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In the aftermath of yesterday’s chemical gas attack in Syria’s Idlib Province, numerous governments – including those that have funded and armed rebels in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian government – have accused the Syrian army of being primarily responsible for the attack, despite no independent confirmation of their claim and no investigation into who was truly responsible for the tragedy. As MintPress recently reported, the only information available regarding the attack so far has come from only two sources: the White Helmets and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Both groups have strong ties to pro-interventionist governments that have armed and funded rebel groups and even have ties to al-Qaeda.

However, pro-interventionist elements in foreign governments and within the Syrian opposition seem disinterested in obtaining valid information, jumping on initial accusations from dubious sources to support long-standing efforts to destabilize and overthrow the Syrian government. Wednesday morning, while media outlets throughout the West ran headlines calling for foreign intervention in Syria with headlines like “We Must Not Look Away,” the Russian Defense Ministry announced a surprising discovery in Khan Sheikhoun the very township where the gas attack took place. Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov publicly stated Wednesday morning that a warehouse in the vicinity of Khan Sheikhoun had been destroyed as part of a Syrian Air Force airstrike conducted midday Tuesday, several hours after the gas attack. According to Konashenkov, the facility produced and stored shells that contained toxic gas, many of which had been delivered to Iraq and repeatedly used there by Daesh militants and other extremists. He also pointed out that the same weapons had been used by foreign-funded rebels in Aleppo in 2016 – a conclusion derived by the analysis of samples taken by Russian military experts. He also stated that the victims of yesterday’s gas attack displayed identical symptoms to those shown by victims of the Aleppo attack. Rebels operating in the area – all of which are allied with the al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham, both al-Qaeda affiliates – have rejected Konashenkov’s claims. Hasan Haj Ali, commander of the al-Nusra affiliate Free Idlib Army rebel group, told Reuters: “all the civilians in the area know that there are no military positions there, or places for the manufacture [of weapons]. The various factions of the opposition are not capable of producing these substances.”

However, it was proven back in 2013 that not only were the rebels capable of producing chemical weapons, but they had used them repeatedly in both Syria and Iraq. For instance, UN officials have confirmed that anti-Assad rebels were responsible for the 2013 sarin gas attack in Ghouta, another attack that was prematurely blamed on the Assad regime. In addition, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh established in his 2014 piece “The Red Line and the Rat Line” that rebels have long had the capacity to carry out chemical weapon attacks and that countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia have supplied them with such weapons. Sria’s government, by contrast, no longer has chemical weapons, a fact established by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The organization confirmed in 2016 that all Syrian government chemical weapons had been destroyed under their supervision per Assad’s affirmation of the International Chemical Weapons Convention three years prior. OPCW’s fact-finding mission, a joint effort with the United Nations, is still active within Syria and has yet to report its findings regarding Tuesday’s attack, according to a statement released Wednesday. In addition, questions have been raised regarding the information that has come from opposition sources regarding the gas attack in Idlib, particularly the now widely-shared images purporting to show victims of yesterday’s attack.

By  Jeff Stein 0 Share Last Thursday, an urgent call went out from CIA headquarters to the spy agency's director, John Brennan, who was giving a speech to a graduating class at The Farm, the CIA's training facility near Williamsburg, Va. Brennan was warned that the Associated Press and The Washington Post were about to publish the results of a long investigation revealing that Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent who had gone missing while "on private business" in Iran six years ago, had actually been working for the CIA. A handful of national security reporters in D.C. had known of Levinson's CIA connection for years but agreed to sit on it, accepting the CIA's rationale that publishing the information could endanger the life of Levinson, who was ostensibly pursuing an investigation of cigarette smuggling for a private client when he went missing on Iran's Kish Island in March 2007. Levinson was thought to be in Iranian hands. On Thursday morning, the entreaties of lower ranking CIA officials to the AP and Washington Post not to publish the story were rebuffed. Other high-ranking Obama administration officials, including White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, as well as FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, made the same argument to the reporters and their editors. By the time Brennan got his warning from headquarters, however, it was too late to for him to make an appeal. The story, by the AP's Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, who had recently left AP to join The Washington Post, was online.

Back in 2011, Julian Assange met up with Eric Schmidt for an interview that he considers the best he’s ever given. That doesn’t change, however, the opinion he now has about Schmidt and the company he represents, Google.In fact, the WikiLeaks leader doesn’t believe in the famous “Don’t Be Evil” mantra that Google has been preaching for years.Assange thinks both Schmidt and Google are at the exact opposite spectrum.“Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity,” Assange writes in an opinion piece for Newsweek.

“Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). And even as Schmidt’s Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community,” Assange continues.Throughout the lengthy article, Assange goes on to explain how the 2011 meeting came to be and talks about the people the Google executive chairman brought along - Lisa Shields, then vice president of the Council on Foreign Relationship, Jared Cohen, who would later become the director of Google Ideas, and Scott Malcomson, the book’s editor, who would later become the speechwriter and principal advisor to Susan Rice.“At this point, the delegation was one part Google, three parts US foreign-policy establishment, but I was still none the wiser.” Assange goes on to explain the work Cohen was doing for the government prior to his appointment at Google and just how Schmidt himself plays a bigger role than previously thought.In fact, he says that his original image of Schmidt, as a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, “a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast,” was wrong.

However, Assange concedes that that is not the sort of person who attends Bilderberg conferences, who regularly visits the White House, and who delivers speeches at the Davos Economic Forum.He claims that Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s “foreign minister” did not come out of nowhere, but it was “presaged by years of assimilation within US establishment networks of reputation and influence.” Assange makes further accusations that, well before Prism had even been dreamed of, the NSA was already systematically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act under its director at the time, Michael Hayden. He states, however, that during the same period, namely around 2003, Google was accepting NSA money to provide the agency with search tools for its rapidly-growing database of information.Assange continues by saying that in 2008, Google helped launch the NGA spy satellite, the GeoEye-1, into space and that the search giant shares the photographs from the satellite with the US military and intelligence communities. Later on, 2010, after the Chinese government was accused of hacking Google, the company entered into a “formal information-sharing” relationship with the NSA, which would allow the NSA’s experts to evaluate the vulnerabilities in Google’s hardware and software.

Russia ramped up its calls for the U.S. military to depart from Syria on Thursday, contending it has no substantial reasons to be in the country and its presence there "must end."“Any reasons cited by the Americans to justify their further military presence... are just excuses and we think their presence must end," Alexander Lavrentiev, Russian President Vladimir Putin's envoy to Syria, told reporters. Lavrentiev was in Astana, Kazakhstan, on Thursday ahead of peace talks regarding the Syria conflict between Russia, Iran and Turkey, Reuters reports. Russia, a major ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has played a significant role in the Syria conflict. 

This is not the first time the Russian government has expressed such views in recent weeks. Russia seemingly feels the U.S. military has no purpose in Syria now that the the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has largely lost its foothold in Syria and Iraq. The envoy's remarks also come after the U.S. and Russia have sparred over airspace in Syria. In mid-December, two U.S. warplanes in Syria were diverted from supporting ground operations against ISIS to intercept Russian fighter jets that allegedly crossed into U.S. coalition airspace. But the Pentagon has signified it has no plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria any time in the near future. "We are going to maintain our commitment on the ground as long as we need to, to support our partners and prevent the return of terrorist groups," Pentagon spokesperson Eric Pahon told Agence France-Presse earlier this month. "To ensure an enduring defeat of ISIS, the coalition must ensure it cannot regenerate, reclaim lost ground or plot external attacks," he added. There are currently nearly 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria, according to numbers from the Pentagon. Since the Syrian conflict began in 2011, it has claimed more than 400,000 lives, according to the U.N., and contributed to the worst refugee crisis since World War II. 

You may recall, from the dark days of Abu Ghraib, that there was a batch of photos that was never released—images the Pentagon deemed so inflammatory that they needed to stay under wraps. The ones we saw were disturbing enough: the piles of naked Iraqi prisoners, the soldier giving a thumbs up next to an ice-packed corpse, the prisoners being menaced by dogs. And who can forget that iconic shot of a hooded man (his name is Ali Shalil Qaissi), standing on a box in a shower with wires attached to his fingers—a mock execution. There are as many as 2,100 additional images, according to the ACLU, which sued the government in 2004 demanding their release. President Obama has resisted the legal efforts, noting in a statement that to make the photos public would "impact the safety of our troops." Newsweek's Lauren Walker nicely summarizes the developments so far, some of which my colleague Nick Baumann has also covered, so here's the upshot: In August, a federal judge gave the administration an ultimatum: either release the photos or provide evidence for each image explaining why publishing it would be detrimental to national security. On December 19, the administration indicated that it would take the latter course, and a hearing on the new evidence has been set for January 20.

Because the concealed images, the ACLU told Newsweek, aren't simply more examples of abuse: "One of the reasons we’ve been fighting for so long for these photographs is because the official narrative following the disclosure of the Abu Ghraib photos was that those abuses were the result of a few bad apples," says Alex Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney working on the case since 2005. "These photographs come from at least seven different detention facilities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq.... We think this would once and for all end the myth that the abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib was an aberration," he says. "It was essentially official policy. It was widespread at different facilities under different commanders."

Consider this exchange between Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo and former Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, who got an eight-year prison sentence for his role in the Abu Ghraib horrorshow. (He was the guy who staged the mock execution.) The interview is from Zimbardo's 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect, which is about how good people placed in bad situations end up doing abhorrent things.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that Israeli forces operate in Syria from “time to time.” It is the first public recognition of Israel’s military involvement in its neighboring war-torn country. The Israeli leader said that forces carry out operations to prevent weapons transfers to Lebanon, where Iranian-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah—which went to war with Israel in 2006—operates, and to stop southern Syria becoming a front against Israel. "We operate in Syria from time to time to prevent it from becoming a front against us, a second terror front against us," Netanyahu said at the Galilee Conference in the northern Israeli city of Acre, the Associated Press reported.

He added: "We are also acting of course to prevent the transfer of deadly weapons from Syria to Lebanon in particular and we will continue to do so.” Netanyahu did not elaborate further on Israeli operations in Syrian territory but Israeli forces have carried out airstrikes against a number of regime targets this year and have also attacked Hezbollah fighters—allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad— operating on its border. Israeli intelligence service Mossad has also been linked with the 2008 assassination of top Hezbollah commander Imad Mugniyah in Damascus. Other Israeli strikes in Syrian territory have been widely reported since the onset of the Syrian civil war in March 2011. The Israeli military acknowledged this year’s strikes but Israeli officials have never publicly admitted to the country’s involvement within Syrian territory.

Whatever happened to honor among thieves? When the National Security Agency was caught eavesdropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, it was considered a rude way to treat a friend. Now U.S. intelligence officials are saying—albeit very quietly, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill—that our Israeli “friends” have gone too far with their spying operations here. According to classified briefings on legislation that would lower visa restrictions on Israeli citizens, Jerusalem’s efforts to steal U.S. secrets under the cover of trade missions and joint defense technology contracts have “crossed red lines.”  Israel’s espionage activities in America are unrivaled and unseemly, counterspies have told members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees, going far beyond activities by other close allies, such as Germany, France, the U.K. and Japan. A congressional staffer familiar with a briefing last January called the testimony “very sobering…alarming…even terrifying.” Another staffer called it “damaging.”  The Jewish state’s primary target: America’s industrial and technical secrets. 

“No other country close to the United States continues to cross the line on espionage like the Israelis do,” said a former congressional staffer who attended another classified briefing in late 2013, one of several in recent months given by officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the State Department, the FBI and the National Counterintelligence Directorate. 

“I don’t think anyone was surprised by these revelations,” the former aide said. “But when you step back and hear…that there are no other countries taking advantage of our security relationship the way the Israelis are for espionage purposes, it is quite shocking. I mean, it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that after all the hand-wringing over [Jonathan] Pollard, it’s still going on.” Israel and pro-Israel groups in America have long lobbied U.S. administrations to free Pollard, a former U.S. naval intelligence analyst serving a life sentence since 1987 for stealing tens of thousands of secrets for Israel. (U.S. counterintelligence officials suspect that Israel traded some of the Cold War-era information to Moscow in exchange for the emigration of Russian Jews.) After denying for over a decade that Pollard was its paid agent, Israel apologized and promised not to spy on U.S. soil again. Since then, more Israeli spies have been arrested and convicted by U.S. courts. 

An FBI special agent who lost his job in 2008 told Newsweek columnist Jeff Stein his story about how the 9/11 hijackers slipped through the cracks at the FBI and CIA more than a decade ago. Mark Rossini said the CIA prevented him from going to FBI headquarters with the information that two known terrorists, who later went on to carry out the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, had entered the US. Government reports on 9/11 blame a vague "intelligence failure" for the terrorist attack that killed about 3,000 people in 2001 and provide little clarity on why the CIA didn't communicate crucial information about the hijackers to the FBI. This information, in theory, could have helped the US to prevent the attacks.

Rossini said that after 9/11, when congressional investigators started asking him questions about his work with the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit, he and another FBI agent stayed quiet at the direction of CIA officers. "It was just understood in the office that they were not to be trusted, that [the congressional investigators] were trying to pin this on someone, that they were trying to put someone in jail," Rossini told Newsweek. "They said [the investigators] weren’t authorized to know what was going on operationally. … When we were interviewed, the CIA had a person in the room, monitoring us." He eventually told the FBI in 2004 about what happened. He said he regrets obeying CIA orders and not going to FBI headquarters with the information that Khalid al-Mihdhar, who would go on to hijack one of the planes used in the 9/11 attack, was in the country. The CIA had been tracking al-Mihdhar for some time already. It wasn't until the agency lost track of him and another future hijacker, Nawaf al-Hazmi, in the summer of 2001 that the CIA went to the FBI with the information that the terrorists were in the US.

Rossini pointed out that al-Mihdhar was "a known terrorist that [the CIA] follows around the globe. He’s a subject of several cables, he comes to America ... and they allow him to leave America and go back to Yemen for the birth of his baby. And he comes back." If it was the CIA's plan to recruit al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, as former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke has suggested, it obviously did not work. A few months after the CIA lost track of the two terrorists, the 9/11 attacks were carried out. The US still doesn't have an official explanation as to why CIA officers forbade Rossini from going to FBI headquarters with the information about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Several top government officials have gone on the record with doubts about the CIA's version of events leading up to 9/11.

A US-led raid on the compound housing the Islamic State’s ‘chief financial officer’ produced evidence that Turkish officials directly dealt with ranking ISIS members, Martin Chulov ofthe Guardian reported recently. Islamic State official Abu Sayyaf was responsible for directing the terror army’s oil and gas operations in Syria. Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) earns up to $US10 million per month selling oil on black markets. Documents and flash drives seized during the Sayyaf raid reportedly revealed links “so clear” and “undeniable” between Turkey and ISIS “that they could end up having profound policy implications for the relationship between us and Ankara,” a senior western official familiar with the captured intelligence told the Guardian. NATO member Turkey has long been accused by experts, Kurds, and even Joe Biden of enabling ISIS by turning a blind eye to the vast smuggling networks of weapons and fighters during the ongoing Syrian war.

The move by the ruling AKP party was apparently part of ongoing attempts to trigger the downfall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Ankara officially ended its loose border policy last year, but not before its southern frontier became a transit point for cheap oil, weapons, foreign fighters, and pillaged antiquities.

In November, a former ISIS member told Newsweek that the group was essentially given free reign by Turkey’s army. “ISIS commanders told us to fear nothing at all because there was full cooperation with the Turks,” the fighter said. “ISIS saw the Turkish army as its ally especially when it came to attacking the Kurds in Syria.” But as the alleged arrangements progressed, Turkey allowed the group to establish a major presence within the country — and created a huge problem for itself. “The longer this has persisted, the more difficult it has become for the Turks to crack down [on ISIS] because there is the risk of a counter strike, of blowback,” Jonathan Schanzer, a former counterterrorism analyst for the US Treasury Department, explained to Business Insider in November. “You have a lot of people now that are invested in the business of extremism in Turkey,” Schanzer added. “If you start to challenge that, it raises significant questions of whether” the militants, their benefactors, and other war profiteers would tolerate the crackdown.

The announcement today by Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman at the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, that the Trump administration warned Israel that imposing sovereignty over the West Bank would cause an “immediate crisis” between the U.S. and Israel, is spreading like wildfire. Newsweek reported the warning pointed to “a red line for the Trump administration in its relationship with the Israeli government”: “We received a direct message… imposing Israeli sovereignty [on the West Bank] would mean an immediate crisis with the new administration,” Lieberman told the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “The coalition should clearly state that there is no intention to impose [Israeli] sovereignty.” The warning came after Likud KM Miki Zohar, who advocates annexation, stated on Israeli television Channel i24 last night that the two state solution was “dead” and Palestinians, while not having full citizenship, would nonetheless enjoy rights like every citizen, except for the right to vote for the Knesset — unless they serve in the army or to “serve the country” which he hastened to assure viewers they would not do. Lieberman noted he’d been getting calls from “all of the world wanting to know if this is the position of the coalition,” continuing, “[W]e need to separate from the Palestinians and not to integrate them. The decision to annex Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] would mean the integration of 2.7 million Palestinians in Israel.” Rather confusing messaging from the Trump administration. Just last month Trump said he’d be “happy” with a one state solution “if Israel and the Palestinians are happy”. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley later walked that back, saying that the policy was still, two-state solution. Maybe Trump heard Palestinians are not happy. We may be hearing more on this latest development soon as Lieberman is due to meet with top U.S. administration officials this week in Washington.

August 24, 2017 (Tony Cartalucci - LD) - US policymakers have recently announced plans to hand over control of the Syrian city of Raqqa to former Islamic State (ISIS)-affiliated officials, Newsweek would report.

In its article, "Syria: Arab Tribes Who Once Supported ISIS Turn to U.S. As Endgame Being In Raqqa," Newsweek reports: A top U.S. diplomat in the fight against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has praised recent talks with Syrian tribal leaders slated to play a large role in governing Raqqa once the jihadis are expelled. But the plan to create a careful balance of local power on the ground in Raqqa that will likely see former ISIS-affiliated officials ultimately in charge could cause a split between the U.S. and its Kurdish allies. What appears to be ill-conceived policy is in fact the United States providing direct military protection to the remnants of terrorist organizations operating in Syria it has supported, including fighters of the so-called "Islamic State." With other foreign-backed terrorist organizations facing collapse in strongholds including Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria - fighters funded, armed, and operating on behalf of foreign interests, including Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and even the Islamic State itself - will either need to flee the country back behind the borders of  their state sponsors - Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey - or find a safe haven in Syrian territory illegally occupied by the United States and its allies.

The northern city of Idlib is another admittedly Al Qaeda-controlled city the US and its allies are still flooding with torrents of aid, supplies, weapons, and equipment. Idlib and Raqqa will form the remaining footholds of foreign-sponsored violence in Syria until Syria and its allies encircle and cut them off, making effective destabilization from either city difficult if not impossible. In an effort to blunt Syria's gaining momentum, US-ally and proxy Israel has recently threatened war with Iran if it does not remove its forces from neighboring Syria. Iran and Russia have played a key role in preserving the territorial integrity of Syria and allowing the government in Damascus to restore order to the nation's most populous centers.

On June 19, 2013, US President Obama, hoping to raise himself above the developing National Security Agency (NSA) spy scandals, sought to associate himself with two iconic speeches made at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Fifty years ago, President John F. Kennedy pledged: "Ich bin ein Berliner." In 1987, President Ronald Reagan challenged: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Obama's speech was delivered to a relatively small, specially selected audience of invitees. Even so, Obama spoke from behind bullet proof glass.

I thought about that March night as the election results rolled in, as the New York Times forecast showed Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency plummet from about 80% to less than 5%, while Trump’s fortunes skyrocketed by the minute. As Clinton’s future in the Oval Office evaporated, leaving only a whiff of her stale dreams, I saw all the foreign-policy certainties, all the hawkish policies and military interventions, all the would-be bin Laden raids and drone strikes she’d preside over as commander-in-chief similarly vanish into the ether. With her failed candidacy went the no-fly escalation in Syria that she was sure to pursue as president with the vigor she had applied to the disastrous Libyan intervention of 2011 while secretary of state.  So, too, went her continued pursuit of the now-nameless war on terror, the attendant “gray-zone” conflicts — marked by small contingents of U.S. troops, drone strikes, and bombing campaigns — and all those munitions she would ship to Saudi Arabia for its war in Yemen. As the life drained from Clinton’s candidacy, I saw her rabid pursuit of a new Cold War start to wither and Russo-phobic comparisons of Putin’s rickety Russian petro-state to Stalin’s Soviet Union begin to die.  I saw the end, too, of her Iron Curtain-clouded vision of NATO, of her blind faith in an alliance more in line with 1957 than 2017. As Clinton’s political fortunes collapsed, so did her Israel-Palestine policy — rooted in the fiction that American and Israeli security interests overlap — and her commitment to what was clearly an unworkable “peace process.”  Just as, for domestic considerations, she would blindly support that Middle Eastern nuclear power, so was she likely to follow President Obama’s trillion-dollarpath to modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal.  All that, along with her sure-to-be-gargantuan military budget requests, were scattered to the winds by her ringing defeat.

Clinton’s foreign policy future had been a certainty.  Trump’s was another story entirely.  He had, for instance, called for a raft of military spending: growing the Army and Marines to a ridiculous size, building a Navy to reach a seemingly arbitrary and budget-busting number of ships, creating a mammoth air armada of fighter jets, pouring money into a missile defense boondoggle, and recruiting a legion of (presumably overweight) hackers to wage cyber war.  All of it to be paid for by cutting unnamed waste, ending unspecified “federal programs,” or somehow conjuring up dollars from hither and yon.  But was any of it serious?  Was any of it true?  Would President Trump actually make good on the promises of candidate Trump?  Or would he simply bark “Wrong!” when somebody accused him of pledging to field an army of 540,000 active duty soldiers or build a Navy of 350 ships. Would Trump actually attempt to implement his plan to defeat ISIS — that is, “bomb the shit out of them” and then “take the oil” of Iraq?  Or was that just the bellicose bluster of the campaign trail?  Would he be the reckless hawk Clinton promised to be, waging wars like the Libyan intervention?  Or would he follow the dictum of candidate Trump who said, “The current strategy of toppling regimes, with no plan for what to do the day after, only produces power vacuums that are filled by terrorists.” Outgoing representative Randy Forbes of Virginia, a contender to be secretary of the Navy in the new administration, recently said that the president elect would employ “an international defense strategy that is driven by the Pentagon and not by the political National Security Council… Because if you look around the globe, over the last eight years, the National Security Council has been writing that. And find one country anywhere that we are better off than we were eight years [ago], you cannot find it.”

Such a plan might actually blunt armed adventurism, since it was war-weary military officials who reportedly pushed back against President Obama’s plans to escalate Iraq War 3.0.  According to some Pentagon-watchers, a potentially hostile bureaucracy might also put the brakes on even fielding a national security team in a timely fashion. While Wall Street investors seemed convinced that the president elect would be good for defense industry giants like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, whose stocks surged in the wake of Trump’s win, it’s unclear whether that indicates a belief in more armed conflicts or simply more bloated military spending. Under President Obama, the U.S. has waged war in or carried out attacks on at least eight nations — Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Syria.  A Clinton presidency promised more, perhaps markedly more, of the same — an attitude summed up in her infamous comment about the late Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”  Trump advisor Senator Jeff Sessions said, “Trump does not believe in war. He sees war as bad, destructive, death and a wealth destruction.”  Of course, Trump himself said he favors committing war crimes like torture and murder.  He’s also suggested that he would risk war over the sort of naval provocations — like Iranian ships sailing close to U.S. vessels — that are currently met with nothing graver than warning shots. So there’s good reason to assume Trump will be a Clintonesque hawk or even worse, but some reason to believe — due to his propensity for lies, bluster, and backing down — that he could also turn out to be less bellicose.

An investigation by El Universal found that between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs while Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels. Sinaloa, led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, supplies 80% of the drugs entering the Chicago area and has a presence in cities across the U.S.

There have long been allegations that Guzman, considered to be "the world’s most powerful drug trafficker," coordinates with American authorities. But the El Universal investigation is the first to publish court documents that include corroborating testimony from a DEA agent and a Justice Department official. The written statements were made to the U.S. District Court in Chicago in relation to the arrest of Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, the son of Sinaloa leader Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada and allegedly the Sinaloa cartel’s "logistics coordinator."

El Universal, citing court documents, reports that DEA agents met with high-level Sinaloa officials more than 50 times since 2000.

Michael Hand, co-founder of the infamous Nugan Hand Bank who disappeared in 1980 after authorities began investigating the bank’s shadowy past following its sudden collapse, has been found. The Nugan Hand bank was a CIA-linked cesspool of drugs, money laundering, and organized crime.  In the words of Jonathan Kwitny, the bank was “a true tale of dope, dirty money, and the CIA.” Hand, who now lives under the name Michael Fuller, was found by an Australian news crew in Idaho, where he runs a company that makes survival knives for U.S. military clients, including Special Operations personnel. (Hand, a former green beret, previously resurfaced in the early 1980s working as a military advisor to CIA-linked military forces in Central America.) Hand has been dubbed “one of Australia’s most wanted fugitives,” but does Australia have the political will to seek the extradition of a man widely believed to have been a CIA asset? Initial indications appear to be no.

Michael Hand, co-founder of the infamous Nugan Hand Bank who disappeared in 1980 after authorities began investigating the bank’s shadowy past following its sudden collapse, has been found. The Nugan Hand bank was a CIA-linked cesspool of drugs, money laundering, and organized crime.  In the words of Jonathan Kwitny, the bank was “a true tale of dope, dirty money, and the CIA.” Hand, who now lives under the name Michael Fuller, was found by an Australian news crew in Idaho, where he runs a company that makes survival knives for U.S. military clients, including Special Operations personnel. (Hand, a former green beret, previously resurfaced in the early 1980s working as a military advisor to CIA-linked military forces in Central America.) Hand has been dubbed “one of Australia’s most wanted fugitives,” but does Australia have the political will to seek the extradition of a man widely believed to have been a CIA asset? Initial indications appear to be no. As one observer noted, “The fact that Hand has been allowed to live the free life in the United States suggests he belongs to a protected species, most likely of the intelligence kind.” Hand’s partner at the bank (Frank Nugan) was not as lucky, dying under murky circumstances prior to Hand’s disappearance.

If Australia summons the political will to seek Hand’s extradition, will the US agree? For those who follow the dark undercurrent of “deep politics,” this one is well worth watching…

Donald Trump has doubled down on his statement at a town hall last week that he aims to be neutral in his comments on the Israel/Palestine conflict so as not to injure his ability as president to negotiate a deal between the parties. On Meet the Press yesterday he pointedly did not buy into the Republican “orthodoxy” on Israel, saying he’s very pro-Israel but peace there is the “ultimate deal” and he wasn’t going to prejudice matters.

Trump surely senses that he can gain by exhibiting independence of the Israel lobby. Here are some other straws in the wind: –A new poll shows that the number of Americans holding a favorable view of Israel has declined 16 percent in the last year, to 59 percent. And in the same interval those holding a favorable view of the Palestinians has surged 42 percent, to 25 percent, and even Iran has had an image-makeover, with 16 percent of Americans regarding the country favorably, up considerably. Grant Smith of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy says the data reveal “a stunning turn in U.S. public opinion.” –The MSM are reflecting the thaw. Last week Newsweek ran a defiant piece by Hanin Zoabi, the Palestinian Israeli legislator who has been suspended from the Knesset as a troublemaker, explaining Palestinian violence as a response to occupation and discrimination. Boldly titled, “Why Israel Is Fighting the Indigenous Palestinians,” it included these lines: “The occupier does not have the right to self-defense. We, the occupied, have the full and only right to fight it, by all means recognized within the framework of international law.”

I throw in these stray facts to say that American public opinion is changing (as is Jewish opinion) and there is political hay to be made of the changes. Donald Trump surely senses this, in his populist campaign. And so he is preparing to run against Marco Rubio by saying that Rubio is Sheldon Adelson’s “perfect little puppet”, and preparing to set up a general election campaign against Hillary Clinton in which he can call out her beholdenness to the billionaire Haim Saban. In his reissued autobiography of last fall, Bernie Sanders refers with disdain to Sheldon Adelson and the “Adelson primary” on the very first page. But that’s the last we hear of it: Adelson, who is in bed with Hillary Clinton’s good friend Haim Saban. Sanders is ignoring a populist political opportunity that Donald Trump has seized upon. Go figure

In case this confuses you: According to Trump, the problem is business, not government.