Sep 14

Today’s News 14th September 2020

  • Infighting & Resignations Rock Knesset As Israel Imposes 2nd Sweeping Nationwide Lockdown
    Infighting & Resignations Rock Knesset As Israel Imposes 2nd Sweeping Nationwide Lockdown

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/14/2020 – 02:45

    Israel is set to return to a controversial nationwide coronavirus lockdown after a recent spike in cases, with the details of how far restrictions on businesses are expected to go being hotly debated in Knesset Sunday morning.

    The entire country will be declared a ‘hot zone’ and the lockdown will take effect at 6:00am Friday morning, Sept.18, which is about 12 hours before the the start of Rosh Hashanah, the two day festive celebration marking the Jewish New Year. 

    The Health Ministry has ordered all schools closed starting Friday (changing from initial plans to shutter them Wednesday), though it remains uncertain if they’ll be allowed to open after two weeks of closure.

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    “Under the proposal, in the first phase beginning Friday, Israelis must remain within 500 meters of their homes; in the second phase, intercity travel is banned,” Times of Israel writes.  

    Already there have been resignations among some key Haredi and other Jewish conservative ministers and officials over the plan to shut the country down at the start of the high holy days. They are angry over the fact that during the prior major lockdown early in the summer, synagogues were also ordered closed, restricting freedom of worship.

    “The decision to impose a full lockdown over the holidays was planned in advance out of a lack of appreciation to the Jewish holidays,” Housing Minister Yaakov Litzman said in his resignation letter protesting the new measures.

    “My heart is with the hundreds of thousands of Jews who come to synagogue once a year and won’t this year because of the lockdown,” he added.

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    Crucially, the representatives of the Health and Finance ministry’s clashed during Sunday morning debates over how far-reaching this next round of restrictions will be. Health Minister Yuli Edelstein clashed with the Finance ministries, as detailed in Jerusalem Post:

    He added that if the plan is withdrawn, then by next Tuesday there will be no public restrictions, the price of which would be several thousand dead. “I will not give in to pressure just to please such and such people,” he stressed.

    A fight broke out between the directors-general of the Health and Finance ministries as the meeting prepared to commence, N12 reported, over whether to allow businesses to stay open or not. According to the plan, they are supposed to be shuttered – except for essential services – for the first two weeks of the closure.

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    The middle of last week saw a new daily coronavirus record in Israel. The health ministry reported 3,904 new cases on Wednesday, bringing the total cases since the start of the pandemic to over 153,000, including over 1,100 deaths.

  • The EU Is To Blame For The Latest Brexit Crisis
    The EU Is To Blame For The Latest Brexit Crisis

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 09/14/2020 – 02:00

    Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

    The UK is threatening to ignore the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. How did we get here?

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    “No Miserable Squabbling” 

    Boris Johnson has urged Conservative MPs to back his Plan to Override Part of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement.

    In a Zoom call with about 250 of them, he said the party must not return to “miserable squabbling” over Europe.  

    The EU has warned the UK it could face legal action if it does not ditch controversial elements of the Internal Market Bill by the end of the month. 

    And a Tory MP has proposed an amendment to the bill, which would affect trade between Britain and Northern Ireland. 

    Meanwhile, the European Parliament has threatened to scupper any UK-EU trade deal if the bill becomes UK law.

    Another EU Bluff Underway

    German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz was out with another EU bluff on Saturday: No-Deal Brexit Would Hurt Britain More Than EU.

    “My assessment is that an unregulated situation would have very significant consequences for the British economy,” Scholz told a news conference after a meeting of EU finance ministers in Berlin.

    “Europe would be able to deal with it and there would be no particularly serious consequences after the preparations we have already made,” he added.

    Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Saturday that a planned bill, which would breach a divorce treaty with the bloc, was needed to protect Britain’s integrity. 

    Obvious Bluff

    If “Europe could deal with this with no serious consequences”, then why would it care?

    The fact of the matter is German exports to the UK would crash in the absence of a deal.

    But how did we get to this point? 

    EU Made a Power Grab and the UK Responded in Kind 

    Eurointelligence fills in the missing pieces of the puzzle.

    Our twitter feed exploded yesterday after the UK’s Northern Ireland Secretary admitted that the no-deal legislation constituted a breach of international law, in a very specific and limited way, as the minister put it. The anticipated breach of law relates to Northern Ireland: Under the withdrawal agreement, the region would continue to have custom-free links to the Republic, while new customs borders would have to be erected along the Irish Sea. The legislation seeks to nullify this arrangement in the event of no deal. Readers may recall this was the single biggest controversy in the withdrawal agreement negotiations.

    It is worth reflecting on how we got to this point. The moment the EU tried to make a power grab for UK state-aid policy, the negotiation turned into an ugly battle of egos.

    We heard a lot of tough-luck arguments. The EU is the bigger of the two sides, and can impose its will, for example by anchoring the level-playing-field to its own conditions. This was a short-sighted argument.

    The International Court of Justice in the Hague may well end up ruling against the UK. But, first, this won’t happen before the end of the year. And, second, the ICJ has no enforcement powers. If you start playing the relationship talks in the spirit of a geopolitical power game, don’t be surprised when the other side plays in the same spirit.

    What determines whether there will be a deal or not is the readiness of the EU to accept a compromise on state aid. If it does, then there will be a deal. If not, there won’t.

    Forget the EU’s Bluff

    We are here because the EU demanded fishing rights and interfered in UK internal policies on state aid.

    Boris Johnson responded in kind.

    If the EU will not compromise, the EU will shoot itself in the foot and Germany in the head.

  • The 9/11 Attacks: Understanding Al-Qaeda & The Domestic Fall-Out From America's Secret War
    The 9/11 Attacks: Understanding Al-Qaeda & The Domestic Fall-Out From America’s Secret War

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 23:30

    Authored by Sam Jacobs via Ammo.com,

    With American military personnel now entering service who were not even alive on 9/11, this seems an appropriate time to reexamine the events of September 11, 2001 – the opaque motives for the attacks, the equally opaque motives for the counter-offensive by the United States and its allies known as the Global War on Terror, and the domestic fall-out for Americans concerned about the erosion of their civil liberties on the homefront.

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    Before venturing further, it’s worth noting that our appraisal is not among the most common explanations. Osama bin Laden, his lieutenants at Al-Qaeda, and the men who carried out the attack against the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon are not “crazy,” unhinged psychopaths launching an attack against the United States without what they consider to be good reason.

    Nor do we consider then-President George W. Bush to be either a simpleton, a willing conspirator, an oil profiteer, or a Machiavellian puppet whose cabinet were all too happy to take advantage of a crisis.

    The American press tends to portray its leaders as fools and knaves, and America’s enemies as psychopathic. Because the propaganda machine hammered away so heavily on the simple “cowardly men who hate our freedom” line, there was not much in the way of careful consideration of the actual political motives of the hijackers, the Petro-Islam that funded them, the ancient, antagonistic split between Sunni and Shi’a, the fall-out from the 1979 Iranian revolution or the 1970s energy crisis, the historical context of covert American involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War and the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, nor the perceived “imperialist humanitarianism” of American military adventures of the 1990s in Muslim nations like Bosnia, Iraq, Somalia and Kosovo. Alone, none of these factors were deadly. Combined, they provided a lethal combination.

    It is our considered opinion that the events of 9/11 and those that followed in direct response to the attacks – including the invasion of Iraq – were carried out by good faith rational actors who believed they were acting in the best interests of their religion or their nation. There are no conspiracy theories here; sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

    This opinion does not in any way absolve the principals from moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions. It does, however, provide what we believe to be a more accurate and nuanced depiction of events than is generally forthcoming from any sector of the media – because we see these principals as excellent chess players who, in the broad sweep of events, engaged in actions which are explicable.

    How the Hijackers Pulled Off the Intelligence Coup of the Century

    Very few people dispute one simple fact: On 9/11, 19 men hijacked four planes, three of which hit their targets: the World Trade Center Building 1, the World Trade Center Building 2, and the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

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    What is less often talked about is perhaps an even more stunning feat the hijackers pulled off: Being able to evade the attention of the United States intelligence community while planning their attacks. Indeed, their acumen with regard to covert operations was so great that they were effectively able to steal an air force for the attacks. It’s not that they were absent from the radar of U.S. intel services – it’s that no one was ever able to connect the dots.

    Indeed, they understood the game so well that Osama bin Laden was able to call his mother two days before the attack to tell her: “In two days you’re going to hear big news, and you’re not going to hear from me for awhile.” He knew he was under surveillance by the NSA, but he also knew the turnaround time on intel was three days.

    Another oft overlooked quality that the hijackers had was discipline and intestinal fortitude. It is important to remember that courage is a virtue, but it does not carry a moral weight of its own. The men who perpetrated the attacks on 9/11 went to their deaths in a disciplined fashion, carrying out their orders to the letter. This is not something a coward, a simpleton, or a psychopath does.

    While the evidence for the attack was able to be collated in hindsight, it is not an exaggeration to say that the United States was more surprised by the attack of 9/11 than it was by the attack on Pearl Harbor.

    The U.S. Domestic Situation in the 1970s

    It’s helpful to start with the domestic situation in the United States in the 1970s. Still in the throes of the Vietnam defeat, Congress had little appetite for defense expenditures or additional covert wars. However, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw an opportunity to use the Soviets’ favorite tool against them when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979: The sponsored war of national liberation.

    This was also post-Watergate era, and there was a focus on transparency in the government. This included sweeping changes to how intelligence operations were conducted in the United States. The battle against the spooks was fought by Idaho Senator Frank Church, who held hearings demonstrating that the American intelligence community was simultaneously untrustworthy as well as bad at its job. The end result was a hamstrung CIA and NSA, because they were found to be illegally spying on Americans.

    Thus you had an intelligence community both out of favor in Washington and discreetly called upon to oppose the Soviets in Afghanistan as part of the larger Cold War chess board.

    American Intelligence Finds a New Ally: The Saudis

    Still, covert ops were needed. And while the CIA could covertly foot part of the bill, it could not afford the whole thing. But the CIA learned quickly that it had a natural ally both against the Soviets and against the new radical Shi’ite regime in Iran – the Sunni monarchy of Saudi Arabia, who at the time had what was effectively an endless supply of petrodollars without the constraints of public oversight and democracy to get in the way.

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    The need was mutual. Having seen how badly the oil embargo hurt the United States in the 1970s, the Saudis were not eager to see enemies of the United States (namely Iran and the Soviets) emboldened. Instead the Saudis were eager to see the U.S. put its muscle into a covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. They had both the insight into the situation on the ground and the money to throw behind it. America had the muscle and the materiel.

    Common enemies make for uncommon allies, and the covert alliance between Washington and Riyadlah in the 1980s was no exception.

    The Saudis would provide funding and personnel to support a covert effort by the CIA to build an anti-Soviet guerrilla movement in Afghanistan. The goal was to build a quagmire for the Soviets while the U.S. urgently rearmed. The means was an alliance between the United States and Muslim fundamentalists.

    Such an alliance was not new. In fact, it was effectively American policy since the rise of Arab socialism (both Nasserism and the two flavors of Ba’athism housed in Syria and Iraq). The Arab Socialists cozied up to the Soviets without fully entering their sphere. In response, the United States sought refuge in the conservative monarchies of the region: The Hashemites of Jordan and Iraq (until 1968), the Shah in Iran (until 1979), and now the Saudis.

    The funds largely came not from official government coffers, but from the Saudi royal family and the aristocracy of the nation. This was to have some degree of plausible deniability.

    There was one additional factor: Pakistan. Pakistan was a long-term American ally, torn between the secularism of its founders and the Islamism of a large segment of its population. It was also terrified of being trapped between a Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and a pro-Soviet India.

    Pakistan did have a long experience in Afghanistan, as well as territory contiguous to Afghanistan – where training camps, logistics systems, and bases of operations could be constructed. The North Vietnamese had Cambodia and Laos; the United States had Pakistan. A three-way alliance was created. The United States would provide training, coordination, and strategic intelligence. The Saudis would provide money and recruitment of mujahideen. The Pakistanis would provide their territory plus their intelligence service, the ISI, to liaise with Afghan forces resisting the Soviet invasion.

    Jimmy Carter presided over the creation of this fateful alliance. Earlier in his administration, he had spoken of America’s “inordinate fear of communism.” He was not as interested in destroying the Soviet Union as much as he wanted to find a basis for accommodation with the Soviets and end what had been a decade of decline in American power.

    Carter certainly did not consider – nor would any reasonable person – that the result of aiding Afghan guerrillas against Soviet occupation would help stimulate the collapse of the Soviet Union and, a generation later, lead to the rise of Al-Qaeda.

    The Reagan Administration and Bill Casey

    Enter the Reagan Administration and their point man William Casey. Bill Casey was a legend among the intelligence community, seen as something of a mad genius. Few people ever understood what he was talking about, but his results spoke for themselves. He was Reagan’s go-to guy for encircling and suffocating the Soviet Union. There were many aspects to Casey’s strategy, including baiting the Soviets into an arms race that would bankrupt them, underwriting Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland, and supporting resistance by Russian Jews. Afghanistan was simply part of this increasingly aggressive pattern of pressure on the Soviets.

    A key part of this strategy that would come back to haunt the United States later: Casey thought it was a great idea to encourage young Muslim men to travel to Afghanistan to wage jihad against the Soviet invaders. These men were, at the end of the war in 1989, equipped with captured Soviet equipment, generous gifts of cash and materiel from the United States military, and trained by United States Special Forces.

    Al-Qaeda Forged in the Crucible of Afghanistan

    It is impossible to understand Al-Qaeda without first understanding what the Afghanistan resistance movement did to the men who formed it. It was a nine-year war against one of the biggest powers in the world, spanning the inhospitable Hindu Kush fought in an asymmetrical fashion. By the end, the men who fought it were hard as nails.

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    The mujahideen descended upon Afghanistan for a variety of reasons. They were trained in Pakistan, before setting off to work with Afghan rebels. No matter the nation they hailed from, their Islamic faith and hatred of the Soviet Union were the fuel that powered them. The American government encouraged this and it even received public attention in Rambo III, released three months after the end of the war in 1988 (at the time, this was the most expensive film ever made).

    What’s more, the Islamic world was buoyed by the victory – it was the first time in centuries that an Islamic army had won a decisive battle against foreign invaders. That this foreign invader was also an atheistic superpower was not a fact that was lost on the mujahideen. Nor was the fact that the force who defeated this army was a multinational Islamic force, not an “Afghan” one.

    While there was the disastrous British retreat from Kabul in 1842, it was followed by the British laying siege to Kabul in direct response. The British didn’t seek to occupy Afghanistan in response: they simply laid waste to it and left.

    American and Muslim views of the war were starkly different. The Americans viewed it simply as one piece of the larger Cold War puzzle, one that they had been the primary force behind. The mujahideen, and to a lesser extent, many within the Muslim world, saw themselves as having single-handedly brought the atheistic empire of communism to its knees. In contrast, the Americans felt that they were owed gratitude from the mujahideen and the Islamic world as a whole.

    Once the war was over, the United States did what it usually does with its allies: Maintained a casual relationship and expected to be reached out to by the Afghan fighters. This did not happen and is the genesis of the cleavage between the two.

    The Iran/Iraq War, the Fall of Communism, and Operation Desert Storm

    In Afghanistan, the U.S. was covertly working with the mujahadeen to defeat the Soviets, thanks to a covert alliance with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Elsewhere in the Middle East was another covert balance-of-power strategy: The U.S. was also working with Iraq and Saudi Arabia to contain Iran whilst also occasionally arming Iran against Iraq to prolong the Iran/Iraq War of the 1980s.

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    Neither America nor Saudi Arabia wanted to see the Ayatollah Khomeini brand of Islamist radicalism spread around the Islamic world. America was in the throes of defeating one revolutionary ideology with the Soviets. It did not want to begin dealing with another, especially one controlling so much of the world’s energy supplies.

    The Saudis were obviously more well acquainted with the nuances of Islam than the Americans. They were also less concerned about the revolutionary aspect of the movement than the Shi’ism. This is the dominant strain of Islam in Iran, but also throughout a region of the Arab world known as the Shi’a Crescent.

    (The split between Shi’a and Sunni Islam is analagous to the split between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland – just taking place atop a much more strategically important portion of the world, the oil-rich Persian Gulf.)

    The Saudis were profoundly antagonistic toward Shi’a, belonging to an ultra-fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. From a more practical perspective, the Saudis saw Iranian power as a threat to their oil revenues.

    America and Saudi Arabia had similar interests that didn’t quite overlap in the 1980s, but were enough for an alliance of convenience – the goal was to keep Iran penned in and to stop the spread of revolutionary Shi’a Islam. What the Americans didn’t know at the time was that they were building up Wahhabism while combating Shi’a.

    To contain Iran in the 1980s, the United States encouraged Iraq, its ally at the time, to invade Iran. This encouragement was of the low-key variety, assuring Iraq that it would not stand in the way of an invasion of Iran and offering the U.S. plausible deniability through diplomatic channels.

    Iraq was looking to settle a score from a previous war against the Shah’s Iran in the 70s, one where the United States had backed Iran. What America really wanted was a protracted and exhausting conflict that would sap the energy of both countries. The Saudis and other Gulf oil nations were ready with cash. Iraq invaded in September 1980.

    Such a policy was not novel in American history. America allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler, and with Communist China to contain the Soviet Union. But as with both of these cases, America was creating a new problem while solving the old (known colloquially in intelligence circles as “blowback”).

    Iraq’s goal was to be the dominant power in the region, first through defeating Iran, then through conquering Kuwait. The United States simply wanted the balance of power maintained and used the Iran-Contra affair to arm Iran toward that end. The famous Iran-Contra affair, engineered by Bill Casey, was part of this strategy – with Americans delivering Hawk surface-to-air missiles and TOW anti-tank missiles to Iran in order to help stave off an Iranian defeat, while also arranging for supplies to Iraq. Under the circumstances, it was a clever move until better options emerged.

    The war between Iran and Iraq lasted over nine years and caused millions of deaths. Iraq won a Pyrrhic victory.

    After that war ended, Iraq turned its attention toward Kuwait – to the victor goes the spoils of war. The U.S. Ambassador to Iraq from 1980 to 1989, April Glaspie, quietly assured Saddam Hussein that it had no interest in internal Arab affairs. This was a good wink-and-nod during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, but state department policy had changed with the Fall of Communism, which Glaspie was somehow ignorant of.

    The subsequent response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Desert Storm, enraged the Muslim world because Christian troops were stationed in Islam’s holiest nation, Saudi Arabia. But the difference now was the mujahideen veterans. They didn’t share the more conservative view that the United States was a necessary ally. What’s more, they viewed those who had not fought in Afghanistan with a degree of contempt.

    There were three lessons the mujahideen had absorbed through their experience in Afghanistan: First, that Islamic nations are not as weak as they had previously believed. Second, that the current leadership, even the conservative, religious monarchies, were corrupt and unnecessarily reliant upon the United States. Third, the United States, a Christian nation, was the last super power and needed to be fought against and ultimately humbled to break the traditional reliance upon the country, as well as to inspire the Islamic masses with a greater degree of confidence.

    They also knew a great deal about how the Americans thought, collected intelligence, and how they would fight based on the Afghan experience.

    Their focus turned in two directions: First, to attack the United States in a manner that would provoke a massive response, the ultimate goal of which was to bait the United States into a war against the entire Muslim world. Second, to leverage the defeat of America and its allies in the Muslim world into a recreated caliphate. This was the kernel of the plan to attack the United States on September 11, 2001.

    Former Mujahideen Turn on the United States

    The placement of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula during Desert Storm was seen as an invasion of Christian crusaders invited by the ostensible defenders of Muslim holy sites at Mecca and Medina, the Saudi royal family. This is when forces like those who formed Al-Qaeda began to see conservative Muslim monarchies as corrupt and weak.

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    The Americans believed they were, for the most part, dumb farmers who couldn’t learn anything useful, but they were wrong. The mujahideen included many like Osama bin Laden who were wealthy, well educated and intelligent. They quickly learned from the American intelligence community about covert operations. They also had a ready-made financial network from the Afghanistan adventure that had never really shut down. Finally, while the Islamists hated the secular regimes of the region, they were happy to adopt their primary strategy – terrorism, the purpose of which is psychological rather than financial or military.

    The new grouping spent years working behind the scenes, testing holes in American intel and security, while at the same time figuring out what the intelligence community was paying attention to and what it wasn’t. It largely did this through orchestrating fake attacks, then monitoring the response. They also learned how to exhaust the resources of the system by sacrificing low-level operatives in an attempt to distract and hamstring the intelligence community.

    Throughout the 90s, radicalization of the Islamic world against the United States grew, thanks to extensive American involvement in Muslim nations like Bosnia, Iraq, Somalia and Kosovo. Al-Qaeda saw these recurring U.S. military interventions in the Islamic world as both a direct challenge and, more important, an opportunity to mobilize support by labeling the United States an enemy of Islam – which could be used to forment a pan-Islamic uprising and recreate the caliphate.

    Petro-Islam and the 9/11 Hijackers

    In a cruel twist of fate, the radicalization of the Islamic world against the U.S. was further exacerbated in large part with American dollars in a process known as Petro-Islam.

    Consider the following cycle: The U.S. – along with just about every other industrialized country – buys oil from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family uses a portion of their oil revenue to fund the spread of Wahhabism abroad, encouraging the creation of mosques and madras.

    From 1982 to 2005, during the reign of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, over $75 billion is estimated to have been spent in efforts to spread Wahhabi Islam to various, much poorer Muslim nations worldwide. By comparison, the Soviets spent about $7 billion spreading communism worldwide in the 70 years from 1921 and 1991.

    The money was used to establish 200 Islamic colleges, 210 Islamic centers, 1,500 mosques, and 2,000 schools for Muslim children in both Muslim and non-Muslim majority countries. The schools were “fundamentalist” in outlook and formed a network “from Sudan to northern Pakistan.” By 2000, Saudi Arabia had also distributed 138 million copies of the Quran worldwide.

    These Saudi-backed Wahhabi institutions radicalize Muslims. The majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and all of the hijackers are believed to have been practitioners of Wahhabism.

    To make this nefarious cycle worse, the U.S then sells weapons to the Saudi royal family so that they can maintain their grip on power via military force – all whilst vacationing abroad in opulence in places like the south of France, while their citizens suffer under totalitarian rule back home. It’s a sick, vicious cycle driven by petrodollars funneled from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia and then back to the American military-industrial complex.

    American Intelligence Underestimates Al-Qaeda

    The American military and intelligence communities were largely caught with their pants down after the 9/11 attacks. This is precisely why so many conspiracy theories popped up in response. The American intelligence community had a plan in place for a war against Britain and Canada after World War I. It plans for even the most far-fetched contingencies. But it had not planned for anything remotely similar to what happened on 9/11.

    The intel community largely saw groups like Al-Qaeda as nuisances who were more likely to blow themselves up or kill themselves than anything. They were ready for an attack on the power grid. They weren’t worried about poisoning the water supply, because such an attack was simply logistically unfeasible. They weren’t worried about nukes, because they were hard to get and even if someone did, one intel agency or another would know within hours. Islamists had attacked the United States before, including at the World Trade Center, the USS Cole and attacks on embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, but none of these were terribly impressive.

    Hijackings were expected and well-worn territory. Indeed, they were largely political theater and authorities knew how to respond: You got the plane on the ground and started negotiating. If that didn’t work, the hijackers either killed everyone on the plane or you sent special forces in to get them out. But hijackings with a suicide attack were unprecedented. There was no game plan for this. And unlike the response to the attack on Pearl Harbor when President Roosevelt cleaned house, President Bush left the same men in charge. It was business as usual.

    One question is always raised when discussing the twin post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq: Why did the United States invade Afghanistan and Iraq when most of the hijackers and the bulk of their funding and logistics hailed from Saudi Arabia, and to a lesser extent, Egypt? The answer to this question might surprise you.

    Why the United States Government Invaded Afghanistan and Iraq

    Afghanistan was chosen as the place for counter-attack for a simple reason: The Taliban was there and had never fully consolidated power. The Northern Alliance opposed it and was available for hire at the right price.

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    Strategically, it also brought in the Russians, who were facing both a homegrown Islamic threat in Chechnya as well as Afghan encroachment on Central Asian republics ethnically close to the tribes of the Northern Alliance. Finally, it was important to the United States to send a swift, sharp action against the Islamic world in response to the 9/11 attack. For a variety of reasons, Afghanistan was seen both as the easiest and the one with the least PR damage – the Taliban was widely perceived as an outlaw regime and wasn’t even recognized by the United Nations.

    Iraq was chosen for a distinct purpose: To shake the Saudis out of their slumber and bring them into the fight against Al-Qaeda – or at least pressure them into stopping their funding of Al-Qaeda, as the U.S. State Department noted in a cable leaked by WikiLeaks:

    While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) takes seriously the threat of terrorism within Saudi Arabia, it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority. Due in part to intense focus by the USG over the last several years, Saudi Arabia has begun to make important progress on this front and has responded to terrorist financing concerns raised by the United States through proactively investigating and detaining financial facilitators of concern. Still, donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. Continued senior-level USG engagement is needed to build on initial efforts and encourage the Saudi government to take more steps to stem the flow of funds from Saudi Arabia-based sources to terrorists and extremists worldwide.

    This had to be done without once again committing the error of putting American boots on the ground in Saudi Arabia, a la Desert Storm, and thus inciting a pan-Islamic counter-offensive as Osama bin Laden hoped.

    The claimed pretext of WMDs is laughable on its face: If the United States actually believed that Iraq had WMDs capable of striking America, it would not have spent months sabre rattling and provide a due date for invasion. It would just strike.

    What’s more, if the occupation of Iraq had gone smoothly, the United States would have become the preeminent power in the region, encircling Iran with U.S. forces in Afghanistan on Iran’s eastern flank – with a base of operations that bordered most of the major powers in the region: Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, and Kuwait.

    In both cases, the United States underestimated both the continued resistance it would face from Islamic fighters in each nation and the depth of the old vendettas amongst the liberated. (Calling Iraq or Afghanistan a “nation” is akin to calling Frankenstein a man; both are heterogenous and held together by totalitarian regimes.) Sectarian violence erupted in the power vacuum in both Iraq amongst the Kurds, Shi’a and Sunni factions, and in Afghanistan amongst the 14 recognized ethnic groups and various tribes.

    To fundamentally understand the attack of 9/11 and the United States response is not to ascribe any moral weight to either side in either direction. But what is clear is that the fighters of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates are sincere in their desire to reestablish the caliphate of Islamic theocracy as it existed at the time of Muhammed – and that the United States intelligence community continually and woefully underestimated their seriousness.

    We would be remiss without discussing the financial issues. America has spent trillions on the Global War on Terror – $5.9 trillion to be exact, as of 2019. The conventional wisdom is that the United States invaded Afghanistan, and especially Iraq, for their natural resources, but this is patently false. After all, where are the vast oil and mineral riches?

    America has, however, managed to import the major cash crop of Afghanistan: opioids.

    The Western Way of War

    While the United States undertook a prompt response – the invasion of Afghanistan – it did not undertake the same measures as it did for the purpose of winning World War II (namely overwhelming and overly destructive force). There were, of course, the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also overwhelming destructive force throughout the war in the form of carpet bombings, flame throwing tanks, and picket destroyers. The carnage of Okinawa fundamentally changed how the West viewed war, particularly against the fanatical Japanese.

    Gen. Curtis Lemay was an architect of this strategy and advocated it not only in Korea (where it was not used), but also Vietnam, where his advocacy of keeping the nuclear option open is often cited as one of the things that destroyed the 1968 presidential campaign of George Wallace – for whom Lemay was the vice presidential candidate. The idea was that overwhelming destructive force led to fewer casualties for the Allies. Here, Gen. Lemay discusses the concept with regard to the Korean War:

    “What I’m trying to say is, once you make a decision to use military force to solve your problem – then you ought to use it. And use an overwhelming military force. Use too much. And deliberately use too much. So that you don’t make an error on the other side, and not quite have enough. And you roll over everything to start with. And you close it down just like that. You save resources. You save lives. Not only your own but the enemies too. And the recovery is quicker. And everybody is back to peaceful existence – hopefully in a shorter period of time.”

    America spends billions of dollars developing highly destructive military technology. But since World War II, it has failed to deploy this in the defense of its citizenry.

    The Domestic Response to 9/11

    It’s almost a cliche, but in some manner of thinking, the terrorists have been wildly successful. American civil liberties have been severely curtailed since 9/11 and a culture of unquestioning obedience to authority under the guise of “security” has been ushered in. The TSA has effectively groomed the American populace to accept totalitarianism at its airports, despite the fact that the TSA is ineffective at preventing terrorism in airplanes (some airports have a zero-percent compliance rate during audits and security checks, and all attempts at airplane bombings since 9/11 have been thwarted by passengers, not the TSA).

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    It’s worth noting that 9/11 was a massive intelligence failure on the part of the NSA and the CIA. Rather than being held to account, they had their powers massively expanded in the wake of the attacks. Maureen Baginkski very candidly said just weeks after the attacks, “You have to understand, 9/11 is a gift to the NSA…We are going to get all the money we want.”

    The PATRIOT Act was passed with virtually no oversight after 9/11. It has not been dialed back one iota since, despite the revelations of Edward Snowden. Snooping agencies like the NSA and CIA, who had their power severely curtained in the 1970s, now effectively have a blank check, both literal and figurative. This doesn’t even include the number of private security firms receiving big money from the federal government.

    We are now all living in what is effectively a soft totalitarian state, where our every communication is tracked unless we are willing to take extreme measures to protect ourselves. By all outward appearances, there is no going back.

    What’s more, there is still a fundamental inability to acknowledge who the United States is actually at war with. The Global War on Terror is sometimes spoken of in terms of criminal justice and sometimes in terms of a war on a concept. It is telling that the enemy is now frequently referred to not even as “terrorism,” but “terror.”

    Such confusion did not exist after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. FDR did not speak of bringing the perpetrators to justice – he spoke of an act of war. What’s more, FDR was squarely focused on the state actor who committed the attack, namely Japan. He did not speak about Japan’s allies or even unrelated countries like George W. Bush did when he spoke of an “Axis of Evil,” none of whom had anything to do with the attack on 9/11, some of whom (North Korea) were tangentially related at best to a militant global revolutionary Islam.

    President Bush did not want to declare war on the Islamic world, so he chose Al-Qaeda. But then he confused the issue by invading first Afghanistan, then Iraq. President Obama created further obfuscation when he took pains to divorce the religion of the perpetrators from their ideology whilst massively expanding covert drone strikes all over the world, thus blurring the line between warfare and assassination.

    18 years later, we are no closer to a clear definition of an enemy and a statement of goals than we were on September 12, 2001. What would constitute victory in the Global War on Terror? No one knows.

    The Geneva Conventions have provisions for guerrilla fighters. Two rules must be met for protection under the Conventions: First, fighters must carry their weapons openly. Second, they must wear uniforms. The Islamist terrorists do neither and are thus not protected. During the Second World War, such fighters would have been treated to a perfunctory military trial and summary execution, whether caught by the Axis or the Allies.

    Indeed, both the Hague Accords and the Geneva Conventions are very clear about the role of irregulars in a war: They have 72 hours to don either uniforms or identifying pieces of clothing (for example, armbands). If they fail or refuse to do this, they are no longer covered by the Geneva Conventions or Hague Accords, and they are not to be treated by the regular rules of war. There is no obligation to capture them, accept their surrender or do anything else but shoot.

    This means that America accepts the surrender of enemy combatants who do not enjoy the legal protection of either surrender or trial.

    Unless the United States is clear about who its enemy is and the price it is willing to pay to defeat it, we are destined for an endless war with ever-growing encroachments on American liberties. If this is the path America chooses, then there can be no doubt that we have already lost the war.

  • Fast Food Restaurants 'Radically' Redesign Floor Plans With "Convenience Focus"
    Fast Food Restaurants ‘Radically’ Redesign Floor Plans With “Convenience Focus”

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 23:00

    Taco Bell, Shake Shack, and Burger King are among some of the major fast-food restaurant chains redesigning store layouts to accommodate larger volumes of drive-thru traffic as the virus pandemic has altered consumer behaviors, reported CNBC. 

    To this day, or about seven months into the pandemic (start date Mar. 1), hungry Americans have downloaded restaurant apps, delivery apps, opted for curbside pick up, and or have used the drive-thru more than ever as some chains keep indoor dining spaces at limited capacity or entirely closed. 

    Readers may recall we outlined this shift in a piece titled “COVID Has Transformed America Into The ‘Drive-In’ Nation.” 

    Data from NPD Group showed drive-thru visits surged 26% in the second quarter as restaurant companies are now accelerating plans to update or reformat the storefront designs with a heavy focus on convenience. 

    Starbucks is another company that has understood consumers are demanding more convenience-oriented visits. The company is planning more mobile pickup cafes over the next 12-24 months than initially expected.

    CNBC lists three major restaurant chains who have released radical designs that suggest indoor dining is dead as drive-thrus become dominate in floor plans: 

    Taco Bell 

    The Yum Brands chain’s newest design features a dual drive-thru lane and parking spots designated for contactless curbside pickup. 

    “We have a lot of franchisees interested in expanding drive-thru capacity,” Taco Bell Global Chief Operating Officer Mike Grams said.

    In Taco Bell’s second quarter, it served an additional 4.8 million cars through drive-thru lanes compared with a year earlier, even as its same-store sales declined 8%.

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    The new “Go Mobile” design will feature indoor shelves for claiming digital orders. The size of the dining rooms will vary depending on the market. The kitchens will be outfitted with technology that tells workers the fastest way to make the order and communicates to the customer the easiest way to pick up the food.

    Shake Shack 

    Shake Shack introduced its new Shack Track restaurants in early May.

    The new format incorporates drive-up and walk-up windows, which will be reserved for picking up digital orders. And for customers looking for a contactless experience, curbside pickup will become a permanent feature. At least eight locations will have the new design by the end of the year.

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    Shake Shack is also building its first-ever drive-thru lane that will launch in 2021 and allow customers to order on the spot.

    Burger King

    The Restaurant Brands International chain unveiled two new restaurant designs on Thursday that require about 60% less square footage than a traditional Burger King restaurant. 

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    The two-floor Next Level design includes up to three drive-thru lanes to the locations, with one lane specifically for delivery drivers. Its kitchen and indoor seating area jut out above the drive-thru lanes in a space-saving design measure. It also includes a walk-up window for takeout orders and parking spots designated for curbside pickup.

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    The Burger King Your Way design features just two drive-thru lanes and a shaded outdoor patio for on-premise dining. Customers can also park their cars under solar-powered canopies and have their Whoppers and fries delivered right to their vehicles after scanning a QR code at their parking spot and placing their order on Burger King’s mobile app.

    The future of the restaurant industry is one where mega-corporations will rule the space as the downturn has crushed mom and pop eateries. Take, for example, the dire situation unfolding in the New York City restaurant industry as roughly 83% of shops were unable to pay July rent. 

    We noted in July, small eateries across the country were liquidating assets on Facebook Marketplace. The official account is still unknown, but some estimates have the worldwide restaurant industry losing upwards of two-million shops due to the pandemic. 

    With that being said, the future of restaurants are ones that are controlled by mega-corporations with drive-thrus. The death of indoor dining has arrived… 

  • A Tale Of Two Mass Gatherings: Sturgis "Super Spreader" Bike Rally Vs Black Lives Matter "Fiery But Mostly Peaceful" Protests
    A Tale Of Two Mass Gatherings: Sturgis “Super Spreader” Bike Rally Vs Black Lives Matter “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful” Protests

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 22:30

    Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Judging by the way the media and medical authorities are reprimanding public events organized by right-leaning organizations, it appears beyond doubt that the coronavirus outbreak is being used as a political weapon to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

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    In early August, an estimated 460,000 motorcyclists took part in the annual pilgrimage to South Dakota. The Sturgis Biker Rally, which has been a major draw since 1938, is a 10-day event that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, much of it made on alcohol-fueled fun and revelry. In other words, as the party poopers would say, the ideal conditions for a deadly virus to sweep through a broad swath of the population, leaving behind incalculable loss of life in its wake.

    So now that the coronavirus has surpassed its Sturgis incubation period, how many reckless bikers lost their lives for not honoring social-distancing protocols at crowded hotspots for multiple days and nights on end? You may want to have a seat, this will shock you. The current death rate stands at just one (1) person. That’s right, as USA Today reported, the unidentified victim was a “Minnesota man…in his 60s and had underlying health conditions.”

    In other words, not exactly the sort of outcome one would expect under a code-red pandemic.

    Nevertheless, a study by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics (which receives its funding, oddly enough, from Deutsche Post) has described the biker rally as a coronavirus “super spreading event” that led to an estimated $12.2 billion in public health costs. I repeat, $12.2 billion dollars all on a single Covid-related fatality. While not denying that all lives matter, that seems a bit over the top. So how did it happen?

    Well, the authors of the study, using the latest location-tracking technology from SafeGraph Inc., received a digital readout of bikers congregating in Sturgis before getting back on their Harleys and taking their viral stowaways on a joyride around the country; a bit like the Black Death teaming up with Hell’s Angels. This noxious combination, the researchers say, accounted for 266,796 new cases of Covid-19. At this point, however, the authors take some real liberties with the figures.

    “If we conservatively assume that all of these cases were non-fatal, then these cases represent a cost of over $12.2 billion, based on the statistical cost of a COVID-19 case of $46,000…,” they wrote.

    In other words, the assumption is made that all of the 266,796 individuals who contracted the virus required lengthy hospital care in order to recover from their illnesses. Yet considering that the majority of people who have COVID are asymptomatic, or are able to recover at home without medical attention, the $12.2billion dollar price tag for the biker rally appears immediately suspicious.

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    Indeed, in the very next line (page 30, second paragraph of said study) it is admitted that “[T]his is by no means an accurate accounting of the true externality cost of the event, as it counts those who attended and were infected as part of the externality when their costs are likely internalized (i.e. their recovery was paid out of pocket, assuming expenditures were required).”

    The authors continue: “However, this calculation is nonetheless useful as it provides a ballpark estimate as to how large of an externality a single superspreading event can impose, and a sense of how valuable restrictions on mass gatherings can be in this context.”

    Don’t you just love it when esteemed researchers use the word “ballpark” in their studies?

    Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a leading epidemiologist with no apparent political ax to grind, told the Daily Beast in an interview that the study’s estimate that the additional cases cost billions of dollars was “absurd.” Yet few people are likely to ever hear that professional opinion; instead, what will stick in their mind is the screaming headline that Sturgis was a ‘super spreader event’ with a $12.2 billion dollar price tag.

    The other messages being reinforced is that mass gatherings at a time of a pandemic are verboten and, furthermore, the authorities now have the ability to digitally trace people by accessing their cellphones wherever they go.

    Yet that disturbing knowledge only draws further attention to the elephant in the sick room:

    ‘Why are left-leaning protest groups, like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, not getting tagged as ‘super spreader’ events as are church gatherings, motorcycle rallies and, perhaps most tellingly, Trump rallies? Indeed, Twitter blue checks have been nothing but kind and courteous to the ‘peaceful protestors.’

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    By way of experiment, do a Google search for ‘black lives matter covid super spreader.’

    The result shows one article after another asserting that the months-long protest movement, which continues to see random acts of violence flare up across the country, did nothing to contribute to an uptick in Covid infections.

    In fact, the third offering by the search monster is an article by The Colorado Sun with a headline declaring ‘Black Lives Matter protests may have slowed overall spread of coronavirus…’

    The story focuses on the only study to date that examines the correlation between BLM protests and the transmission of Covid in the population.

    Relying on cellphone tracing technology similar to the Sturgis study, the team of economists (not epidemiologists, mind you) came up with a shockingly different conclusion from that of Sturgis:

    “We find no evidence that urban protests reignited COVID-19 case or death growth after more than five weeks following the onset of protests. We conclude that predictions of population-level spikes in COVID-19 cases from Black Lives Matter protests were too narrowly conceived because of failure to account for non-participants’ behavioral responses to large gatherings.”

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    Now had the BLM researchers really wanted to, they also could have performed the same numbers magic trick with the data that the Sturgis researchers did. After all, the whole notion as to exactly who is a COVID ‘carrier’ has become almost meaningless, or at the very least open to all sorts of speculation. The way the mortality figures have been manipulated around the country – with ‘COVID’ being stamped on the death certificates of people who died from completely different causes, like motorcycle crashes – naturally makes any study less reliable.

    Moreover, a number of medical authorities actually came out in defense of the Black Lives Matter protests, arguing it was more crucial for the public to take a stand against ‘systemic racism’ than to protect the public from the scourge of a pandemic.

    “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus,” tweeted Jennifer Nuzzo in early June. No, Miss Nuzzo is not a fervent member of some activist group, like BLM or Antifa, for example, but is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

    At the same time, Dr. Tom Frieden, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, said something equally disturbing when he tweeted, on the very same day as his above colleague, “The threat to Covid control from protesting outside is tiny compared to the threat to Covid control created when governments act in ways that lose community trust…”

    It sounds like some people are sharing talking points at a very high level. But why?

    Whatever the answer, it is rather remarkable that just as the BLM protests were breaking out across the country, at a time when churches, businesses, sporting events and political rallies were being shut down, a number of leading doctors were telling the locked up public that the ‘mostly peaceful’ protests were more important than protecting citizens from a pandemic.

    That is not only remarkable, it is simply unbelievable.

  • "This Time Is Different": Why Morgan Stanley Expects The Fed To Finally Succeed In Boosting Inflation
    “This Time Is Different”: Why Morgan Stanley Expects The Fed To Finally Succeed In Boosting Inflation

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 22:00

    Looking at this week’s main event, the FOMC’s two-day meeting on Wednesday, consensus expects that the Fed won’t announce any new actions having crushed the idea of yield curve control or a shift in QE, while fresh projections for the federal funds rate – which will include 2023 for the first time, – are expected to show rates locked at zero, something traders have priced in already expecting no rate hikes until at least 2025. Such an outcome is likely to embolden bond bulls and further crimp inflation expectations, according to Bloomberg.

    A key reason for the Fed’s lack of action is that according to Goldman, the Fed’s Summary of Economic Projections is likely to show large upgrades to the growth and unemployment forecasts in recognition of the surprisingly strong data over the last few months, yet not enough for any hawkish surprise: “we expect that the median projection will still show an unemployment rate modestly above the longer-run rate and inflation just below 2% even at the end of the forecast horizon in 2023, a bit short of the conditions that we expect to eventually trigger liftoff.”

    To some, such as Jefferies chief economist Aneta Markowska, this is a problem: “The market definitely needs more from the Fed now,” she told Bloomberg. “The Fed will be undershooting on inflation for the better part of four years, so why wait to do more? And inflation expectations have already been fading.”

    But not everyone agrees, and in a Sunday note from Morgan Stanley’s chief economist Ellen Zentner, she writes that “This Time Is Different”, and that “the central bank is now more likely to achieve its desired inflation target in the current cycle. If it does, this new framework may well be Chair Powell’s legacy.”

    We could go on and on about whether what comes next is deflation or inflation, but since we will probably have to write about that tomorrow, the day after, the after that, and so on, below we republish Zentner’s full note on the off chance that she is right and the Fed does actually succeed where it has failed so dismally for the past decade.

    The Fed’s New Framework: This Time Is Different

    On August 27, Chair Powell and the Federal Open Market Committee made history, rolling out a new inflation-targeting framework. I believe that the central bank is now more likely to achieve its desired inflation target in the current cycle. If it does, this new framework may well be Chair Powell’s legacy.

    The Fed replaced its old symmetric 2% inflation target with a flexible average inflation-targeting framework. It emphasizes that the Fed will target an inflation overshoot in recoveries following inflation shortfalls during downturns. This has important implications for economic and policy outcomes over the medium term. Most specifically, under Powell’s leadership the Fed has now solidified a more dovish path than in previous recoveries. Under the new outcome-based approach, the Fed needs evidence of inflation before raising rates, rather than simply forecasting that it will rise. Had this policy framework been in place in the last cycle, with inflation and unemployment evolving exactly as they did, the Fed might have delayed lift-off to as late as 2018, with its overall policy stance more accommodative for longer.

    It’s not just policy outcomes that are likely to differ. A change in monetary policy dynamics is likely to feed through to inflation expectations, which are relevant to price- and wage-setting. This would make it more likely that the Fed can achieve its inflation targets over the current cycle and that average 2% inflation outcomes are attainable over time. To be sure, the change in the Fed’s framework makes us even more confident that inflation will be structurally higher over this cycle and beyond.

    How quickly the output and employment gaps close in this cycle will play a major role in determining when the first rate hike comes. Moreover, we believe that to demonstrate their commitment to the new strategy, policy-makers won’t rush to raise rates at the first sign of success. The longer-term simulations we laid out in Life After Covid suggest that the kind of labor market and inflation conditions the Fed would want to see sustained could be in place for the Fed to consider raising rates by the first half of 2024, sooner should the V-shaped recovery continue to run ahead of expectations.

    Long before the first rate hike, the Fed should see the necessary conditions to start taking its foot off the gas. Working backwards, we think the Fed will want to end its asset purchases around a year before the first rate hike. This suggests that asset purchases would stop in early 2023, but tapering is likely to come in mid-2022. Chair Powell has time and again displayed an affinity for long-dated forewarning of Fed action to market participants, so starting to slow the pace of asset purchases around mid-2022 means we should get guidance that tapering is on the horizon by the December 2021 FOMC meeting.

    Would keeping rates at the effective lower bound for that long pose risks to financial stability? Arguably, markets remain frothy. I would highlight the reciprocal relationship between the Fed and financial conditions underpinned by market expectations. The market is pricing in zero Fed rate hikes through 2023, something we think the Fed will confirm in its ‘dot plot’ this week. Hence, market conditions today already reflect an expectation of ultra-low rates for years to come. While some FOMC members think that raising rates can battle signs of financial instability, the vast majority believe that this job is better left to macroprudential tools. Still, emerging signs of financial instability would pose a challenge for the Fed, particularly if they require quick action.

    Well before the framework change bears fruit, the FOMC is meeting this week. Current financial conditions are supportive of the inflation outlook, and Chair Powell thinks that policy is in “good stead”. I expect changes to the statement to be cosmetic, intended to align the language with the new framework. But make no mistake, further accommodation will be easy for the Fed if it’s needed. One catalyst could be the failure of Congress to pass CARES 2, and our US public policy strategists see the probability of passage dwindling without negotiating progress in the near term.

    The economy has not suffered the full effects of Covid-19 because fiscal policy plugged the hole in income created by job losses. Without an extension of that support, the economy would need to hit the reset button to align with high rates of unemployment and all they entail. What’s more, the failure of Congress to pass support for state and local governments would accelerate layoffs, which could be enough to halt improvement in the unemployment rate.

    Financial markets aren’t likely to appreciate this scenario, which could lead to sustained tightening in financial conditions. Tighter financial conditions, coupled with a deteriorating labor market outlook, are developments the Fed would take steps to offset. In our view, these actions most certainly would include increasing the size and duration of its asset purchases.

  • America's Color Revolution
    America’s Color Revolution

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 21:30

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    I have provided evidence that the military/security complex, using the media and the Democrats, intends to turn the November election into a color revolution – here, here, and here.  

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    The CIA is very experienced at color revolutions, having pulled them off in a number of countries where the existing government did not suit the CIA.  As we have known  since CIA Director John Brennan’s denunciations of President Trump, Trump doesn’t suit the CIA either. As far as the CIA is concerned, Trump is no different from Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Charles de Gaulle, Manuel Zelaya, Evo Morales, Viktor Yanukovych, and a large number of others.  

    Russiagate was a coup that failed, followed by the failed Impeachgate coup.  Faced with Trump’s reelection and the realization that upon reelection Trump will be able to deal with the treason against him, the Deep State has decided to take him out with a color revolution.

    The evidence of a color revolution in the works is abundantly supplied by CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, NPR, Washington Post and numerous Internet sites funded by the CIA and the foundations and corporations through which it operates, all of which are committed to Trump’s ejection from the Oval Office.  The American public does not realize the extent to which the institutions of a free society have been penetrated and turned against freedom. All of these media organizations are establishing the story in the mind of Americans that Trump will not leave office when he loses or steals the election and must be driven out. 

    Emails are arriving from readers in the UK and Europe reporting that the British and European media are at work preparing the acceptability of the CIA’s color revolution against President Trump.  It is taken for granted by both media and politicians in Europe and the UK that Trump cannot win reelection because he:

    (1) is a Putin agent,

    (2) abuses the power of his office,

    (3) represents racist “Trump Deplorables,”

    (4) is a womanizer – “grab them by the pussy,”

    (5) is responsible for America leading the world in Covid-19 cases and deaths,

    (6) doesn’t support NATO (a sinecure for many Europeans),

    (7) is an outsider and not a member of The Establishment and “is not like us,”

    (8) “has orange hair” (orange is considered a low class color). 

    You can add your own to the list.

    The scenarios for what the American, British, and European media assume to be a necessary color revolution  to drive Trump from office are:

    1. Trump loses the election, refuses to leave office and must be dislodged or democracy is lost.

    2. Trump wins the election by fraud and must be dislodged or democracy is lost.

    The scenarios do not accommodate Trump actually winning the election by the vote of the people.  That outcome is outside the possibilities.

    According to the media, Trump can only lose or steal the election.

    With Antifa and Black Lives Matter now experienced in violent protests, they will be unleashed anew on American cities when there is news of a Trump election victory. The media will explain the violence as necessary to free us from a tyrant and egg on the violence, as will the Democrat Party.  The CIA will be certain that the violence is well funded.

    Trump, isolated in his own government, which has failed to bring charges against the Obama regime officials who tried to frame the President of the United States and drive him from office—Barr and Durham represent The Establishment, not the President or law—will be cut off from Twitter, Facebook and from the print and TV media.  All Americans and the world will hear is that Trump lost and must go or Trump won by vote fraud and must go. It will be impossible for Trump or anyone to refute the charges. The weak-minded, weak-willed Republicans will collapse. Republicans are not people capable of combat. Republicans believe that to disparage the military/security complex is unpatriotic. Thus, they are sitting ducks.

    The CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, Radio Liberty, etc., have used color revolution against others who stood in the way of the American National Security State. Only Maduro has survived them.  So far.

    The Secret Service cooperated with the CIA and the Joint Chiefs in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. What is a reelected President Trump going to do when the Secret Service refuses to repel Antifa and Black Lives Matter when they breach White House Security?  There is no doubt whatsoever that the Secret Service is penetrated by the CIA.  How else could President Kennedy have been assassinated?  

    American Democracy is on the verge of being ended for all times, and the world media will herald the event as the successful overthrowing of a tyrant.  

  • California Offers Path For Inmate Firefighters To Expunge Criminal Records
    California Offers Path For Inmate Firefighters To Expunge Criminal Records

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 21:00

    California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law legislation which would expunge criminal convictions for inmate firefighters so they can qualify for civilian firefighting jobs after their release from prison.

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    Prisoners from the McCain inmate crew from San Diego, Calif., prepare to clear brush from a road on Oct. 11, 2017 in Calistoga, Calif. Ben Margot:AP

    “Inmates who have stood on the frontlines, battling historic fires should not be denied the right to later become a professional firefighter,” Newsom, as he signed the law on Friday which allows prisoners to petition courts to expunge their convictions after receiving “valuable training and place themselves in danger assisting firefighters to defend the life and property of Californians.”

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    The law would also allow inmate firefighters to qualify for paramedic certification, a requirement by civilian fire departments which prevents those with convictions from achieving.

    “Rehabilitation without strategies to ensure the formerly incarcerated have a career is a pathway to recidivism,” said Democratic Assemblywoman Eloise Reyes, who added “We must get serious about providing pathways for those that show the determination to turn their lives around.”

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    Approximately 2,200 California inmates serve on the front lines of the state’s increasingly frequent and destructive blazes, according to the Sacramento Bee. Overall, the program has 3,100 inmates stationed at minimum security facilities across 27 counties.

    To put it in context, Cal Fire has approximately 6,500 year-round employees, which swells to around 9,000 during fire season. Inmates earn between $2 and $5 per day, plus $1 per hour while fighting a fire.

  • "I've Never Seen Anything Like This": Shippers Using West Coast Ports Can't Book Rail On BNSF And Union Pacific
    “I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This”: Shippers Using West Coast Ports Can’t Book Rail On BNSF And Union Pacific

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 20:30

    By Stas Margaronis of AJot Insights

    A Northern California logistics consultant was unable to book containers on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) or Union Pacific (UP) railroads for the first week of September going to and from U.S. West Coast ports and Midwest destinations.

    The consultant said, “I have been working in the industry for thirty years and I have never seen anything like this. It’s weird.”

    The result is that importers of low value products being shipped by containers such as tee shirts would be at an economic disadvantage transporting containers by truck as opposed to by rail between U.S. West Coast ports and Midwest destinations, because of the higher cost.

    The consultant explained that there is a huge shortage of rail capacity: “There are no rail cars and there are no chassis.”

    The consultant, who is not identified, was contracted to research container rail bookings on the UP and BNSF to and from U.S. West Coast ports including:

    • Los Angeles
    • Long Beach
    • Oakland
    • Seattle

    The result of the research was that: “The railroads will not take any bookings right now and so all the containers going to and from the West Coast to places such as Chicago and Memphis must go by truck.”

    The consultant cited the following trucking rates per container as examples:

    • Los Angeles/ Long Beach to Chicago: $7000.
    • LA/LB to New Berlin, Wisconsin: $6,700.
    • LA/LB to Nashville, Tennessee: $7,200.
    • LA/LB to Dallas, Texas: $5000.
    • LA/LB to Jacksonville, Florida: $8,800.

    The consultant said that in the past it had been possible to truck a container coast-to-coast for $2,000: “But those days are gone.”

    In addition, “In the good old days you could ship a container from the West Coast to Chicago or Memphis by rail for $1000 dollars.”

    The research found one exception. It was possible to ship a container on a COSCO vessel to Shanghai from Memphis, Tennessee via the Port of Prince Rupert, British Columbia utilizing the Canadian National Railway.

    The problem: “The travel time was over twenty-one days which is way too slow.”

    However, rail intermodal moves are a complex affair, particularly when there is a significant freight imbalance as there is at the moment on the West Coast. A BNSF spokesman told AJOT, “The claim that we have a lack of railcar capacity for international shipments is inaccurate. BNSF is open for business and ready to receive all freight from ocean carriers at the West Coast ports. We have a railcar fleet in excess of demand and have sufficient locomotives, equipment and people across our network to handle current and additional volumes. As always, we are in constant communication with our customers and remain focused on meeting their shipment needs.”

    And a UP spokeswoman referred AJOT to an August 26th statement by Kenny Rocker, executive vice president, Marketi:

    “We continue to align our resources to handle the increase in demand and are excited to build on the positive momentum we’re seeing this month. And to specifically address the surge of intermodal demand, we are modifying our ingate windows at several intermodal terminals across our network to help manage gate and ramp fluidity. We continue to evaluate our terminal activity and will make any necessary adjustments to accommodate your needs and, at the same time, deliver the safe and reliable service you expect.”

    On August 24th, the heads of the Surface Transportation Board (STB) and the Federal Railway Administration (FRA) sent identical letters to the heads of the leading U.S. railroads, including the Union Pacific (UP) and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) expressing concerns about the adequacy of U.S. railroad service and the adequacy of personnel to transport freight.

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    The letter, signed by Federal Railroad Administrator Ron Batory and Surface Transportation Board Chair Ann Begeman read as follows:

    “Recently, however, we have been made aware of service issues, including missed industrial switches and excessively late or annulled trains due to crew availability issues. As you know, with both increasing intermodal and carload volumes and a projected robust harvest fast approaching, railroad employee availability, together with sufficient equipment resourcing, is essential for safe, fluid rail service in support of the nation’s economic recovery. Given the challenges related to changing demand patterns and operating conditions, increased communication and transparency with rail shippers is especially important to ensure they have the information needed to plan their businesses and meet their own customers’ needs.”

    Jack Hedge, Executive Director, Utah Inland Port Authority and formerly with the Port of Los Angeles, told AJOT that U.S. West Coast ports are also losing business to the Port of Prince Rupert, British Columbia for containers transported by the Canadian National Railway to and from Chicago and U.S. Midwest destinations: “Imports and exports transiting through the Canadian Port of Prince Rupert and Chicago pay $500 to $1000 less per move than by transporting containers to and from the West Coast ports and Chicago on the UP and BNSF.”

    In an August 27th analysis, Trains Magazine reporter Bill Stephens, contrasted responses of the BNSF and UP to spikes in summer imports at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach:

    “BNSF Railway and Union Pacific are facing the same problem: An unprecedented spike in intermodal traffic that wants to move out of Southern California to Texas, Chicago, and elsewhere in the Midwest … The onslaught of containers and trailers that began in June and continues today followed record declines in April [and] in May due to the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic…”

    Stephens first cited the response of BNSF:

    “As you can imagine, we quickly moved to position resources to be able to handle that increase.” BNSF Chief Operating Officer Katie Farmer told an Intermodal Association of North America webcast earlier this month. “BNSF recalled crews, fired up parked locomotives, and pulled miles of cars out of storage and sent them west as baretable trains. It added drayage support and parking spaces at its Los Angeles area terminals. And BNSF even flew terminal personnel from Chicago and elsewhere on the system to its terminals in Southern California …”

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    Stephens says UP did not move as fast: “UP took a much more measured approach, even as volume in June jumped 40% in Southern California from one week to the next. UP recalled crews and pulled locomotives and cars from storage, too. But UP did so at its own pace because railroads simply can’t handle such sudden swings in volume, UP Chief Operating Officer Jim Vena explained on the company’s earnings call in July.”

    “ There was no way I was going to flow trains one way and have all the deadheads and extra costs. We took it on a systematic basis, and we’re fluid now,” Vena said …

    Stephens added, “But UP also has used increasingly expensive surcharges in California – first $500 per container, then $1,500, and now a record $3,500, the Journal of Commerce reports – that tell potential low volume customers to hit the highway. This hurts UP’s partners, the intermodal marketing companies it relies on to fill its railroad-supplied containers.”

    Stephens wondered about the different responses: “Why would BNSF move heaven and earth to capture volume while UP aimed to tightly manage its capacity?”

    He says, “The most obvious answer is that UP’s response was straight out of the Precision Scheduled Railroading [PSR] playbook. Container traffic isn’t a high-margin business. Running empty trains, or repositioning empties, increases your costs and burns crews and locomotives while throwing your network out of balance.”

  • Oracle Reportedly Wins Bidding War For TikTok; Microsoft Offer Rejected
    Oracle Reportedly Wins Bidding War For TikTok; Microsoft Offer Rejected

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 20:16

    Update (2000ET): Amazingly, WSJ is reporting that ByteDance has accepted Oracle’s “offer” for TikTok’s US business, which, in reality, is more like a proposal for a licensing deal whereby Oracle will earn money by serving as BD’s “trusted tech partner” in the US.

    The key takeaway: the deal will not be structured as an outright sale, which means Oracle won’t have direct access to TikTok’s “secret sauce” the algorithm responsible for feeding users new content. It’s seen as the key driver of the app’s highly addictive quality.

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    TikTok reportedly has more than 100 million active monthly users.

    To be sure, there’s still one week left until President Trump’s Sept. 20 deadline. A lot could happen between now and then.

    * * *

    Update (1900ET): It’s official. Microsoft just announced that ByteDance has rejected its bid for the US business of TikTok.

    “ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft,” the company said in a statement shared with Bloomberg.

    “We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users, while protecting national security interests,” they added. 

    Most importantly, Microsoft said the company wasn’t asked to make a revised offer, meaning the talks with ByteDance now have apparently concluded.

    Microsoft added that it had factored in the White House’s “national security concerns” to its bid, but didn’t offer too many details beyond that.

    “To do this, we would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for security, privacy, online safety, and combatting disinformation, and we made these principles clear in our August statement. We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas.”

    That leaves Oracle as the only major bidder, aside from a few private investor groups reportedly aiming to take the US business private. But as SCMP advised earlier, the CCP will likely exercise veto power over any final sale.

    * * *

    Update (1636ET): While the SCMP’s message earlier today seemed pretty clear to us, English-language media outlets from the US and Europe have continued to publish updates on the ‘bidding war’ over TikTok’s US business, even as a refusal to part ways with TikTok’s algorithm will likely kill any potential deal.

    The latest update comes from Axios, which – truth be told – hasn’t always had the best track record of accuracy with business-related scoops.

    But this latest report certainly does include some interesting details.

    Axios’s Dan Primack reports that Oracle has now “leapfrogged” the Microsoft-Wal-Mart alliance mostly because it’s the only suitor who has reportedly expressed any interest in potentially buying the business without the core algorithm.

    Oracle is more likely than Microsoft to accept a deal in which it serves more as a cloud services provider than as a traditional parent company.

    • Oracle also is working with certain existing ByteDance shareholders, which could make ByteDance and Beijing feel more confident that they are maintaining a level of control.
    • It also has some very close ties to President Trump, who would need to sign off on any deal. Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison earlier this year held a fundraiser for Trump, and Oracle CEO Safra Catz served on Trump’s 2016 transition team.
    • As a caveat, Microsoft still has much deeper pockets and more consumer tech expertise than does Oracle. If ByteDance opts for a clean break, Microsoft remains its best option.

    The final deadline is a week from Sunday. Oracle founder Larry Ellison has been said to have an edge thanks to his relationship with President Trump.

    * * *

    As both ByteDance and Washington dig in their heels in a dispute over a potential sale of TikTok’s US-focused business, the Chinese tech upstart has just sent out its latest trial balloon in what has become a rapidly escalating game of chicken: The SCMP, a paper with ties to the CCP, is reporting that TikTok’s algorithm will not be sold to an American buyer.

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    Any potential buyer could simply buy TikTok’s US business, and build its own algorithm. But the TikTok algorithm uses advanced AI technology – technology that was recently included in a list of restricted assets that can’t be sold to foreign buyers without state approval.  Beijing has long opposed a deal, though initially it appeared that Beijing would tolerate a sale, at a premium, to be sure, so long as it’s not a “smash and grab” rush job.

    Trump said Thursday that “we’ll either close up TikTok in this country for security reasons, or it will be sold…there will be no extension of the TikTok deadline.”

    Communist Party spokespeople have accused President Trump of trying to bully the company into a sale. Now, the SCMP is saying that the algorithm isn’t for sale, but a western buyer could still purchase “the car, but not the engine.”

    With a looming US deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations, the source said: “The car can be sold, but not the engine.”

    “The company [ByteDance] will not hand out source code to any US buyer, but the technology team of TikTok in the US can develop a new algorithm,” the source told the South China Morning Post.

    The source, who did not want to be identified, said ByteDance had notified US authorities and potential bidders of the decision.

    If US President Donald Trump rejected the condition, there would be no possibility of selling TikTok and the app could turn dark for its American users after the Tuesday deadline for divestment, the source said.

    […]

    The source said the “no algorithm” condition was now the bottom line for any discussions of sales or restructure of TikTok, following the introduction of new Chinese government export controls.

    The possibility of excluding the algorithm from a sale has already reportedly been explored by ByteDance in partnership with its suitors. Right now, that includes Microsoft, Wal-Mart and Oracle.

    Trump has said Sept. 15 is the deadline, but his most recent executive order stipulates Sept. 20 – a week from Sunday – as the deadline.

    The phrasing of Trump’s order doesn’t explicitly make clear the nature of the restrictions facing TikTok if the deadline passes, but many expect that Google and Apple will be banned from hosting the app in their stores, and that the service will be effectively banned in the US, as it has been in India.

    The SCMP explains how the new export-controls imposed by the CCP work, bringing readers through the process of winning approval step by step.

    With its new export control rules, China is showing that it can influence the outcome of this deal in this case – and others like it.

    Any Chinese seller of sensitive technologies such as the push of personalised information based on data analysis has to apply to a provincial level commerce authority, which would have up to 30 working days to approve the deal. If the outline of the deal were approved, the firm could start “substantive negotiations” with potential importers of the restricted technologies.

    The firm would then have to submit any contract for review to the commerce authority, which would have 15 working days to make a decision. If approved, a technology export licence certificate would be issued.

    The approval process could be shorter because local governments have been working to streamline procedures. It would take 19 working days to obtain an export licence certificate in Beijing after the required documents were filed, according to the municipal commerce bureau.

    On Friday, Yan Ligang, head of the Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau, declined to say whether his bureau had received any application from ByteDance about TikTok-related technology exports.

    As the deadline for a sale approaches, we suspect we’ll be seeing a flurry of often-conflicting reports as ByteDance and the administration use the press as a weapon in the Trump Administration’s latest skirmish with China in the name of “national security”, or what Trump’s political opponents have instead tried to frame as Trump shuttering a media company in retaliation for screwing with his rally.

  • China Injects $500 Billion In New Monthly Credit As Surge In US Real Yields Looms
    China Injects $500 Billion In New Monthly Credit As Surge In US Real Yields Looms

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 20:00

    While the financial punditry is preoccupied with the Fed and its $7 trillion balance sheet, whether Powell is purchasing bond ETFs or has enigmatically stopped doing so (as it did in August), and whether the US central bank has any hope of sparking inflation (with or without the help of Congress), what most are forgetting is that when it comes to any global reflationary spark, China – and its $40 trillion financial system which is double that of the US – has been a far more critical driver than the US ever since the financial crisis.

    And so, five months after China injected a record 5.2 trillion yuan ($732 billion) in new total social financing – China’s broadest credit aggregate – in March to offset the catastrophic hit its economy had suffered from the covid pandemic, Beijing once again surprised to the upside when in August China injected a whopping 3.58 trillion yuan into its economy ($520 billion), above the highest Wall Street estimate (1 trillion yuan above the consensus estimate of 2.585 trillion yuan) and the biggest monthly injection since the March record.

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    Here is a breakdown of the latest August credit data:

    • New CNY loans: 1280bn yuan, exp. 1250 billion. Outstanding yuan new loan growth: 13.0% yoy in August, in line with the 13% increase in July 13.0%.
    • Total social financing: 3580bn yuan, vs. consensus: RMB 2585bn.
    • TSF stock growth: 13.4% yoy in August, higher than 13.0% in July. The implied month-on-month growth of TSF stock accelerated to 14.8% from 12.6% in July.
    • M2: 10.4% yoy in August, below the consensus of 10.7% yoy. July, and down from 10.7% yoy in July.

    Some observations:

    • August credit data surprised the market to the upside, although even though the sequential growth of TSF rose to 14.8% mom annualized from 12.6% in July.
    • Among major TSF components, government bonds net issuance contributed the most to the acceleration in August. Corporate bond issuance increased from last month despite higher interbank interest rates, suggesting further growth recovery.

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    • Shadow banking rose after the steep drop in July, as Beijing appears to be easing its crackdown on sources of shadow funding. Banker’s acceptance bills increased RMB 144bn in non-seasonally adjusted terms, reversing the contraction in July. The decline in trusted and entrusted loans remained modest in August. In total some 71 billion yuan in shadow debt was created.

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    • On loan extension, the increase in mid-to-long term loans to households remained relatively strong, consistent with the strong property sales suggested by high frequency indicators. The increase in mid-to-long term loans to non-financial enterprises picked up in August in seasonally adjusted terms.
    • Finally, in an odd divergence, despite the biggest increase in TSY growth since the start of 2018, M2 growth moderated further to 10.4% yoy in August from 10.7% in July. While it remained well above 2019 levels, it begs the question of just where this newly created credit is ending up if not in the broader monetary aggregate.

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    Going forward, September TSF is expected to remain “robust” according to Goldman, on continued government bond issuance. Given the recent growth momentum and credit strength, policymakers are likely to stay on hold. That said, a slowdown in credit growth will likely come in Q4 as government bond issuance is likely to slow and monetary authorities are in no rush to loosen.

    Why does China’s record credit injection in 2020 matter? Because as we showed recently, China’s notorious credit impulse (which as UBS admitted several years ago is the only thing that matters for global reflation), and which is a function of how much credit Beijing creates leads real 10Y yields with a 12 month lead time. As shown in the chart below, a simple correlation suggests that real yields are set to soar by 150bps from their current -1% to approximately 50bps, and that’s assuming China does nothing to further stimulate its economy over the next 6 months.

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    In other words, if this relationship holds – and there is no reason to expect why it shouldn’t we are not about 6 months away from the next major spike in real yields, which while probably not as violent as Stanley Druckenmiller expects with his forecast of 5-10% inflation, will be sufficient to cause another crash in both risk assets and Treasurys, and spark some real confusion within the Fed which by then will have firmly cemented the perception that no matter what happens to inflation or real rates it will not tighten financial conditions.

    Alas, now that China is once again injecting credit in its economy at a furious pace and has even reactivated the shadow banking spigots, it appears that the next spike higher in real rates is scheduled to hit some time in early 2021.

  • From 9/11 To COVID-19: Nineteen Years Of Permanent "Emergency"
    From 9/11 To COVID-19: Nineteen Years Of Permanent “Emergency”

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 19:35

    Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    During March and April of this year – during the early days of the covid-19 panic – each day came to be accompanied by a general feeling of dread. As new emergency orders and decrees rained down from governors, mayors, and faceless health bureaucrats, I wondered, What new awful thing will governments think up today? As business and churches were closed by government edict, politicians increasingly were threatening to arrest and jail ordinary citizens for doing things that were perfectly legal mere days before.

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    Even worse was the new orthodoxy that seemed to immediately spring up. All dissent from the new regime of lockdowns and business seizures was denounced and mocked. We were now all expected to chant new slogans.

    “We’re all in this together. Flatten the curve.”

    There was no sign of any sizable opposition. The courts were silent. So-called due process was abandoned.

    But for those of us who are old enough to remember the dark times that followed the 9/11 attacks, the feelings of dread had a familiarity to them.

    The blind sloganeering, the anger toward dissent, and the obeisance toward politicians who were credited with “keeping us safe” brought back bad old memories.

    They were memories of the days and months and years that followed the 9/11 attacks. These were the days of so many new assaults on basic human freedoms and human rights. They were days when the public was bullied into accepting whatever new scheme politicians were dreaming up in the name of keeping us “safe.”

    In many ways, the current hysteria is even worse than that of the early years of the twenty-first century. It affects the everyday lives of countless Americans in ways the 9/11 panic did not.  But the current crisis is nonetheless very much a continuation of the attitudes and paranoia that surged nineteen years ago.

    Trust the Experts!

    Then, as now, the public was repeatedly instructed to trust the experts and not question government officials in any way. This manifested itself in a couple of ways. First of all, there was new legislation like the so-called Patriot Act, a smorgasbord of new freedom-destroying federal initiatives that would authorize all sorts of new spying and search powers by the federal government. Soon after, of course, came new additional powers, such as the president’s power to declare anyone an “enemy combatant” and subject to torture, imprisonment, and forfeiture of all legal rights.

    Those who objected were denounced as reckless and naïve, and unconcerned for human life. Torture, we were told, was absolutely necessary for public safety. The opposition was said to be unfit to comment on the matter or question federal powers because the “experts”—i.e., CIA personnel, etc.—understood the real dangers.

    The trust-the-experts claim was trotted out again when the Bush administration and the CIA began to collaborate to “prove” that Saddam Hussein was somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks and was harboring “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) to use on Americans. Politicians and bureaucrats went into high gear, creating countless reports, studies, and claims from alleged witnesses showing that the Iraqi regime was just itching to launch its WMDs at innocents around the world.

    The experts, of course, were wrong. Moreover, many were simply lying. There were no WMDs, and Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. But millions of Americans believed the experts, and thus believed the lies.

    And now we see the same thing today. We’re repeatedly ordered to trust the official arbiters of scientific truth. Never mind the fact, however, than many other experts have dissented on a wide variety of topics, from the lethality of covid-19 to the wisdom of lockdowns. But they’re not the real experts, we’re told. Then as now, it’s only acceptable to believe the experts who support untrammeled growth in state power.

    Support the Troops!

    Any outbreak of panic, fear, and uncritical support for despotism requires its own vocabulary. Nowadays we have all sorts of new slogans. These include “we’re all in this together,” “flatten the curve,” “this is the new normal,” “#stayhome,” and “sixfeetapart.”

    Many of the slogans are delivered in a cheerful tone, but they’re really joyless commands, issued to communicate to the hearer that obedience to these declarations is not really optional. Either you obey, or you are essentially a murderer.

    The world of post-9/11 hysteria was similar. We had slogans like “support the troops,” “thank you for your service,” and “if you see something, say something.”

    Other catchphrases weren’t quite at the level of slogans, but they were invoked repeatedly to encourage uncritical acceptance of the official government line. Examples include “they hate us because we’re free,” “you’re with us or your with the terrorists,” and “we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.”

    Due to the lack of social media back then, we didn’t have quite the proliferation of slogans we have now. Had we had hashtags in 2003, it’s likely we would have regularly encountered ones like #globalwaronterror, #wmds, and #supportthetroops.

    The use of these phrases also functioned as a means to “virtue signal.” In 2002, putting a yellow ribbon magnet on one’s car or sporting an American flag lapel pin were ways to publicly show one’s loyalty to the cause and show opposition to one’s less enthusiastic neighbors and relatives who “hate America.”

    The real message behind these phrases and signals, of course, was that we are required to support the regime and its “new normal” whatever it may be. In 2001, that meant supporting new wars while ignoring the Bill of Rights, and turning a blind eye to abuses like CIA torture programs. Today it means calling the cops on your neighbor for not social distancing. It means screaming at people for not wearing a mask. It means blindly trusting the “experts” so long as those experts support unlimited government power.

    Be Always Afraid!

    The “if you see something, say something” slogan was part of a larger effort to remind the public that it should live in a state of constant fear. Maybe your neighbor is plotting to blow you up. It’s better to be safe than sorry: spy on your neighbors for the FBI.

    Many people now forget that in the days immediately following 9/11, Americans were buying gas masks and planning backyard bunkers. The then new Department of Homeland Security in February 2003 advised Americans to prepare for a chemical attack from terrorists:

    Stash away duct tape and pre-measured plastic sheeting for future use. Experts tell us that a safe room inside your house or apartment can help protect you from airborne contaminants for approximately five hours – that could be just enough time for a chemical agent to blow away.

    For those who wanted all the “best” new information on how to prepare, the federal government created the website ready.gov, complete with a section for children called Ready Kids, where kids could learn—in the spirit of the old Duck and Cover videos from the Cold War—how to prepare for an attack from terrorists.

    And then there was the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System. This was a visual aid which allowed the federal government to let us know just how much we should fear terrorism on any given day. Of course, the government always kept the warning level at “elevated” or “high.” It never dropped down to “low,” of course, lest some form of terrorism take place on that day and the “experts” look like they were asleep at the switch.

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    Today, of course, we have countless websites, models, and news stories devoted to reminding the public that it must constantly fear covid-19 infection. Were there a color-coded alert system for the current crisis, we can be quite confident it would be set each day to “high” or “severe.” As with the 9/11 panic, this all serves to encourage unquestioning obedience to government authorities and to send the message there is no time for political debate, dissent, or even due process. Our “leaders” keep us safe and we must defer to their judgment completely.

    The media itself remains an accomplice in this. Then, as now, media pundits and “journalists” side reflexively with officials promoting fear and obedience to the state.

    Living with the Aftermath

    It takes many years for a society to recover from fits of panic and paranoia such as these. Nineteen years after 9/11, the federal government still has the power to spy on law-abiding Americans with impunity. It still has the power to simply assassinate American citizens—including children—without any due process. American police have been militarized with “surplus” military hardware from various failed and failing wars. The taxpayers will still be paying interest on the trillions of dollars spent on disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan decades from now. Thousands of American troops died for nothing in conflicts that have done nothing to make any American safer. (Hundreds of thousands of innocent foreigners have died in those same conflicts.)

    Thanks to the reaction to 9/11, governments in the US are now far larger, far more expensive, and far less limited by laws and constitutions than in the past. This is what happens when a country believes itself to be in a constant state of emergency. Due process is out the window. Governments get away with far more than would have been the case otherwise.

    This process, which was so greatly accelerated after 9/11, has now been supercharged by the current panic of covid-19. Government officials issue “laws” and decrees without any debate and without any due process. Americans are ruined, arrested, destroyed, and humiliated in the name of “safety.” Those who dissent and seek to limit the regime’s powers are silenced, threatened, arrested, shouted down, and ignored.

    This is America in a state of permanent emergency. The justification for the regime’s ever growing power changes over time. But the results are the same.

  • Russia Sends Elite Airborne Troops To Belarus For Drills As Putin Hosts Embattled Lukashenko
    Russia Sends Elite Airborne Troops To Belarus For Drills As Putin Hosts Embattled Lukashenko

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 19:10

    Russian state media reports that the country’s airborne forces will be deployed to Belarus for joint military drills from Monday through September 25. 

    Despite the ‘Slavic Fraternity’ drills being an annual pre-planned event hosted by Belarusian armed forces, the deployment comes at an intensifying moment of continued mass anti-Lukashenko protests after denunciations by the opposition that the Aug.9 national election was “rigged”. 

    “In accordance with the schedule of international events for 2020, the planned joint Belarusian-Russian tactical exercise Slavic Fraternity, which has been held annually since 2015, will be held from 14 to 25 September at the Brestsky training ground in Belarus”, the Russian defense ministry said over the weekend. 

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    Image source: RDM/Sputnik 

    It total Russia is expected to send about 300 troops among its elite Pskov division along with military hardware for the joint drills.

    Crucially it comes after Minsk has again charged that “NATO is at the gates” in neighboring Lithuania, where it’s been confirmed that American tanks are participating in pre-scheduled exercises there. 

    Viktor Khrenin, the Belarusian minister of defense, said on Saturday:

    “The movement of NATO troops is taking place in territory adjacent to us, within the framework of the Enhanced Forward Presence and Atlantic Resolve operations. In particular, the 2nd Battalion of the 69th Armor Regiment is being deployed to the Pabrade training ground [in Lithuania], 15 kilometers from our border.”

    The defense minister added, “The fact that about 500 people, 29 tanks, and 43 Bradley Fighting Vehicles will be in such close proximity to our border cannot do anything but worry us.”

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    Meanwhile, opposition activists – of which 250 were reportedly arrested in the Belarusian capital Sunday amid more mass protests – have charged that Putin is treating the country as a “Russian province” akin to Soviet times. 

    The Guardian and others reported numbers of up to 100,000 protesters in Minsk on Sunday, on the eve of a much-anticipated meeting between Presidents Lukashenko and Putin on Monday in Sochi. The embattled Belarusian president, now in his sixth term, will seek greater public backing by Putin.

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    Interestingly, Serbia was expected to take part in this week’s military games in Belarus, but has backed out based on its policy of wanting to display greater neutrality, but also under intense pressure from the EU.

  • Australia Is A Full Scale Pilot Test For The New World Order
    Australia Is A Full Scale Pilot Test For The New World Order

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 18:45

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    Several journalists and content creators have noticed that Australia looks like the most totalitarian police state that has existed in recent history.  It has become a full-scale pilot test for the elitists to see how well they can implement the New World Order.

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    Australians have been subjected to some of the most horrendous basic human rights and dignity violations during this entire scamdemic.

    The elitists are using Australia to test out these authoritarian measures, such as getting the public used to a police state in which the military and police both patrol the streets ready to commit violence against other humans for refusing to quarantine when not sick or not wearing their New World Order issued muzzle…I mean, face mask.

    “These guys know full well what they are doing. They are psychopaths, but they aren’t stupid,” says Brian in the above video. The politicians are redistributing both wealth and power away from the public and consolidating it into their own hands. We are in big trouble if we cannot get the military and the police who are committing violence on behalf of the tyrants to realize what they are doing to humanity.

    All of this is over 17 new cases of COVID-19. This absolutely horrifying that people continue to buy this scam.

    “Heavy-handed tyranny and oppression is happening everywhere,” Brian adds.

    If you don’t think this is coming back to the United States in the form of a second lockdown, think again.  The media has been preparing us for a “dark winter” and a “second wave” since the first false wave happened.

    Wake up. Time is now extremely short. If you don’t have food or water, now is the time to get what you can. If you don’t have emergency plans, now is the time to make some with your family.  If you are already well prepared for any disaster, the best thing you can do is to stay alert and fearless.  Don’t live a life terrified (they enslave you with your fear), but make sure you know what’s going on. The best preparedness plan includes one of awareness of this situation we’ve found ourselves in today.

  • Unhappy With SoftBank's Stock Price, Masa Son Reportedly Considering Taking Company Private
    Unhappy With SoftBank’s Stock Price, Masa Son Reportedly Considering Taking Company Private

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 18:20

    Just like Donald Trump, SoftBank’s Masa Son is especially sensitive about stock prices and one in particular: that of his own company, the second largest in Japan after Toyota. And, as we explained yesterday, Masa Son did not take to the recent slide in SoftBank’s stock price kindly: as a reminder, SoftBank tumbled following news that it was the company behind the August gamma meltup (with call-buying retail investors coming along for the ride), leading to “intense shareholder scrutiny of SoftBank’s recent aggressive bets on US technology stocks” and even the nickname the “Nasdaq whale.”

    In response, SoftBank promptly leaked to Bloomberg that it was “reconsidering” its option strategy approach, although as even Bloomberg admitted, it was not clear “what changes might be made.”

    It gets even more confusing because as the FT reports today, “the company sees itself increasingly as an investor and asset manager rather than a direct operator of businesses as it has been for its 39-year history” which as analysts noted, was the very reason why SoftBank’s shares were pummeled as investors prompted disapproved of Masa Son’s drift from his core “competency” (it remains to be seen just how competent he is in offloading his dozens of private portfolio companies at a profit).

    And so, as the FT also reported on Sunday,  SoftBank “executives” – read Masa Son – clearly displeased with the market’s reaction to the news it had successfully sparked a major market gamma squeeze sending tech names and the S&P to all time high generating a reported $4 billion in profits in the process, are now considering taking the Japanese technology group private as the company seeks a new strategy after disposing of several large assets, including the just announced upcoming  sale of Arm to Nvidia in a cash-and-stock sale expected to value Arm at about $40 billion.

    The discussions have been driven by frustrations over what else: the company’s “low” stock price – it is down a little over 10% so far in 2020  – and the company’s $115 billion public valuation, which despite the 2nd largest buyback program after Apple, continues to trade at a substantial discount to the value of its individual holdings – which reached as much as 73% during tne March lows – something which Masa Son harps on during every SoftBank earnings call.

    Adding insult to injury, the stock price of SoftBank Corp has underperformed Japan’s Nikkei 225 index and is also below the 1,500 yen price at which it sold units in its 2018 IPO, which to this day remains Japan’s biggest-ever stock market listing, and was widely regarded at the time as finalizing the group’s transition from domestic telecommunications company to what Reuters dubbed “a monolithic global tech investor.”

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    Yet since then SoftBank has faced a host of challenges including losses on investments made by its $100 billion Vision Fund, activist pressure from hedge fund Elliott Management and questions regarding significant option purchases during the recent run-up in the U.S. stock market.

    According to the FT, the talks on taking SoftBank private have been speeded up due to number of fundamental changes to SoftBank’s business strategy to become a long-term investor in businesses rather than a manager of companies, although even there problems have emerged. SoftBank’s recent investment track record has been mediocre at best, including a particularly large bet on the collapsed office provider WeWork, resulting in SoftBank reporting an $18 billion loss at the Vision Fund in May, pushing the conglomerate to a record loss.

    It’s unclear just how or who could possibly fund such a massive transaction, although that’s probably not the right question; the real question that should be asked is why is SoftBank increasingly following in the footsteps of that other “questionable” company, Tesla, which readers will recall had “funding secured” for an MBO at $420, only for this to turn out to be a tweeted lie by the then mind-altered CEO. In fact, what is likely going on is that just like Elon Musk, Masa Son appears to be increasingly engaged in either financial engineering – SoftBank is nearing the end of an asset sale programme launched in March that was meant to fund $41bn in share buybacks and debt repayments – and massive buybacks ever since the public’s faith in its investing acumen was shattered, or – when that fails – pivoting the narrative and pursuing other get rich schemes: like an MBO. That said, if Son truly was looking to do an MBO, he would have done so quickly and without leaking the news first, as any deal just became more expensive once the stock prices rises to reflect the latest news (which is likely all Masa Son intended anyway).

    Additionally, a potential delisting of SoftBank, which Masayoshi has flirted with multiple times the past, would strike a heavy blow to the Tokyo stock market, where the company represents the closest business Japan has to Silicon Valley titans, according to the FT, because as noted above, SoftBank is the second-heaviest weighted stock in the Nikkei 225 Average.

    There is another way that Masa Son and Elon are similar: the Japanese tech mogul has borrowed heavily against his shares and is desperate to get the stock price higher. In fact, the company’s asset disposal program was launched in March after SoftBank shares fell to their lowest levels since 2016 sparking whispers that Son could be facing a margin call. Meanwhile, SoftBank’s debt stood at $115bn before the asset sales.

    Finally, and also just like Tesla, SoftBank has come under criticism over standards of corporate governance.

    In short, one almost wonders when @masason will start tweeting daily in hopes of pushing up his stock price.

    In the end, most likely nothing will happen. According to the FT report, “internal opposition to a management buyout remains strong, particularly in Japan where there is strong prestige attached to being a listed company.” Meanwhile, analysts and investors have said they regard the chances of an MBO as low, as a large part of the relationship that SoftBank has with its megabank lenders in Japan hinges upon its status as one of the country’s most valuable listed companies. Listed status as a company also remains critical in Japan to attracting the best graduates.

  • Facebook And FBI Wage Infowar On West Coast Wildfire Arson "Conspiracy Theories"
    Facebook And FBI Wage Infowar On West Coast Wildfire Arson “Conspiracy Theories”

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 17:55

    A top Facebook official tweeted Saturday it would delete posts alleging leftist organizations started wildfires in Oregon and other Western states after the FBI said arson reports are “conspiracy theories,” reported RT News. 

    “We are removing false claims that certain groups started the wildfires in Oregon. This is based on confirmation from law enforcement that these rumors are forcing local fire and police agencies to divert resources from fighting the fires and protecting the public,” Andy Stone, policy communications manager at Facebook, tweeted on Saturday evening. 

    Stone continued, “This is consistent with our past efforts to remove content that could lead to imminent harm given the possible risk to human life as the fires rage on.” 

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    Stone’s announcement came after several organizations, including the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon, published warnings on various social media channels about speculation that extremists ignited wildfires. 

    “Rumors spread just like wildfire, and now our 9-1-1 dispatchers and professional staff are being overrun with requests for information and inquiries on an UNTRUE rumor that 6 Antifa members have been arrested for setting fires,” the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office said. “THIS IS NOT TRUE! Unfortunately, people are spreading this rumor and it is causing problems.”

    On Friday, the FBI Portland bureau said, “reports that extremists are setting wildfires in Oregon are untrue.” 

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    The FBI even called some of the arson reports “conspiracy theories.” 

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    As wildfires in Oregon and California have been labled nothing short of “historic” (see: here & here), Reuters notes arson investigators had been called to investigate the fires. Last week, Oregon State Trooper Ryan Burke tweeted a 36-year-old “Puyallup resident” who was arrested on Wednesday (Sept. 9) for starting a fire on the “median on SR-167.” 

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    According to That Oregon Life, here are four other arson incidents across Oregon, Washington, and California: 

    1. Police arrested a man for arson over Sweet Creek Fires. Lane County Police announcement.  Oregonian notes “A 44-year-old man was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of arson in a wildfire that has burned nearly 400 acres and prompted evacuations west of Eugene, deputies say.” 

    2. Arson arrest in Spokane, WA:  KHQ-TV 6 News is reporting that police have arrested a woman for multiple arson incidences; “According to Spokane Police, Officer Mohondro arrived on scene he saw some grass and a pallet on fire outside of a commercial business… The same officer spotted another fire a few blocks away. SPD said the fire was next to an old oil drum under a tree which gave the fire the potential to explode into something much larger was very high.”

    3. Arson arrest in California fire: San Fransisco Chronicle reports, “Ivan Geronimo Gomez, 31, of Fresno was arrested and booked into Monterey County Jail on Aug. 19 after state park rangers detained him near the fire’s origin point, the Sheriff’s Office said. Sheriff’s detectives arrested him on suspicion of five charges, including arson of forestland, setting his bail at $2 million. Jail records list illegal marijuana cultivation as another charge, along with throwing objects at a vehicle with intent to cause great bodily harm, battery and exhibiting a deadly weapon that wasn’t a gun.”

    4. Police arrest a man in Lane County: The Hill reports, “Authorities in southern Oregon charged a 44-year-old man, Jason Maas, with first-degree arson after he allegedly started a fire in the woods near the frisbee golf course at Dexter State Recreation Area on Wednesday.” 

    Another arson incident? 

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    But, Facebook and the FBI have unleashed an infowar to make sure no left-leaning groups are blamed for the wildfires in the western US, this allows the liberal media to preserve the narrative that wildfires are a result of “climate damn emergencies” (and not due to La Nina’s cyclical heatwave or environmentalism’s impact on forest management).   

    Meanwhile, on the ground – the threat of arson and looting appears to be such a significant threat that signs have been plastered across towns in Oregon, indicating “arsonist” and “looters” will be shot. 

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    In a separate incident, one Twitter user tweets: 

    “Right wing militia members in Oregon who are convinced anti-fascists set fire to their town set up checkpoints with guns on roads ppl were using to flee. Who had this on their 2020 bingo card?” 

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    Finally, one wonders why Facebook and the FBI have been so quick and vociferous in shutting down any suggestion that these “climate fires” (as Gov Inslee has now taken to calling them) are being created by organized arson attacks… especially as numerous liberal media and political types raise the red flag of a “climate damn emergency” and “an angry mother earth” as being to blame (with legislation to combat the “climate crisis” among the top agenda items).

  • ​​​​​​​DEA Busts Drug 'Superhighway' Across America, Seizes 28,000 Pounds Of Meth
    ​​​​​​​DEA Busts Drug ‘Superhighway’ Across America, Seizes 28,000 Pounds Of Meth

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 17:30

    U.S. Attorney William Barr and Drug Enforcement Administration Acting Administrator Timothy Shea announced Thursday, at a press conference in Phoenix, a large meth bust across the U.S., seizing thousands of pounds of methamphetamine, tens of millions of dollars, and hundreds of firearms. 

    The operation was a six-month-long effort to bring down a ‘meth superhighway’ that was controlled by Mexican cartels and stretched across the U.S. 

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    The operation included 750 investigations across ‘meth hubs’ in Atlanta, Dallas, El Paso, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Phoenix, San Diego, and St. Louis, resulting in 1,840 arrests, the seizure of 28,560 pounds of methamphetamine, 284 firearms and $43.3 million in drug profits.

    DEA showcased the dugs and weapons seized in the busts. 

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    Barr is holding a weapon seized from one of the busts. 

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    Here are more drugs and weapons. 

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    “In the months leading up to the launch of Operation Crystal Shield, communities across the United States experienced a surge of methamphetamine,” Shea said. 

    “The COVID pandemic locked down many communities and impacted legitimate businesses, but the drug trade continued. Under difficult conditions, DEA – along with our federal, state, and local partners – never stopped working as we helped stem the flow of methamphetamine onto our streets, even as violent drug traffickers sought new ways to smuggle it into the United States. The success of Operation Crystal Shield reflects the devotion of DEA and our partners to protect our communities from the scourge of drug trafficking and violent crime under any circumstances,” he said. 

    Special Agent in Charge William J. Callahan, head of the St. Louis Division, said: 

    “Our efforts in this operation focused on the transshipment of methamphetamine through the highways that cross through the Midwest,” Callahan said. 

    Adding that, “being in the heart of the country means that drug traffickers are using the highway system to move their drugs from the Southwest border, not only to the cities located in our region but also to those on the East Coast. Drug traffickers transport their illegally-gained cash back to Mexico, and the seizure of those funds severely impacts the command and control of the drug organization.”

    Callahan said meth trafficking was also conducted through “the U.S. Postal Service and other commercial parcel shipping businesses.”

    “Our investigators partnered with federal, state, and local law enforcement throughout the region to discover traffickers who utilized this method, and disrupt the methamphetamine supply,” he said.

    The DEA has reported domestic seizures (see: here) of meth increased 127% between 2017-19, from 49,507 pounds to 112,146 pounds.

    The Trump administration has made a concerted effort among federal, state, and local leaders to combat drug traffickers and criminal cartels for violating U.S. sovereignty via breaching the southern border. 

  • Maldives Offers $52,000 Remote Office 'Work From Paradise' Package
    Maldives Offers $52,000 Remote Office ‘Work From Paradise’ Package

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 17:05

    The Maldives – the cluster of paradise islands located in the Indian Ocean – is taking ambitious steps to jump start tourism again amid the global pandemic, though all inbound visitors have to show a negative COVID-19 test. 

    One local resort, The Nautilus Maldives, is even offering a “Workation Package” to attract remote workers, launching a $23,250 luxury remote working package. And the temporary office hideaway can be booked for up to 21 days, which would set a person back $52,000. 

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    Via The Nautilus Maldives 

    According to CNN, this includes a desk with an ocean view, a personal assistant looking after every need, and a steady supply of refreshments, as well as daily yoga class and sunset cruises.

    And of course the whopping price tag also includes a steady stream of cocktails and “breakfast anywhere, anytime”. 

    The ultimate work from paradise experience also includes the availability of a desk and work station on a sandbar off the private island’s beach for up to a few hours a day.

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    Via The Nautilus Maldives 

    Guests are guaranteed “incredible seclusion” and all inclusive everything taken care of, down to laundry. 

    The full three-week ‘work from paradise’ stay breaks down to a “deal” of almost $2,500 a day. However, a two week package is also available at $37,850 total.

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    Illustrative file image, luxury villa via Premier Maldives.

    This also of course includes being set up with a phone, wireless printer, fax machine, scanner, portable projector and anything else required of a modern office. 

    For the few who can actually afford this ‘work site’, we doubt too many junior employees back home will be too impressed with their well-payed bosses and executives conducting streaming conference calls from their ‘personal island’ retreat and spectacular scenic backdrop. 

  • US Judge Rules Saudi Royals Must Answer 9/11 Lawsuit Questions
    US Judge Rules Saudi Royals Must Answer 9/11 Lawsuit Questions

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 09/13/2020 – 16:40

    A US Judge has ruled that two members of the Saudi royal family will have to answer questions about the September 11, 2001 attacks, in what attorneys for the victims call a ‘turning point in a long-running lawsuit,’ according to AP.

    U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in a written ruling unsealed late Thursday ordered Saudi Arabia to make the royals — and other Saudi witnesses, including current and former government official — available for depositions.

    It was unclear how and when the witnesses will be deposed, but the decision means “we can start uncovering what they know,” plaintiff’s attorney Jim Kreindler said Friday. –AP

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    Bandar (left) has been close to multiple US administrations

    One of the two ordered to give depositions is Prince Bandar bin Sultan – a former Saudi intelligence chief who was the kingdom’s US ambassador from 1983 to 2005, according to court papers. His involvement in world events ranges from Reagan’s Nicaraguan Contra program (including direct involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal), to making the case for the Iraq War as a trusted friend of Bush and Cheney, to directing US-Saudi covert operations overseeing the arming of jihadists in Syria.

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    Former President George W. Bush and Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

    Bandar – who earned a reputation as one of Saudi Arabia’s most famous arms dealers, was detained in the 2017 Saudi “corruption purge,” according to Middle East Eye‘s reporting at the time.

    Meanwhile, per AP:

    Some relatives of Sept. 11 victims claim that agents of Saudi Arabia knowingly supported al-Qaida and its leader at the time, Osama bin Laden, before hijackers crashed planes into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. The nearly 3,000 deaths were commemorated Friday on the 19th anniversary of the attacks. The families are seeking billions of dollars in damages.

    Attorney for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Michael Kellogg, declined comment.

    To read more on Bandar’s alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks, click here.

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