fidayeen or suicide bombers of Islamic jihadist organizations who are promised paradise in return for mounting terrorist attacks against political adversaries.

Citations:

[1] Pascale Ferrier: White House ricin package suspect in court:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54255727

[2] The curious case of Cesar Sayoc:

https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/08/13/inside-the-mind-of-the-maga-bomber-the-trump-superfan-who-tried-to-wreak-havoc-on-the-last-national-election/ 

Rise of Trumpism and Geoeconomic Pivot to China

Though lacking intellect and often ridiculed for frequent spelling errors on Twitter timeline, such as “unpresidented” and “covfefe,” implying he gets his news feed from television talk shows and rarely reads book and articles, Donald Trump is street smart and his anti-globalization agenda and down-to-earth attitude appeals to the American working classes.

In order to understand the real and perceived grievances of Donald Trump’s alt-right electoral base, we need to understand the prevailing global economic order and its prognosis. What the pragmatic economists predicted about free market capitalism has turned out to be true, whether the leftists like it or not. A kind of global economic entropy has set into motion, and money is flowing from the area of high monetary density to the area of low monetary density.

The rise of BRICS countries in the 21^st century is the proof of this tendency. BRICS are growing economically because the labor in developing economies is cheap; labor laws and rights are virtually nonexistent; expenses on creating a safe and healthy work environment are minimal; regulatory framework is lax; expenses on environmental protection are negligible; taxes are low; and, in the nutshell, windfalls for multinational corporations are massive.

Thus, BRICS are threatening the global economic monopoly of the Western capitalist bloc: North America and Western Europe. Here we need to understand the difference between manufacturing sector and services sector. Manufacturing sector is the backbone of economy; one cannot create a manufacturing base overnight.

It is based on hard assets: the national economies need raw materials; production equipment; transport and power infrastructure; and, last but not the least, a technically educated labor force. It takes decades to build and sustain a manufacturing base. But the services sector, like the Western financial institutions, can be built and dismantled in a relatively short period of time.

If we take a cursory look at the economy of the Western capitalist bloc, it has still retained some of its high-tech manufacturing base, but it is losing fast to the cheaper and equally robust manufacturing base of the developing BRICS nations. Everything is made in China these days, except for high-tech microprocessors, software, several internet giants, some pharmaceutical products, the Big Oil and the military hardware and defense production industry.

Apart from that, the entire economy of the Western capitalist bloc is based on financial institutions: the behemoth investment banks that dominate and control the global economy, like JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs in the US; BNP Paribas and Axa Group in France; Deutsche Bank and Allianz Group in Germany; and Barclays and HSBC in the UK.

After establishing the fact that the Western economy is mostly based on its financial services sector, we need to understand its implications. Like I have contended earlier that it takes time to build a manufacturing base, but it is relatively easy to build and dismantle an economy based on financial services.

Moreover, the manufacturing sector is labor-intensive whereas the financial services sector is capital-intensive, therefore the latter does not create as much job opportunities to keep the workforce of a nation gainfully employed and sufficiently remunerated as the industrial sector does.

Although the bankers and corporate executives of the Western economies are the beneficiaries of such exploitative practices, the middle and working classes are suffering. Besides the Trump supporters in the United States, the far-right populist leaders in Europe are also exploiting popular resentment against free trade and globalization.

The Brexiteers in the United Kingdom, the Yellow Vest protesters in France and the far-right movements in Germany and across Europe are a manifestation of a paradigm shift in the global economic order in which nationalist, isolationist and protectionist slogans have replaced the free trade and globalization mantra of the nineties.

Donald Trump withdrawing the United States from multilateral treaties, restructuring trade agreements and initiating a trade war against China are meant to redress, at least cosmetically, the legitimate grievances of the American working classes against the wealth disparity created by laissez-faire capitalism and market fundamentalism.

From the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the 21^st century, the neocolonial powers brazenly exploited the resources and labor of the post-colonial world. But after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, a paradigm shift occurred in the global economic order.

Behind the “Iron Curtain” of international isolation, China successfully built its manufacturing base by imparting vocational training and technical education to its disciplined workforce, and by building an industrial and transport infrastructure.

It didn’t allow any imports until 2001, but after joining the WTO, it opened up its import-export policy on a reciprocal basis, and since the labor is much cheaper in China than in the Western countries, therefore it now has a comparative advantage over the Western capitalist bloc which China has exploited in its national interest.

These prudent trade and economic policies, along with visionary leadership of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and China’s vanguard socialist party, collectively, have placed China on the path to progress and prosperity in the 21^st century.

Regarding the issue of immigration to the developed world, there are two contrasting styles of debating a subject: those who prefer normative arguments, and those who choose descriptive line of reasoning. Most intellectuals nowadays adopt the former approach, but the truth unfortunately is generally bitter.

Let me admit that I do understand race relations is a sensitive subject in the modern world, particularly when millions of skilled and unskilled immigrants from the impoverished developing world have migrated to the economically prosperous developed countries to find a better future for themselves and their families.

However, instead of bending over backwards and demanding from the natives of their host countries to be more accommodating and totally non-communal, the immigrants need to understand that migration is not the natural order of societies.

In order to elaborate this paradox by way of an analogy, when we uproot a flowering plant from a garden and try to make it grow in a different environment, sometimes the plant flourishes in the new environment, but at other times it doesn’t, depending on the adaptability of the plant and the compatibility of the environment. If we want to change the whole environment to suit the needs of that particular uprooted plant, such an unrealistic approach may not be conducive to native flora and fauna of those habitats.

The prudent way to tackle the immigration problem is to discourage it by reducing the incentive for prospective immigrants to permanently abandon their homes, families and communities to find a better job in a foreign country and a radically different culture, where they might be materially better off but could find themselves socially isolated and emotionally desolate.

In order to minimize the incentive for immigration, we need to revamp the global economic order. Once the relative imbalance of wealth distribution between the developed and the developing world is narrowed down, then there will be no need for the people of one region and culture to relocate to another, except on a temporary basis for education, traveling and cultural exchange.

Humanism only implies that we should be just and fair in our approach. The human mindsets, attitudes and behaviors are structured and conditioned by their respective cultures and environments. A person born and bred in Pakistan or India generally has more in common with the people of the subcontinent.

For instance, when the first generation Indo-Pakistani immigrants relocate to foreign countries, they find it hard to adjust in a radically different culture initially. It would be unwise to generalize, however, because it depends upon the disposition and inclination of immigrants, their level of education and the value system which they have internalized during their formative years.

There are many sub-cultures within cultures and numerous family cultures within those sub-cultures. Educated Indo-Pakistani liberals generally integrate well into the Western societies, but many conservative Pakistani and Indian immigrants, particularly from backward rural areas, find it hard to adjust in a radically different Western culture. On the other hand, such immigrants from underprivileged backgrounds find the conservative societies of the Gulf countries more conducive to their social integration and individual well-being.

In any case, the second generation immigrants, who are born and bred in the Western culture, seamlessly blend into their host environments, and they are likely to have more in common with the people and cultures where they have been brought up. Thus, a first generation Pakistani-American is predominantly a Pakistani, while a second generation Pakistani-American is predominantly an American, albeit with an exotic-sounding name and a naturally tanned complexion.

Why Trump Copped out of Ordering Bashar al-Assad Hit-job?

Donald Trump disclosed [1] in the morning show Fox and Friends yesterday that he contemplated assassinating Syrian President Bashar al-Assad following an alleged chemical weapons attack in April 2017 in Khan Sheikhoun, a strategic town in northwest Idlib province that has recently been liberated by the Syrian army, but then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis opposed the idea.

"I would have rather taken him out. I had him all set," Trump said. "Mattis didn't want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general, and I let him go."

Since then-President Obama’s warning in 2013 that the use of chemical weapons was a “red line” for him, several false flag sarin attacks have been staged by terrorists themselves to enforce a US-led no-fly zone, a la Libya, over Syria, too.

After the purported chemical weapons strike in April 2017, a “visibly moved and tearful” Donald Trump appeared on television to make a momentous announcement, saying, “the attack has crossed a lot lines for me.” While making the statement, however, he was standing next to King Abdullah of Jordan who was instrumental for the devastation in Syria that has claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives and displaced more than half of Syria’s population.

According to an informative December 2013 report [2] from a newspaper affiliated with the UAE government which takes the side of Syrian opposition against the Syrian government, it is clearly spelled out that Syrian militants got arms and training through a secret command center based in the intelligence headquarters’ building in Amman, Jordan that was staffed by high-ranking military officials from 14 countries, including the US, European nations, Israel and the Gulf Arab States to wage a covert war against the government in Syria.

Following the alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017, the US launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at al-Shayrat airfield in Homs governorate from where the Syrian plane allegedly took off to the chemical weapons strike site in northwest Idlib province.

An year later on April 7, 2018, another false flag chemical weapons attack was staged in Douma. Couple of days later, on April 11, Trump tweeted: “Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!”

After Trump’s advisers drew his attention to the fact that he might have telegraphed his intentions of bombing Syria to the Russians, one of the “smartest” American presidents ever came up with an even more puerile tweet the next day, saying: “Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?”

The fact was that during the week before the alleged chemical weapons strike, Donald Trump was so distracted by the FBI’s raid on the office of his attorney Michael Cohen and the release of former FBI director James Comey’s tell-all book that he had paid scant attention to what had happened in Syria. He kept fulminating about those two issues throughout the week before the strike on his Twitter timeline and mentioned the alleged Douma chemical weapons attack in Syria on April 7, 2018, only in the passing.

Even though Trump’s former babysitter Jim Mattis, then the Secretary of Defense, admitted on the record that though he was sure chlorine was used in the attack in Douma, he was not sure who carried out the attack and whether any other toxic chemical agent, particularly sarin, was used in the attack.

In fact, a subsequent OPCW report in July 2018 clarified that no nerve agents were used in the attack. If chlorine can be classified as a chemical weapon, then how is one supposed to categorize white phosphorous which was used by the US military in large quantities in its battle against the Islamic State in Raqqa?

Despite scant evidence as to the use of chemical weapons or the party responsible for it, Donald Trump ordered another cruise-missile strike in Syria a week after the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma in collaboration with then-Theresa May government in the UK and the Emmanuel Macron administration in France.

In the cruise-missile strikes on April 14, 2018, against a scientific research facility in the Barzeh district of Damascus and two alleged chemical weapons storage facilities in Homs, 105 total cruise missiles were deployed, 85 were launched by the US, 12 by France and 8 by the UK aircraft.

It bears mentioning that the American air and missile strikes in Syria are not only illegal under the international law but are also unlawful according to the American laws. While striking the Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, Washington availed itself of the war on terror provisions in the US laws, known as the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), but those laws do not give the president the power to order strikes against the Syrian government targets without prior approval of the US Congress which has the sole authority to declare war.

The Intercept reported last year [3] that the Trump administration had derived the authority to strike the Syrian government targets based on a “top secret” memorandum of the Office of Legal Counsel that even the US Congress couldn’t see. Complying with the norms of transparency and the rule of law were never the strong points of the American democracy but the Trump administration has done away with even the pretense of accountability and checks and balances in the conduct of international relations.

In conclusion, the only reason the Pentagon advised the “toddler-in-chief” against committing the folly of ordering the assassination of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was that American forces were waging a military campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in 2017.

Although the Syrian government has tolerated against its wishes the presence of US troops in eastern Syria fighting alongside Kurds, had Trump ordered the assassination of the Syrian president, it would have amounted to a declaration of an all-out war, making it impossible to maintain the presence of US forces not only in Syria but also in Iraq.

It’s worth pointing out here that although Trump did order the assassination of revered Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on January 3, by the time the US had already wrapped up anti-ISIS campaigns in Raqqa and Mosul. Whereas in 2017, the Pentagon had deployed tens of thousands of American troops across vast swathes of Syria and Iraq, ensuring their safety could have become an impossible task had Trump ordered the assassination of Bashar al-Assad.

Citations:

[1] Syria calls US a 'rogue state' over Trump's kill al-Assad plan:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/09/syria-calls-rogue-state-trump-kill-al-assad-plan-200916185541951.html

[2] Syrian rebels get arms and advice through secret command center in Amman:

http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/syrian-rebels-get-arms-and-advice-through-secret-command-centre-in-amman

[3] Donald Trump ordered Syria strike based on a secret legal justification even Congress can’t see:

https://theintercept.com/2018/04/14/donald-trump-ordered-syria-strike-based-on-a-secret-legal-justification-even-congress-cant-see/ 

Hunter Biden’s Murky Dealings in Ukraine and Trump’s Show Trial

Despite Hunter Biden’s publicly acknowledged despicable vices, including substance abuse, extramarital affairs and financial corruption, the mainstream media seems to be giving credit to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for helping his son get through rough phases of life. Had Eric or Donald Trump Jr. been in his place, would the media still have been as sparing and sympathetic or would it have crucified Donald Trump for being a bad influence over his children?

An excerpt from the New Yorker’s detailed biographical account [1] of Hunter Biden in July last year serves as an indictment of his moral depravity: “Hunter Biden has struggled for decades with alcohol addiction and drug abuse; he went through an acrimonious divorce from his first wife, Kathleen Buhle Biden; and he had a subsequent relationship with Beau’s widow, Hallie. He was recently sued for child support by an Arkansas woman, Lunden Alexis Roberts, who claims that he is the father of her child.”

An August 21 article [2] from the Business Insider further illustrates how former Vice President Joe Biden used his official appointment and political influence to shield his son from indefensible allegations of financial corruption:

“As his father found his place at the top of Washington, Hunter Biden launched several new business efforts that raised eyebrows. In September 2008, Hunter Biden launched a consulting firm, Seneca Global Advisors, and in June 2009, Hunter cofounded the private-equity firm Rosemont Seneca Partners. The aforementioned New Yorker report described that through his companies and his partners, Hunter Biden established various business connections to figures in China and Russia.

“Hunter Biden's tumultuous personal life became tabloid fodder during and after his father's time with the administration. He sparked confusion when he, then 44 years old, enlisted in the Navy Reserves in 2012, less than two years before reports broke that the Reserve discharged him in 2014 after he tested positive for cocaine.

“Within one month of his term on the board of Burisma Holdings of Ukraine expiring, a bombshell New York Times story published on May 1, 2019, detailed Joe and Hunter Biden's ties to Ukraine and said the former vice president had successfully gotten a Ukrainian prosecutor removed from office.

“The move raised questions about a possible conflict of interest and if Joe Biden was trying to shield his son from an investigation into the company, whose founder faced multiple investigations into allegations of tax evasion and money laundering. Joe Biden has since publicly detailed his threat to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees from the country if the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma Holdings money-laundering and corrupt practices wasn't fired.”

The May 2019 New York Times report [3] was far from a “bombshell,” as alluded to in the aforementioned excerpts, nevertheless it set in motion a series of events that eventually culminated in the initiation of impeachment proceedings against President Trump in September last year:

“In 2014, Mr. Archer, the Kerry family friend, and Hunter Biden were part of a wave of Americans who would come from across the Atlantic to help Burisma both with its substantive legal issues and its image. Their support allowed Burisma to create the perception that it was backed by powerful Americans at a time when Ukraine was especially dependent on aid and strategic backing from the United States and its allies, according to people who worked in Ukraine at the time.

“Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine appears to have been well compensated. Burisma paid $3.4 million to a company called Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC from mid-April 2014, when Hunter Biden and Mr. Archer joined the board, to late 2015, according to the financial data provided by the Ukrainian deputy prosecutor. The payments continued after that, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

“Rosemont Seneca Bohai was controlled by Mr. Archer, who left Burisma’s board after he was charged in connection with a scheme to defraud pension funds and an Indian tribe of tens of millions of dollars. Bank records submitted in that case — which resulted in a conviction for Mr. Archer that was overturned in November — show that Rosemont Seneca Bohai made regular payments to Mr. Biden that totaled as much as $50,000 in some months.”

After reading between the lines, it becomes abundantly clear that the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump were nothing more than a show trial. The Democrats initiated the impeachment inquiry against Trump in September 2019 as a diversionary tactic to cover up the sleazy dealings of Hunter Biden with Burisma Holdings of Ukraine, and consequent discrediting of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Although the Democrats had the requisite majority in the House of Representatives to impeach Donald Trump, the Senate was controlled by the Republicans. Besides, convicting a president of impeachment requires two-third majority in the Senate that the Democrats never had. Then what was the purpose of initiating the proceedings if not to distract attention from the media trial of Hunter Biden, which was bringing damning press coverage not only to the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden but to the Democratic Party as a whole?

Leaving partisan interpretations of the US Constitution aside, an accused is presumed innocent until proved guilty, according to a fundamental axiom of modern jurisprudence. Then how can it be said that Trump is an “impeached president”? By such paradoxical legal interpretations, if a mala fide litigator maliciously accuses an innocent person of murder, could it be said that the person is a murderer simply because he was indicted of the offense but was never convicted of having committed a murder?

Lastly, Donald Trump’s unorthodox approach to the conduct of diplomatic relations has been a persistent thorn in the side of America’s national security establishment for the last four years, and mainstream shills often wonder why Washington’s relations with traditional allies, including Britain, France, Germany and Canada, have soured during the tenure of the Trump administration.

The fact is that like a typical American, Trump regards America’s allies, such as Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau, as subordinates beholden to him personally; whereas he treats adversaries, such as Russian President Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, as independent leaders deserving equal treatment and respect. Nevertheless, it’s an inconsequential matter of interpersonal attitude and etiquette than anything having diplomatic repercussions.

The conspiracy theories perpetuated by the establishment-controlled media that Trump is Putin’s “useful idiot” and alleged Russian interference in America’s domestic politics are sheer fabrications reminiscent of the McCarthyism of the fifties.

Russian netizens indeed lent moral support to the Trump campaign in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential race but simply because they despised Hillary Clinton, who the Russians regarded as an interventionist hawk responsible for initiating proxy wars in Libya and Syria in 2011 as Obama’s secretary of state, and also because she was the wife of former Democratic President Bill Clinton who was responsible for the break-up of former Yugoslavia in the nineties.

Despite the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary by a margin of 2.87 million votes. Had it not been for the archaic electoral college system and James Comey, then the director of FBI, opening last-minute investigation into Hillary Clinton using personal computers for official communications, she was the favorite to win the elections.

According to Washington’s own intelligence estimates, three powers are currently vying for interference in upcoming presidential elections slated for November 3. Two of those, China and Iran, favor Joe Biden because Trump initiated trade war with China and unilaterally annulled Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, whereas Russia allegedly supports Trump because Putin apparently has an unmistakable crush on Slovenian beauty pageant Melania.

Trump is reputed to be a staunch conservative, and it’s a known empirical observation that conservatives typically are considerably more patriotic than liberals. Collaborating with foreign powers to undermine one’s national interest doesn’t appeal to the conservative mindset.

Throughout its four-year tenure, the Trump administration has continued with the policy of its predecessors. If anything, diplomatic relations between Washington and Moscow have significantly worsened during Trump’s tumultuous four-year tenure and a New Cold War has begun between the arch-rivals.

Notes:

[1] Will Hunter Biden Jeopardize His Father’s Campaign?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-biden-jeopardize-his-fathers-campaign

[2] Meet Hunter Biden, the often scandal-plagued middle child of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden:

https://www.businessinsider.com/hunter-biden-life-scandals-ukraine-involvement-with-trump-giuliani-2019-9

[3] Joe Biden faces conflict of interest questions:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukraine.html 

Khashoggi Murder and the Killing of Al-Baghdadi

In his newly released book “Rage,” American journalist Bob Woodward has corroborated what was long known to be an open secret: the existence of a Faustian pact between Donald Trump and President Erdogan of Turkey in which the latter agreed to cover up the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 and also let Washington hunt down Islamic State’s chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hiding in Syria’s Idlib, bordering Turkey, in October last year in return for Ankara mounting Operation Peace Spring in northeast Syria with Trump’s permission in October 2019.

In an informal conversation with Woodward, Donald Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from congressional scrutiny after the brutal assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. "I saved his ass," Trump said in 2018, according to the book [1]. "I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop."

When Woodward pressed Trump if he believed the Saudi crown prince ordered the assassination himself, Trump responded: "He says very strongly that he didn't do it. Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time," Trump said.

"And you know, they're in the Middle East. You know, they're big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have the real power. They have the oil, but they also have the great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion," the president noted. "They wouldn't last a week if we're not there, and they know it," he added.

Regarding the murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, the Erdogan administration released American pastor Andrew Brunson on October 12, 2018, which had been a longstanding demand of the Trump administration, and also decided not to make public the audio recordings of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi implicating Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the assassination.

In return, the Trump administration promised to comply with Turkish President Erdogan’s longstanding demand to evacuate American forces from the Kurdish-held areas in northeast Syria, and the withdrawal was eventually effected an year later in October last year.

In the Operation Peace Spring in October 2019, the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian proxies invaded and occupied 120 kilometers wide and 32 kilometers deep stretch of Syrian territory between the northeastern towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn. It’s worth pointing out that although Turkish forces invaded northeast Syria in October last year, the negotiations were going on for almost an year since December 2018.

Trump immediately announced the withdrawal of American troops from Syria after losing the midterm elections in November 2018. But the Pentagon kept delaying the evacuation of American forces from northern Syria to appease Washington’s Kurdish allies. However, once Turkish armed forces and allied militant proxies invaded northeast Syria in October last year, the Pentagon was left with no other choice than to redeploy American forces to Kurdish-majority areas al-Hasakah and Qamishli in northeast Syria.

Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw American troops from Syria was reportedly made during a telephonic conversation with Turkish President Erdogan on December 14, 2018, before President Trump made the momentous announcement in a Tweet on December 19. The decision was so sudden that it prompted the resignation Jim Mattis, then the Secretary of Defense, according to a December 22, 2018, Associated Press report [2].

Another demand Ankara made to Washington was to pressure Saudi Arabia to lift the Saudi-UAE blockade imposed in June 2017 against Qatar, which is ideologically aligned with Turkish President Erdogan’s AKP party as both follow the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.

After the Khashoggi assassination and the international outrage it generated against the Saudi royal family, Riyadh tried to assuage Doha and invited Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani to attend the Gulf Cooperation Council summit in Riyadh on December 10, 2018, though Doha snubbed the goodwill gesture by sending a low-ranking official to the meeting.

In return for the generous favors, Trump got the most coveted feather in his cap as Turkey let US Special Forces kill fugitive leader of the Islamic State weeks after the Turkish Operation Peace Spring in northeast Syria in October last year.

It’s important to note in the news coverage of the killing of al-Baghdadi that although the mainstream media had been trumpeting for the last several years that the Islamic State’s fugitive chief had been hiding somewhere on the Iraq-Syria border in the east, he was found hiding in the northwestern Idlib governorate, under the control of Turkey’s militant proxies and al-Nusra Front, and was killed while trying to flee to Turkey in Barisha village five kilometers from the border.

The morning after the night raid, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported [3] on Sunday, October 27, that a squadron of eight helicopters accompanied by warplanes belonging to the international coalition had attacked positions of Hurras al-Din, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, in Idlib province where the Islamic State chief was believed to be hiding.

According to “official version” [4] of Washington’s story regarding the killing of al-Baghdadi, the choppers took off from an American airbase in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, flew hundreds of miles over the enemy territory in the airspace controlled by the Syrian and Russian air forces, killed the self-proclaimed “caliph” of the Islamic State in a Hollywood-style special-ops raid, and took the same route back to Erbil along with the dead body of the terrorist and his belongings.

Although Washington has conducted several airstrikes in Syria’s Idlib in the past, those were carried out by fixed-wing aircraft that fly at high altitudes, and the aircraft took off from American airbases in Turkey, which is just across the border from Syria’s northwestern Idlib province. Why would Washington take the risk of flying its troops at low altitudes in helicopters over the hostile territory controlled by myriads of Syria’s heavily armed militant outfits?

In fact, several Turkish journalists, including Rajip Soylu, the Turkey correspondent for the Middle East Eye, tweeted [5] on the night of the special-ops raid that the choppers took off from the American airbase in Turkey’s Incirlik. As for al-Baghdadi, who was "hiding" with the blessing of Turkey, it is now obvious that he was the bargaining chip in the negotiations between Trump and Erdogan, and the quid for the US president's agreeing to pull out of Syria was the pro quo that Erdogan would hand Baghdadi to him on a platter.

Citations:

[1] Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Crown Prince:

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-woodward-i-saved-his-ass-mbs-khashoggi-rage-2020-9

[2] Trump call with Turkish leader led to US pullout from Syria:

https://apnews.com/ec2ed217357048ff998225a31534df12

[3] Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed in US raid:

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/isis-leader-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-targeted-us-raid-officials

[4] Official story of the night raid killing al-Baghdadi:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/us/politics/baghdadi-isis-leader-trump.html

[5] Trump Confirms ISIS Leader Al-Baghdadi Killed In US Raid:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/trump-make-statement-after-isis-chief-al-baghdadi-killed-turkish-border-while-fleeing 

Donald Trump: The Frenemy of the Islamic World

In the Republican primaries of the 2016 US presidential elections, Mitt Romney severely castigated Trump, calling him a phony and a fraud. When Trump was elected president, he dangled the carrot of the secretary of state appointment to Romney, invited him to a dinner in an upscale New York restaurant, made him eat his words and fawn all over Trump like a servile toady. But later, he gave the second most coveted appointment in the US bureaucratic hierarchy to oil executive Rex Tillerson.

Romney felt humiliated to the extent that in Trump’s vulnerable moment, when impeachment proceedings were initiated against him in the Senate in February, Romney became the only US senator in the American political history who voted against his own Republican Party president.

Trump is a typical Shylock of the Wall Street belonging to the American libertarian movement. Though his alt-right agenda has been scuttled by the deep state, his views regarding global politics and economics are markedly different from the establishment Democrats and Republicans pursuing neocolonial world order masqueraded as globalization and free trade.

Besides the admission that Trump knew coronavirus was deadly yet he deliberately downplayed the outbreak, Bob Woodward has made several other startling revelations [1] in his book “Rage” set to be released on September 15.

President Donald Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from congressional scrutiny after the brutal assassination of Saudi dissident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was brutally murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

"I saved his ass," Trump said in 2018, according to the book. "I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop."

When Woodward pressed Trump if he believed the Saudi crown prince ordered the assassination himself, Trump responded: "He says very strongly that he didn't do it. Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time," Trump said.

"And you know, they're in the Middle East. You know, they're big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have the real power. They have the oil, but they also have the great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion," the president noted. "They wouldn't last a week if we're not there, and they know it," he added.

Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Trump for his fairly accurate interpretation of the Middle East’s politics and pragmatic relations of the business world. $400 billion he alluded to was likely the unprecedented arms package he availed for the US defense production industry during his maiden overseas visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017.

By virtue of their physical possession of the holy places of Islam – Mecca and Medina – the Saudi kings are the de facto caliphs of Muslims. The title of the Saudi king: “Khadim-ul-Haramain-al-Shareefain” (the servant of the house of God), makes him the vicegerent of God on Earth; and the title of the caliph of Muslims is not limited to a single nation state, the Saudi king wields enormous influence throughout the commonwealth of Islam, the Muslim Ummah.

The Shia Muslims have their Imams and Ayatollahs (religious authorities), but it is generally assumed about Sunni Islam that it discourages the authority of clergy. In this sense, Sunni Islam is closer to Protestantism, at least theoretically, because it prefers an individual and personalized interpretation of scriptures and religion. Although this perception might be true for educated Sunni Muslims, on the popular level of the masses of developing Islamic countries, the House of Saud plays the same role in Sunni Islam that the pope plays in Catholicism.

Left to their own resources, the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies lack the manpower, the military technology and the moral authority to rule over forcefully suppressed and disenfranchised Arab masses, not only the Arab masses but also the South Asian and North African immigrants of the Gulf states. One-third of the Saudi Arabian population is composed of immigrants. Similarly, more than 75% of UAE’s population is also comprised of expats from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka.

The rest of the Gulf States, including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, also have a similar proportion of immigrant workers from the developing countries. Unlike the immigrants of the Western countries, however, who hold the citizenship status, the Gulf’s immigrants have lived there for decades and sometimes for generations, and they are still regarded as unentitled foreigners.

Seemingly, the Western powers support the Gulf’s autocrats because it has been a firm policy principle of the Western powers to promote “political stability” in the energy-rich Middle East instead of representative democracy. They are mindful of the ground reality that the mainstream Muslim sentiment is firmly against Western military presence and intervention in the Middle East region.

In addition, the Western policymakers also prefer to deal with small cliques of Middle Eastern strongmen rather than cultivating a complex and uncertain relationship on a popular level of the masses of the Middle East, certainly a myopic approach which is the hallmark of so-called pragmatic politicians and statesmen.

In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab States by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf’s petro-sheikhs contribute substantial investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies in the time of global recession when most manufacturing has outsourced to China.

All the recent wars and conflicts aside, the unholy alliance between the Western powers and the Wahhabi-Salafis of the Gulf petro-monarchies is much older. The British stirred up uprising in Arabia by instigating the Sharifs of Mecca to rebel against the Ottoman rule during the First World War.

After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the British Empire backed King Abdul Aziz (Ibn-e-Saud) in his struggle against the Sharif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali because he was demanding too much of a price for his loyalty, the unification of the whole of Arabia, including the Arabian peninsula, Levant, Iraq and the Gulf Emirates, under his suzerainty as a price for rebelling against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.

As a consequence, Western powers dumped him, imposed Sykes-Picot Agreement dividing Arabs into small states at loggerheads with each other, and lent their support to nomadic Sauds of Najd. King Abdul Aziz defeated the Sharifs and united his dominions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 with the support of the British. However, by then the tide of British Imperialism was subsiding and the Americans inherited the former possessions and the rights and liabilities of the British Empire.

At the end of the Second World War on 14 February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a historic meeting with King Abdul Aziz at Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal onboard USS Quincy, and laid the foundations of an enduring alliance which persists to this day. During the course of that momentous Great Bitter Lake meeting, among other things, it was decided to set up the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to Saudi Arabia to “train, advise and assist” the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces. 

Aside from USMTM, the US-based Vinnell Corporation, which is a private military company based in the US and a subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman, used over a thousand Vietnam War veterans to train and equip 125,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guards (SANG) which is not under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and acts as the Praetorian Guards of the House of Saud.

In addition, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Force, whose strength is numbered in tens of thousands, is also being trained and equipped by the US to guard the critical Saudi oil infrastructure along its eastern Persian Gulf coast where 90% of 266 billion barrels Saudi oil reserves are located.

Furthermore, the US has deployed tens of thousands of American troops in aircraft carriers and numerous military bases in the Persian Gulf that include al-Dhafra airbase in Abu Dhabi, al-Udeid airbase in Qatar and a naval base in Bahrain where the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy is based.

Citations:

[1] Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Crown Prince:

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-woodward-i-saved-his-ass-mbs-khashoggi-rage-2020-9 

Reality Check: Is Trump a Stooge of Putin?

Donald Trump’s unorthodox approach to the conduct of diplomatic relations has been a persistent thorn in the side of America’s national security establishment for the last four years. Like a typical American, he regards America’s allies, like Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau, as subordinates beholden to him personally; whereas he treats adversaries, such as Russian President Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, as independent leaders deserving equal treatment and respect.

The conspiracy theories perpetuated by the establishment-controlled media that Trump is Putin’s stooge and alleged Russian interference in America’s domestic politics are brazen fabrications.

Russian netizens indeed lent moral support to the Trump campaign in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential race but simply because they despised Hillary Clinton, who the Russians regarded as an interventionist hawk responsible for initiating proxy wars in Libya and Syria in 2011 as Obama’s secretary of state, and also because she was the wife of Bill Clinton who was responsible for the break-up of former Yugoslavia in the nineties.

Despite the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary by a margin of 2.87 million votes. Had it not been for the archaic electoral college system and James Comey, then the director of FBI, opening last-minute investigation into Hillary Clinton using personal computers for official communications, Hillary was the favorite to win the elections.

According to Washington’s own intelligence estimates, three powers are currently vying for interference in upcoming presidential elections slated for November 3. Two of those, China and Iran, favor Joe Biden because Trump initiated trade war with China and cancelled Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, whereas Russia allegedly supports Trump.

Trump is a conservative, and it’s a known empirical observation that conservatives typically are considerably more patriotic than liberals. Collaborating with foreign powers to undermine one’s national interest doesn’t appeal to the conservative mindset. Throughout its four-year tenure, the Trump administration has continued with the policy of its predecessors. If anything, diplomatic relations between Washington and Moscow have significantly worsened during Trump’s tenure.

In Syria, for instance, the Trump administration has continued with the policy of its predecessor Obama administration. In order to understand the backdrop of the proxy war in Syria, when Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional clients were on the verge of drawing a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government.

With the help of the Russian air power, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional clients.

Moreover, several momentous events have taken place in the Syrian theater of proxy wars and on the global stage that have further soured the diplomatic relations between Moscow and Washington.

On February 7, 2018, the US B-52 bombers and Apache helicopters struck a contingent of Syrian government troops and allied forces in Deir al-Zor province of eastern Syria that reportedly [1] killed and wounded scores of Russian military contractors working for the Russian private security firm, the Wagner Group.

The survivors described the bombing as an absolute massacre, and Moscow lost more Russian nationals in one day than it had lost during its entire military campaign in support of the Syrian government since September 2015.

Washington’s objective in striking Russian contractors was that the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – which is mainly comprised of Kurdish YPG militias – had reportedly handed over the control of some areas east of the Euphrates River to Deir al-Zor Military Council (DMC), which was the Arab-led component of SDF, and had relocated several battalions of Kurdish YPG militias to Afrin and along Syria’s northern border with Turkey in order to defend the Kurdish-held areas against the onslaught of the Turkish armed forces and allied Syrian militant proxies during Ankara’s “Operation Olive Branch” in Syria’s northwest that lasted from January to March 2018.

Syrian forces with the backing of Russian contractors took advantage of the opportunity and crossed the Euphrates River to capture an oil refinery located to the east of the Euphrates River in the Kurdish-held area of Deir al-Zor.

The US Air Force responded with full force, knowing well the ragtag Arab component of SDF – mainly comprised of local Arab tribesmen and mercenaries to make the Kurdish-led SDF appear more representative and inclusive in outlook – was simply not a match for the superior training and arms of the Syrian troops and Russian military contractors, consequently causing a carnage in which scores of Russian nationals lost their lives.

Two months later, an alleged chemical weapons attack took place in Douma, Syria, on April 7, 2018, and Donald Trump ordered a cruise missile strike in Syria on April 14, 2018, in collaboration with the Theresa May government in the UK and the Emmanuel Macron administration in France. The strike took place little over a year after a similar cruise missile strike on al-Shayrat airfield on April 6, 2017, after an alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun, though both cruise missile strikes didn’t accomplish anything and were nothing more than a show of force.

But the fact that out of 105 total cruise missiles deployed in the April 14, 2018, strikes against a military research facility in the Barzeh district of Damascus and two alleged chemical weapons storage facilities in Homs, 85 were launched by the US, 12 by the French and 8 by the UK aircraft demonstrated the unified resolve of the Western powers against Russia.

It bears mentioning that the American air and missile strikes in Syria are not only illegal under the international law but are also unlawful according to the American laws. While striking the Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, Washington availed itself of the war on terror provisions in the US laws, known as the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), but those laws do not give the president the power to order strikes against the Syrian government targets without prior approval of the US Congress which has the sole authority to declare war.

The Intercept reported last year [2] that the Trump administration had derived the authority to strike the Syrian government targets based on a “top secret” memorandum of the Office of Legal Counsel that even the US Congress couldn’t see. Complying with the norms of transparency and the rule of law were never the strong points of the American democracy but the Trump administration has done away with even the pretense of accountability and checks and balances in the conduct of international relations.

Moreover, over the years, Israel has not only provided medical aid and material support to the militant groups battling Damascus – particularly to various factions of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in Daraa and Quneitra bordering the Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s air force has virtually played the role of the air force of Syrian militants and conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the eight-year conflict.

In an interview to New York Times [3] in January last year, Israel’s outgoing Chief of Staff Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot confessed that the Netanyahu government approved his shift in strategy in January 2017 to step up airstrikes in Syria. Consequently, more than 200 Israeli airstrikes were launched against the Syrian targets in 2017 and 2018, as revealed [4] by the Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz in September 2018.

In 2018 alone, Israel's air force dropped 2,000 bombs in Syria. The purpose of Israeli airstrikes in Syria has been to degrade Iran’s guided missile technology provided to Damascus and its Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, which poses an existential threat to Israel’s regional security.

Though after Russia provided S-300 missile system to the Syrian military after a Russian surveillance aircraft was shot down by Syrian air defenses during an Israeli incursion into the Syrian airspace, on September 2018, killing 15 Russians onboard, the Israeli airstrikes in Syria have been significantly scaled down.

Following the incident, though Israel has conducted occasional airstrikes in Daraa and Quneitra in southern Syria and Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria, Israeli airstrikes in northwest Syria, which is within the range of missile defense systems deployed at Hmeimim Air Base near coastal Latakia, have almost entirely ceased.

Taking cover of the Israeli airstrikes, Washington has conducted several airstrikes of its own on targets in Syria and Iraq and blamed them on Israel, which frequently mounts air and missile strikes against Iranian operatives and Hezbollah militia in Syria and Lebanon.

Besides the airstrikes on the missile storage facilities of Iran-backed militias in Iraq, it is suspected that the US air force was also behind an airstrike last year at the newly built Imam Ali military base in eastern Syria at al-Bukamal-Qaim border crossing alleged to be hosting the Iranian Quds Force operatives. 

In the nutshell, if Trump is a stooge of Putin, he must be the most ingrate and treacherous stooge who has stabbed his benefactor in the back.

Citations:

[1] Russian toll in Syria battle was 300 killed and wounded:

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-mideast-crisis-syria-russia-casualtie/russian-toll-in-syria-battle-was-300-killed-and-wounded-sources-idUKKCN1FZ2EI

[2] Donald Trump ordered Syria strike based on a secret legal justification even Congress can’t see:

https://theintercept.com/2018/04/14/donald-trump-ordered-syria-strike-based-on-a-secret-legal-justification-even-congress-cant-see/

[3] An interview with Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s chief of staff:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/opinion/gadi-eisenkot-israel-iran-syria.html

[4] Israel Katz: Israel conducted 200 airstrikes in Syria in 2017 and 2018:

https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/benjamin-netanyahu-admits-israel-to-blame-for-damascus-strikes-1.812590 

Alexey Navalny, Novichok and Western Psy-ops

Novichok must be the most cryptic and deceptive chemical placebo ever developed by the erstwhile super-power that exploded the world’s largest 50 megaton Tsar Bomba in its heyday in the 1960s, because victims infected by it create an ephemeral stir across international media lasting a few days, recover within weeks and are never heard about again.

Globally renowned Putin-critic, albeit lacking a significant political constituency in Russia itself, Alexey Navalny was hastily transported out of Siberia to Berlin on August 22 after he fell ill due to the suspected poisoning of his tea. He had been in a medically induced coma since he had arrived in Germany.

A week later, on September 2, German Chancellor Angela Merkel anxiously announced Navalny had been poisoned with the Cold War-era nerve agent Novichok. Mainstream media’s credulous sheeple were pondering over stately funeral arrangements and the likely place for a shrine where the illustrious anti-communist crusader would be buried.

But in a dramatic turn of events yesterday, September 7, the German officials gleefully announced Navalny was out of coma and was responding well to verbal and visual stimuli, as he was found lewdly staring at voluptuous German nurses. That’s one of the adverse effects of Novichok as it is known to produce aphrodisiac responses like the other drugs in the group of nerve agents that includes Viagra and Cialis.

Sarcasm aside, Novichok is the same group of nerve agents that was used on the Russian former spy Sergei Skripal, who was attacked in Britain two years ago.

On March 4, 2018, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury.

A few months later, in July 2018, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after touching the container of the nerve agent that allegedly poisoned the Skripals, though it is contested if she ever came in contact with Novichok. Because what sort of a dopey secret agent would casually discard a bottle of nerve agent that allegedly looked like a perfume bottle in a public park, where a British lady would pick it up and spray it on herself to check out the fragrance? Instead of high-budget spy thriller, that sounds like a made-up cock and bull story.

Nevertheless, in the case of the Skripals, Theresa May, then the prime minister of the United Kingdom, promptly accused Russia of attempted assassinations and the British government concluded that Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade nerve agent, Novichok.

Sergei Skripal was recruited by the British MI6 in 1995, and before his arrest in Russia in December 2004, he was alleged to have blown the cover of scores of Russian secret agents. He was released in a spy swap deal in 2010 and was allowed to settle in Salisbury. Both Sergei Skripal and his daughter have since recovered and were discharged from hospital in May 2018.

The only plausible explanation for the media hype surrounding the poisoning of the Skripals and Navalny appears to be that Western powers want to impose economic sanctions on Russia and, as usual, the mainstream media has been tasked with the responsibility to create public opinion for the impending international isolation of Russia.

On the subject of economic sanctions, it’s an evident fact that neocolonial powers are ruled by behemoth corporations whose wealth is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, far more than the total GDP of many developing nations. The status of these multinational corporations as dominant players in international politics gets official imprimatur when the Western governments endorse the congressional lobbying practice of so-called “special interest” groups, which is a euphemism for corporate interests.

Since the Western governments are nothing but the mouthpiece of business interests on international political and economic forums, therefore any national or international entity which hinders or opposes the agenda of corporate interests is either coerced into accepting their demands or gets sidelined.

In 2013, the Manmohan Singh’s government of India had certain objections to further opening up to the Western businesses. The Business Roundtable, which is an informal congregation of major US businesses and together holds a net wealth of $6 trillion, held a meeting with the representatives of the Indian government and literally coerced it into accepting unfair demands of the Western corporations.

The developing economies are always hungry for foreign direct investment (FDI) to sustain economic growth, and this investment mostly comes from the Western corporations. When the Business Roundtables or the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) form pressure groups and engage in “collective bargaining” activities, the nascent and fragile developing economies don’t have a choice but to toe their line.

State sovereignty, that sovereign nation states are at liberty to pursue independent policies, particularly economic and trade policies, is a myth. Just like the ruling elites of the developing countries which maintain a stranglehold and monopoly over domestic politics; similarly, the neocolonial powers and multinational corporations control international politics and the global economic order.

Any state in the international arena which dares to transgress the trade and economic policies laid down by neocolonial powers and multinational corporations becomes an international pariah like Castro’s Cuba, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Ayatollah’s Iran, or more recently, Maduro’s Venezuela.

Venezuela has one of the largest known oil reserves in the world. Even though the mainstream media’s pundits hold the socialist policies of President Nicolas Maduro responsible for economic mismanagement in Venezuela, fact of the matter is that hyperinflation in its economy is the effect of US sanctions against Venezuela which have been put in place since the time of late President Hugo Chavez.

Another case in point is Iran which was cut off from the global economic system from 2006 to 2015, and then again after May 2018 when American President Donald Trump unilaterally annulled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), because of Iran’s supposed nuclear ambitions. Good for Iran that it also has one of the largest oil and gas resources, otherwise it would have been insolvent by now.

Such is the power of Washington-led global financial system, especially the banking sector, and the significance of petro-dollar, because the global oil transactions are pegged in the US dollars all over the world, and all the major oil bourses are also located in the Western financial districts.

The crippling “third party” economic sanctions on Iran from 2006 to 2015 have brought to the fore the enormous power that the Western financial institutions and the petro-dollar as a global reserve currency wields over the global financial system.

It bears mentioning that the Iranian nuclear negotiations were as much about Iran’s nuclear program as they were about its ballistic missile program, which is an equally dangerous conventional threat to Israel and the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, just across the Persian Gulf.

Despite the sanctions being unfair, Iran felt the heat so much that it remained engaged in negotiations throughout the nearly decade-long period of sanctions, and such was the crippling effect of those “third party” sanctions on Iran’s economy that had it not been for its massive oil and gas reserves, and some Russian, Chinese and Turkish help in illicitly buying Iranian oil, it could have defaulted due to the sanctions.

Notwithstanding, after the brutal assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, and the clear hand of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the murder, certain naïve political commentators of the mainstream media came up with a ludicrous suggestion that Washington should impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia.

As in the case of aforementioned Iran sanctions, sanctioning Saudi Arabia also seems plausible; however, there is a caveat: Iran is only a single oil-rich state which has 160 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day (mbpd) of crude oil.

On the other hand, the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies are actually three oil-rich states. Saudi Arabia with its 266 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and 10 mbpd of daily crude oil production, and UAE and Kuwait with 100 billion barrels of proven reserves, each, and 3 mbpd of daily crude oil production, each. Together, the share of the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) amounts to 466 billion barrels, almost one-third of the world’s 1477 billion barrels of total proven oil reserves. 

Therefore, although imposing economic sanctions on the Gulf States might sound plausible on paper, the relationship between the Gulf’s petro-monarchies and the industrialized world is that of a consumer-supplier relationship. The Gulf States are the suppliers of energy and the industrialized world is its consumer, hence the Western powers cannot sanction their energy suppliers and largest investors.

If anything, the Gulf’s petro-monarchies had “sanctioned” the Western powers in the past by imposing the oil embargo in 1973 after the Arab-Israel War. The 1973 Arab oil embargo against the West lasted only for a short span of six months during which the price of oil quadrupled, but Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on the export of crude oil outside the US borders, and began keeping sixty-day stock of reserve fuel for strategic and military needs.

Are ‘Black Lives Matter’ Protests being Politicized by Democrats?

Race relations is known to be a sensitive issue in the American political discourse, particularly the discrimination against Afro-Americans since the time of Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s has gained special significance not just in America but across the world.

But it’s also a known fact that gun culture and police brutality are quite prevalent in rural America. Every year, hundreds of Americans die at the hands of trigger-happy cops, and a preponderant number of such fatalities are, of course, Afro-Americans, which belong to the lower strata of the stratified capitalist society.

The Democrats, specifically the Clinton and Obama administrations, are as much guilty of not doing enough to curb racial discrimination, gun violence and the use of excessive force by the law enforcement, besides taking cosmetic steps and paying lip service to the critical issues, as the Republican Bush and Trump administrations.

A question needs to be asked, however, that why these consequential issues were not raised during the eight-year tenure of Barack Obama, despite being an Afro-American himself, and also during the first three years of the Trump administration, and why in the run-up to the American presidential elections in November, the mainstream media spotlight has focused on race relations.

Since the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police Department in May, a number of victims’ families have come forward to register their complaints, whose family members suffered police brutality months and, in some cases, years ago.

The family of Daniel Prude, for instance, who died of asphyxiation in March after the New York police put a spit-hood on his face, came forward five months later in September, and the story was immediately picked up by the mainstream media and triumphantly publicized across its gullible viewership.

Clearly, the “Black Lives Matter” protests aren’t spontaneous demonstrations, the family members of the victims of police brutality and community leaders of Afro-Americans across America are being contacted by the Democratic Party whips and being instigated to go public with their stories in the run-up to the US presidential elections in November. It’s not a coincidence that Donald Trump’s ratings are plummeting since the BLM protests broke out in May.

Here let me clarify that I’m not suggesting that race relations is an insignificant issue, but like the abortion debate in the Western discourse, the issue of racial discrimination has been politicized by the vested interests to the extent that instead redressing the grievances of non-white races, it has further polarized the society in which cosmopolitan liberal and rural conservative camps are adopting extreme stances, consequently creating a civil war-like scenario across America simply to make a political rival lose a presidential election.

Using the BLM protests as an electoral stratagem isn’t the first time the mainstream media has unleashed a smear campaign against Donald Trump’s conservative political base. Similarly, in the run-up to the US midterm elections in November 2018, the American media, the Washington Post and New York Times in particular, took the lead in publicizing the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi who was brutally murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

One apparent reason the mainstream media took morbid interest in the gory details of the grisly assassination could be that Khashoggi was a columnist for The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man with $200 billion net worth and the owner of Amazon.

Bezos had a score to settle [1] with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Mohammad bin Salman hacked Bezos’ phone in May 2018 and sent the details of Bezos’ extramarital affair to the National Enquirer in January 2019, leading to Bezos’ wife divorcing him and taking a significant portion of Bezos’ obscene wealth as alimony.

Nevertheless, the Washington Post has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA, as Bezos won a $600 million contract [2] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service. It bears mentioning that despite Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman being primarily responsible for the war in Yemen that has claimed over hundred thousand lives and created a famine in the impoverished country, the mainstream media hailed him as a “moderate reformer” who brought radical reforms to the conservative Saudi society by permitting women to drive and allowing cinemas to screen Hollywood movies.

So what prompted the sudden change of heart in the mainstream media that the purported “moderate reformer” was all of a sudden reviled as a brutal murderer? More than anything, it was the timing of the assassination and the political mileage that could be obtained from the Khashoggi murder in the domestic politics of the United States that prompted the mainstream media to take advantage of the opportunity and mount a smear campaign against the Trump administration by publicizing the assassination.

Jamal Khashoggi was murdered on October 2, 2018, when the US midterm elections in November were only a few weeks away. Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in particular are known to have forged close business relations with the Saudi royal family. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Donald Trump chose Saudi Arabia and Israel for his maiden overseas visit in May 2017.

Thus, the corporate media’s campaign to seek justice for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 was actually a smear campaign against Donald Trump and his conservative political base, which became obvious after the US midterm election results were tallied.

Even though the Republicans retained their 51-seat majority in the Senate, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives following midterms by gaining 39 additional seats and brought impeachment charges against Donald Trump, though he was acquitted by the Republican majority in the Senate.

Clearly, two factors were responsible for the surprising defeat of the Republicans in the US midterm elections. Firstly, the Khashoggi murder and the smear campaign unleashed against the Trump administration by the neoliberal media, which Donald Trump often pejoratively derides as “Fake News” on social media.

Secondly, and more importantly, the parcel bombs sent to the residences of George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, several other Democratic Congressmen and The New York Times New York office by Cesar Sayoc in October, 2018, on the eve of the midterm elections in November.

Although the suspect turned out to be a mentally ill Trump supporter, he was likely instigated by shady hands in the American deep state, which is wary of the anti-establishment rhetoric and non-interventionist tendencies of the so-called “alt-right” administration.

That the accused had a history of mental illness [3], childhood sexual abuse, substance abuse, including anabolic steroids and cognitive difficulties, including dyslexia, doesn’t come as a surprise because it’s always easy to manipulate and trap such gullible patsies into perpetrating heinous crimes.

In fact, the case of Cesar Sayoc can be compared to another iconic “patsy” in the American political history, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy, who was picked up as a scapegoat because he had visited Russia and Cuba before the hit-job in order to put the blame for the high-profile political assassination on the communists.

Not surprisingly, he was silenced by Jack Ruby before he could open his mouth and prove innocence in the courts of law. The cold-blooded murder of the only other non-interventionist American president, besides Donald Trump, was obviously perpetrated by a professional sniper on the payroll of the American deep state.

It was not a coincidence that Kennedy was killed in November 1963, and months later, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized Lyndon B. Johnson to directly engage in the Vietnam conflict in August 1964 on the basis of a false flag naval engagement.

It’s obvious that the American deep state, comprising the State and Defense department bureaucracies, the Democratic and Republican Party establishments and the mainstream media, was responsible for the assassination of Kennedy. Most likely, the deep state turned against Kennedy after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s pacifist rhetoric and conciliatory approach toward Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union, in the backdrop of the Cold War.

Footnotes:

[1] The Saudi heir and the alleged plot to undermine Jeff Bezos:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/21/revealed-the-saudi-heir-and-the-alleged-plot-to-undermine-jeff-bezos

[2] Jeff Bezos Is Doing Huge Business with the CIA, While Keeping His Washington Post Readers in the Dark:

http://www.alternet.org/media/owner-washington-post-doing-business-cia-while-keeping-his-readers-dark

[3] The curious case of Cesar Sayoc:

https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/08/13/inside-the-mind-of-the-maga-bomber-the-trump-superfan-who-tried-to-wreak-havoc-on-the-last-national-election/