Aug 01

Today’s News 1st August 2017

  • When In Doubt, Nuke China

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via Asia Times,

    A situation in which the US military feels 'unhampered' has precedent – and, as General MacArthur's endeavors in Korea prove, it's something to be afraid of...

    The current collapse of the unipolar world, with the inexorable emergence of a multipolar framework, has enabled a terrifying subplot to run amok – the normalization of the idea of nuclear war.

    The latest exhibit comes in the form of a US admiral assuring everyone he’s ready to follow President Trump’s orders to launch a nuclear missile against China.

    Forget about the fact that a 21st century nuclear war involving great powers will be The Last War. Our admiral – admirably named Swift – is simply preoccupied by democratic minutiae, as in “every member of the US military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic and to obey the officers and the president of the United States as commander and chief appointed over us.”

    So it’s all about loyalty to the President, and civilian control over the military – irrespective of the risk of incinerating untold masses of said civilians, Americans included (as there would be an inevitable Chinese response).

    Swift, once again, to the rescue: “This is core to the American democracy and any time you have a military that is moving away from a focus and an allegiance to civilian control, then we really have a significant problem.”

    It doesn’t matter that the proverbial spokesman on behalf of the US Pacific Fleet – in this case, Charlie Brown (an apt name?) – swiftly engaged in damage control, deriding the premise of the (nuclear) question as “ridiculous.” Both the question and the answer are in fact quite revealing.

    MacArthur’s park is melting in the dark

    To shed extra nuances on “civilian control of the military,” a flashback to September 1950 and the Korean War, with some help from Bruce Cumings and John Halliday’s Korea: The Unknown War, may be far from “ridiculous.” Especially now that factions of the War Party in Washington have been pressing the case for nuking not China but North Korea itself.

    It’s key to remember that by 1950 President Truman had already issued a “civilian control of the military” order to drop two atomic bombs over Japan in 1945 – a historical first.

    Truman had become Vice-President in January 1945. FDR treated him with the utmost disdain. He was clueless about the Manhattan Project. When FDR died he had been Vice-President for only 82 days, and became POTUS knowing absolutely nothing about foreign policy or the new military/nuclear equation.

    PRESIDENT TRUMAN AND GENERAL OF THE ARMY MACARTHUR CONFERENCE: General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Commander-in-Chief, UN Command, greeting President Harry S. Truman upon his arrival at Wake Island for their conference.NARA FILE#: 111-SC-353136

    Truman and MacArthur on Wake Island, 1950. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

    Truman had five years after bombing Japan to learn all about it, on the job. Now the action was on the Korean front. Even before an amphibious landing in Inchon, led by General MacArthur – the greatest since D-Day in Normandy, in 1944 – Truman had authorized MacArthur to advance beyond the 38th parallel. There’s substantial historical debate that MacArthur was not told exactly what to do in detail – as long as he was winning. Fine for a man who was fond of quoting Montgomery: “Generals are never given adequate directives”.

    Still, MacArthur did receive a top secret memorandum from Truman stressing that any operations north of the 38th parallel were authorized only if “there was no entry into North Korea by major Soviet or Chinese Communist forces, no announcements of intended entry, nor a threat to counter our operations militarily”.

    And then, MacArthur received an eyes-only message from Pentagon head George Marshall: “We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel.”

    MacArthur kept going. He was sure China would not intervene in Korea: “If the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be the greatest slaughter.” Well, he was wrong. US forces captured Pyongyang on October 19, 1950. Exactly the same day, no fewer than 250,000 soldiers of the 13th Army Group of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army crossed the Yalu river and entered Korean territory. US intel was clueless about what military historian S.L.A. Marshall described as “a phantom which cast no shadow”.

    The North’s industry and infrastructure was totally destroyed. It’s impossible to understand the actions of the leadership in Pyongyang over these past decades without considering how this human and physical destruction is still very much alive in their minds

    MacArthur progressively ran amok, including calling for nukes to be used on North Korea. He had to go. The question was how. The civilians – Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman – were for it. The Generals – Marshall, Bradly – were against it. But they were also worried that “if MacArthur were not relieved, a large segment of our people would charge that civil authorities no longer controlled the military”.

    Truman had already made up his mind. MacArthur was replaced by Lt. Gen. Ridgway. But the war folly still raged, hostage to the Sino-Soviet “threat” of “communist world domination”. Over two million North Korean civilians were killed. And what General Curtis LeMay – a real- life Dr. Strangelove – later said about bombing Vietnam “back to the stone age” actually was inflicted by the US on North Korea.

    The North’s industry and infrastructure was totally destroyed. It’s impossible to understand the actions of the leadership in Pyongyang over these past decades without considering how this human and physical destruction is still very much alive in their minds.

    So what Admiral Swift actually said, in code, is, if a civilian order comes, the US military will start WWIII (or WWIV, if one counts the Cold War), duly applying the Pentagon’s first-strike doctrine. What Swift did not say is that President Trump also has the power to pull a Truman and fire any run-amok, aspiring MacArthur clone.

     

  • SEC's "ICOs Are Securities" Ruling Proves Bitcoin Has Staying Power

    he SEC shook the blockchain community last week when it issued a report ruling that the $50 million worth of tokens that were stolen last summer as part of a hack on the DAO were securities and should’ve been registered with the SEC. The DAO was a decentralized platform for investing in Ethereum-focused startups that was essentially an early version of the now popular Initial Coin Offerings. The report will likely slow the pace of new ICOs, as fledging company’s comprising a couple of ambitious engineers figure out how, exactly, to go about registering their projects.

    But CoinDesk analyst Noelle Acheson, in a report for the site’s premium subscribers, argued that the ruling’s benefits outweigh the short-term inconvenience that these startups will likely experience as they rush to recruit compliance specialists to vet their offerings and communicate with the SEC.

    By declaring that ICOs should be regulated like securities, the SEC is admitting that they are, indeed, securities. This is a landmark ruling. Since the CFTC first declared bitcoin to be a commodity in 2015, regulators have provided precious few updates to help move the digital currency further down the path of legitimacy. Earlier this summer, the Delaware legislature passed a law officially legalizing the use of blockchain technology in the trading of stocks. Later, the agency issued a registration order to startup called LedgerX, granting it status as an official CFTC Swap Execution Facility, legalizing bitcoin options trading the process.

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    As Acheson writes, “the short-term impact on digital token issuance, assuming their assuming one, will probably instigate some sharp moves…"

    “But there's something else going on here that will end up boosting blockchain development and injecting a welcome dose of innovation into securities issuance and regulation.

     

    It's not so much that the SEC has officially determined that blockchain assets can be considered securities and therefore have to comply with the law. It's that blockchain assets can be considered securities at all.”

    Acheson’s analysis echoes our commentary featured in a report on the initial ruling. As we said, while the SEC's intention to regulate ICOs will probably have an initial chilling effect on the market. Not only is it a blessing in disguise as it will not only validate the blockchain capital-raising mechanism, allowing the entrance of major banks to use it as a fintech alternative to IPOs, but it will also help weed the proliferation of fraudulent schemes that presently are thriving in the grey area of legitimacy.

    By choosing the regulate ICOs, the SEC is opening the door for the coins to eventually be used as collateral for capital markets transactions, a crucial step toward the crypto community’s goal of supplanting fiat currencies. Finally, we posited that the Federal government’s oversight will force companies to tighten cybersecurity controls after hackers tallied $40 million in ill-gotten gains during a series of attacks on ICOs this year.

    “And if blockchain assets can be considered securities, securities can be transformed into blockchain assets.

     

    This takes the Delaware achievement (changing the law to allow registered businesses to issue securities on a blockchain) and magnifies it, sending a signal to all states that a federal regulator is willing to broaden its definition of acceptable transmission methods.”

    The SEC's decision is an important step in a competition to determine which global regulators are leading the process of legitimizing blockchain-based asset and incorporating them into the existing global financial framework is intensifying. Last month, regulators in Switzerland granted a local bank permission to trade cryptocurrencies and incorporate them into the portfolios of its private banking market. As we reported at the time, the decision placed Switzerland at the forefront of the rapidly universe of blockchain finance, and will likely encourage other global regulators, including the SEC and the Fed, to follow suit.

    Acheson posited that the agency’s most recent bitcoin-elated ruling will help repair the damage inflicted on the SEC’s credibility, at least in the eyes of the blockchain community, after it rejected NYSE Arca’s request for a rule change that would’ve used opened the door for the first bitcoin-focused ETF.

    “Entrepreneurs and developers will have more confidence in their project's outlook knowing that it is compliant in multiple jurisdictions, with access to a broader pool of investors.
    In addition, it sends a message to other jurisdictions that blockchain-based assets are not going away. Securities regulators around the world have been intensifying their efforts to catch up with the innovations while fulfilling their mandate of protecting investors. Guidance from the SEC is likely to help.”

    Coincidentally, the SEC ruling has arrived a crucial time for bitcoin and the broader crypto universe, as a group of developers prepares to release an alternative to SegWit, potentially triggering a fork in the bitcoin blockchain that could render some coins worthless. Despite this, bitcoin is higher (up 5%) and the rest of the major virtual currencies lower (down 4%).

    Support for Segwit has climbed above the threshold for adoption, which presently stands at 80% of the network’s hashing rate, according to Blockchain.info. This is an incredibly bullish indicator: As we’ve noted, the post-segwit rally could swiftly carry the digital currency above $3,000 a coin to a fresh all-time high.

  • Anarchy In America: Shot Down Like Dogs In The Street

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
    —William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

    Things are falling apart.

    How much longer we can sustain the fiction that we live in a constitutional republic, I cannot say, but anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.

    We are witnessing the unraveling of the American dream one injustice at a time.

    Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the American people wake up a little more to the grim realization that they have become captives in a prison of their own making. No longer a free people, we are now pushed and prodded and watched over by twitchy, hyper-sensitive, easily-spooked armed guards who care little for the rights, humanity or well-being of those in their care.

    The death toll is mounting. The carnage is heartbreaking. The public’s faith in the government to do its job—which is to protect our freedoms—is deteriorating.

    With alarming regularity, unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by police who shoot first and ask questions later, and all the government does is shrug and promise to do better.

    Things are not getting better.

    Justine Damond is dead. The 40-year-old yoga instructor was shot and killed by Minneapolis police, allegedly because they were startled by a loud noise in the vicinity just as she approached their patrol car. Damond, clad in pajamas, had called 911 to report a possible assault in her neighborhood.

    Ismael Lopez is dead. The 41-year-old auto mechanic was shot and killed by Mississippi police who went to the wrong address looking for a suspect in connection with an aggravated domestic violence case. Police also shot the man’s dog, which had raced out of the house ahead of him.

    Mary Knowlton is dead. The 73-year-old retired librarian was shot and killed by Florida police during a “shoot/don’t shoot” role-playing scenario when police inadvertently used a loaded gun intended for training.

    Sam DuBose is dead. The unarmed 43-year-old rapper was shot in the head and killed by a University of Cincinnati police officer during a traffic stop over a missing front license plate.

    Andrew Scott is dead. Although the 26-year-old homeowner had committed no crime and never fired a single bullet or lifted his firearm against police, he was gunned down by Florida police who were investigating a speeding incident by engaging in a middle-of-the-night “knock and talk” in Scott’s apartment complex.

    Richard Ferretti is dead. The 52-year-old chef was shot and killed by Philadelphia police while trying to find a parking spot. Police had been alerted to investigate a purple Dodge Caravan that was driving “suspiciously” through the neighborhood.

    Fritz Severe is dead. The 46-year-old homeless man was shot five times and killed by Miami police in front of more than 50 schoolchildren attending a nearby summer camp merely because he was seen holding a metal pipe.

    Jordan Edwards is dead. The 15-year-old high school freshman was sitting in the passenger seat of a car driving away from a house party when Dallas police, claiming to have heard gunshots, smashed in the window of the moving car and shot the teenager in the head. Edwards’ two brothers, also in the car, watched him die. No weapons were found.

    Charleena Lyles is dead. The pregnant, 30-year-old mother of four had called the police to report a stolen Xbox video game unit. She was shot and killed by Seattle police after they arrived at her home to find her holding a knife.

    In every one of these scenarios, police could have resorted to less lethal tactics.

    They could have acted with reason and calculation instead of reacting with a killer instinct.

    They could have attempted to de-escalate and defuse whatever perceived “threat” caused them to fear for their lives enough to react with lethal force.

    That police instead chose to fatally resolve these encounters by using their guns on fellow citizens speaks volumes about what is wrong with policing in America today, where police officers are being dressed in the trappings of war, drilled in the deadly art of combat, and trained to look upon “every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making.”

    Remember, to a hammer, all the world looks like a nail.

    We’re not just getting hammered, however.

    We’re getting killed, execution-style.

    It no longer matters whether you’re innocent of any wrongdoing or guilty as sin: when you’re dealing with police who shoot first and ask questions later, due process—the constitutional assurance of a fair trial before an impartial jury—means nothing.

    All the individuals who have been shot and killed by police—fired at three and four and five times in a split second—have already been tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. And in that split second of deciding whether to shoot and where to aim, the nation’s police officers have appointed themselves judge, jury and executioner over their fellow citizens.

    In this way, we’re seen as nothing more than animals and treated as such.

    In fact, we’re being gunned down like dogs.

    Consider that a dog is shot by a police officer “every 98 minutes.”

    The Department of Justice estimates that at least 25 dogs are killed by police every day. ?

    Spike, a 70-pound pit bull, was shot by NYPD police when they encountered him in the hallway of an apartment building in the Bronx. Surveillance footage shows the dog, tail wagging, right before an officer shot him in the head at pointblank range.

    Arzy, a 14-month-old Newfoundland, Labrador and golden retriever mix, was shot between the eyes by a Louisiana police officer. The dog had been secured on a four-foot leash at the time he was shot. An independent witness testified that the dog never gave the officer any provocation to shoot him.

    Seven, a St. Bernard, was shot repeatedly by Connecticut police in the presence of the dog’s 12-year-old owner. Police, investigating an erroneous tip, had entered the property—without a warrant—where the dog and her owner had been playing in the backyard, causing the dog to give chase.

    Dutchess, a 2-year-old rescue dog, was shot three times in the head by Florida police as she ran out her front door. The officer had been approaching the house to inform the residents that their car door was open when the dog bounded out to greet him.

    Yanna, a 10-year-old boxer, was shot three times by Georgia police after they mistakenly entered the wrong home and opened fire, killing the dog, shooting the homeowner in the leg and wounding an investigating officer.

    Here’s the point: when you train police to shoot first and ask questions later—whether it’s a family pet, a child with a toy gun, or an old man with a cane—they’re going to shoot to kill.

    This is the fallout from teaching police to assume the worst-case scenario and react with fear to anything that poses the slightest threat (imagined or real). This is what comes from teaching police to view themselves as soldiers on a battlefield and those they’re supposed to serve as enemy combatants. This is the end result of a lopsided criminal justice system that fails to hold the government and its agents accountable for misconduct.

    Whether you’re talking about police shooting dogs or citizens, the mindset is the same: a rush to violence, abuse of power, fear for officer safety, poor training in how to de-escalate a situation, and general carelessness.

    This is the same mindset that sees nothing wrong with American citizens being subjected to roadside strip searches, forcible blood draws, invasive surveillance, secret government experiments, and other morally reprehensible tactics.

    Unfortunately, this is a mindset that is flourishing within the corporate-controlled, military-driven American police state.

    So what’s to be done about all of this?

    Essentially, it comes down to training and accountability.

    It’s the difference between police officers who rank their personal safety above everyone else’s and police officers who understand that their jobs are to serve and protect. It’s the difference between police who are trained to shoot to kill and police trained to resolve situations peacefully. Most of all, it’s the difference between police who believe the law is on their side and police who know that they will be held to account for their actions under the same law as everyone else.

    Unfortunately, more and more police are being trained to view themselves as distinct from the citizenry, to view their authority as superior to the citizenry, and to view their lives as more precious than those of their citizen counterparts. Instead of being taught to see themselves as mediators and peacemakers whose lethal weapons are to be used as a last resort, they are being drilled into acting like gunmen with killer instincts who shoot to kill rather than merely incapacitate.

    As a result, we’re approaching a breaking point.

    This policing crisis is far more immediate and concerning than the government’s so-called war on terror or drugs.

    This is no longer a debate over good cops and bad cops.

    It’s a tug-of-war between the constitutional republic America’s founders intended and the police state we are fast becoming.

    So how do we fix what’s broken, stop the senseless shootings and bring about lasting reform?

    For starters, stop with the scare tactics. In much the same way that American citizens are being cocooned in a climate of fear by a government that knows exactly which buttons to push in order to gain the public’s cooperation and compliance, police officers are also being indoctrinated with the psychology of fear. Despite the propaganda being peddled by the government and police unions, police today experience less on-the-job fatalities than they ever have historically.

     

    Second, level the playing field. Police lives are no more valuable than any other citizen’s. Whether or not they wield a gun, police officers are public servants like all other government officials, which means that they work for us. While police are entitled to every protection afforded under the law, the same as any other citizen, they should not be afforded any special privileges. They certainly should not be shielded from accountability for misconduct by the courts and the legislatures.

     

    Third, require that police officers be trained in non-lethal tactics. According to the New York Times, the training regimens at nearly all of the nation’s police academies continue to emphasize military-style exercises, with the average young officer made to undergo 58 hours of firearms training and 49 hours of defensive tactical training, but only eight hours of de-escalation training. If police officers are taking classes in how to shoot, maim and kill, shouldn’t they also be trained in non-lethal force, crisis intervention training on how to deal with the mentally ill, de-escalation techniques to use the lowest level of force possible when responding to a threat, and how to respect their fellow citizens’ constitutional rights?

     

    Fourth, ditch the quasi-military obsession. Police forces were never intended to be standing armies. Yet with police agencies dressing like the military in camouflage and armor, training with the military, using military weapons, riding around in armored vehicles, recruiting military veterans, and even boasting military titles, one would be hard pressed to distinguish between the two. Still, it’s our job to make sure that we can distinguish between the two, and that means keeping the police in their place as civilians—non-military citizens—who are entrusted with protecting our rights.

     

    Fifth, demilitarize. There are many examples of countries where police are not armed and dangerous, and they are no worse off for it. Indeed, their crime rates are low and their police officers are trained to view every citizen as precious.

     

    Sixth, stop making taxpayers pay for police abuses. Some communities are trying to require police to carry their own professional liability insurance. The logic is that if police had to pay out of pocket for their own wrongdoing, they might be more cautious and less inclined to shoot first and ask questions later.

     

    Seventh, support due process for everyone, not just the people in your circle. Remember that you no longer have to be poor, black or guilty to be treated like a criminal in America. All that is required is that you belong to the suspect class—a.k.a. the citizenry—of the American police state. As a de facto member of this so-called criminal class, every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.

    You could be the next person who gets shot by a police officer for moving the wrong way during a traffic stop, running the wrong way in the vicinity of a police officer, or defending yourself against a home invasion when the police show up at the wrong address in the middle of the night.

    People have been wrongfully shot and killed for these exact reasons.

    Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, there can be no justice in America when Americans are being killed, detained and robbed at gunpoint by government officials on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing.

    Unfortunately, Americans have been so propagandized, politicized and polarized that many feel compelled to choose sides between defending the police at all costs or painting them as dangerously out-of-control.

    Nothing is ever that black and white, but there are a few things that we can be sure of: America should not be a battlefield.

    Police officers are not soldiers.

    And “We the People: are not the enemy.

  • Berlin Calls For "Countermeasures" To US Sanctions Against Russia, Hints At Trade War

    While the Pentagon may be already contemplating its next steps in the escalating conflict with Russia, which as the WSJ reported will likely involve supplying Ukraine with antitank missiles and other weaponry – a red line for the Kremlin not even the Obama administration dared to cross – there is minor matter of what to do with a suddenly furious Europe, which as we discussed  previously, has vowed it would retaliate promptly after Trump signed the anti-Russia legislation into law, due to allegations it was just a veiled attempt at favoritism for US-based energy companies.

    And, sure enough, on Monday, the Germany economy minister said that tew penalties against Moscow proposed by US lawmakers violate international law and officials in Brussels should consider countermeasures.

    Speaking to Funke Mediengruppe newspaper, Brigitte Zypries said that “we consider this as being against international law, plain and simple.” She added that “of course we don’t want a trade war. But it is important the European Commission now looks into countermeasures.”

    She also said that “the Americans can not punish German companies because they operate economically in another country.”

    Well, that’s not what the US Congress thinks.

    What makes the latest anti-Russia sanctions unique, is that the bill, which passed both the House and Senate but has yet to be signed by Trump, marked the first time Washington has made a move against Moscow without European consent.

    Furthermore, the reason for Europe’s anger is that contrary to its stated intention of punishing Russia for “meddling in the presidential elections”, the bill appears – according to Brussels – to target Russia’s Nord Stream-2 pipeline that will deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany. The proposed expansion would double the existing pipeline’s capacity and make Germany EU’s main energy hub, and even more reliant on Russia.

    In addition to targeting major sectors of Russia’s economy, including defense, railway, and banking industries the bill seeks to introduce individual sanctions for contributing in Russian energy projects, which will likely adversely impact numerous European companies.

    Previously, the latest round of sanctions has been criticized by various officials in Europe, including Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern and German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel. Critics of the US government argue the sanctions could affect European energy security and serve Washington’s economic interests – in line with the “America First” policy of President Trump.

    Just what shape the European retaliation could take has yet to be determined, although last week Politico reported that options on the table include triggering the ‘Blocking Statute,’ an EU regulation that limits the enforcement of extraterritorial US laws in Europe. A number of “WTO-compliant retaliatory measures” are also being considered.

  • Rep. DeSantis Calls for an Investigation into Wasserman Schultz's Ties to Awan

    Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

    Do you recall when Debbie Wasserman Schultz threatened the US Capitol Police chief for seizing a computer from her IT personnel, who was Imran Awan?

    Let’s refresh your memory.

    It never seemed right, the manner in which she targeted him with venomous animus. It was not the cadence, or computation, of an innocent person.

    Fast forward to today and we have a full blown scandal on our hands, with charges that her IT personnel, Awan, had access to the emails of every single member of Congress — and sold that information to person’s unknown.

    Rep DeSantis joined The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) in calling for an investigation into Wasserman Schultz, who employed Awan during and time as DNC chair — dating back to 2005.

    Source: Politico

    Awan and his relatives worked as shared employees for more than two dozen House Democrats in the past several years. After the Capitol Hill investigation came to light in early February, most lawmakers fired the other staffers in question.
     
    But Wasserman Schultz retained Awan, even though he has been barred from accessing the House IT network since February. FACT maintains there’s no way Awan could have performed IT duties for Wasserman Schultz over the past six months, despite staying on the Florida Democrat’s payroll.
     
    “House staff are compensated with taxpayer funds, and members are directly responsible for ensuring their staff are only paid for official public work, work that has actually [been] performed and at a rate commensurate with the work performed,” Matthew Whitaker, FACT executive director, wrote in a letter to the OCE.
     
    “It was, therefore, contrary to the House ethics rule for Wasserman Schultz to continue to pay Awan with taxpayer funds even after he was barred from the House computer system and could not perform his duties, and was also under criminal investigation.”

     
    Awan was arrested by the FBI last week attempting to leave the country, after wiring $300,000 to his home country of Pakistan. Previous to attempting flight, his wife left the country and he had been frantically liquidating real estate holdings.
     
    Here’s Rep. DeSantis discussing the issue with Tucker Carlson, calling for an investigation.

    “It’s extremely odd. We knew in February about the cash. We knew about the smashed hard drives. What’s the explanation for this behavior?”

  • Stockman: The Tweet That Is Shaking The War Party

    Authored by David Stockman via AntiWar.com,

    Most of the Donald’s tweets amount to street brawling with his political enemies, but occasionally one of them slices through Imperial Washington’s sanctimonious cant. Indeed, Monday evening’s 140 characters of solid cut right to the bone:

    The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad…..

    Needless to say, we are referencing not the dig at the empire of Bezos, but the characterization of Washington’s anti-Assad policy as "massive, dangerous and wasteful".

    No stouter blow to the neocon/Deep State "regime change" folly has ever been issued by an elected public official. Yet there it is – the self-composed words of the man in the Oval Office. It makes you even want to buy some Twitter stock!

    Predictably, the chief proponent of illegal, covert, cowardly attacks on foreign governments via proxies, mercenaries, drones and special forces, Senator McWar of Arizona, fairly leapt out of his hospital bed to denounce the President’s action:

    “If these reports are true, the administration is playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin.”

    That’s just plain pathetic because the issue is the gross stupidity and massive harm that has been done by McCain’s personally inspired and directed war on Assad – not Putin and not Russia’s historic role as an ally of the Syrian regime.

    Since 2011, Senator McCain has been to the region countless times. There he has made it his business to strut about in the manner of an imperial proconsul – advising, organizing and directing a CIA recruited, trained and supplied army of rebels dedicated to the overthrow of Syria’s constitutionally legitimate government.

    At length, several billions were spent on training and arms, thereby turning a fleeting popular uprising against the despotic Assad regime during the 2011 "Arab spring" into the most vicious, destructive civil war of modern times, if ever. That is, without the massive outside assistance of Washington, Saudi Arabia and the emirates, the Syrian uprising would have been snuffed out as fast as it was in Egypt and Bahrain by dictators which had Washington’s approval and arms.

    As it has happened, however, Syria’s great historic cities of Aleppo and Damascus have been virtually destroyed – along with its lesser towns and villages and nearly the entirety of its economy. There are 400,000 dead and 11 million internal and external refugees from an original population of hardly 18 million. The human toll of death, displacement, disease and disorder which has been inflicted on this hapless land staggers the imagination.

    Yet at bottom this crime against humanity – there is no other word for it – is not mainly Assad’s or Putin’s doing. It can be properly described as "McCain’s War" in the manner in which (Congressman) Charlie Wilson’s War in Afghanistan during the 1980’s created the monster which became Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

    Even the fact that the butchers of ISIS were able to establish a temporary foothold in the Sunni villages and towns of the Upper Euphrates portion of Syria is the direct doing of McCain, Lindsay Graham and their War Party confederates in the Congress and the national security apparatus. That’s because Syria’s air force and army would have stopped ISIS cold when it invaded in 2014 if it had not been weakened and beleaguered by Washington’s oppositions armies.

    But why did Washington launch McCain’s War in the first place?

    The government of Syria has never, ever done harm to the American homeland. It has no military capacity to attack anything much beyond its own borders – including Israel, which could dispatch Assad’s aging air force without breaking a sweat.

    Moreover, even if a purely sectarian civil war in this strategically irrelevant land was any of Imperial Washington’s business, which it isn’t, Senator McCain and his War Party confederates have been on the wrong side from the get-go. The Assad regime going back to the 1970 was Arab Baathist – a form of nationalistic and anti-colonial socialism that was secular and inclusive in its religious orientation.

    Indeed, as representatives of the minority Alawite tribes (15% of the population, at best), the Assad regime was based on Syria’s non-Sunni Arab minorities – including Christians, Druze, Kurds, Jews, Yazidis, Turkomans, and sundry others. Never once did the Assad’s seek to impose religious conformity – to say nothing of the harsh regime of Sharia Law and medieval religious observance demanded by the Sunni jihadists.

    The point is, the Syrian opposition recruited by Washington for McCain’s War exploited the grievances of ordinary Sunni citizens, but it was led by radical jihadist military commanders. Washington’s endless charade of "vetting" these opposition fighters to ensure that aid only went to "moderates" was a sick joke.

    Such moderates as existed were mainly opportunistic politicians who operated far from the battle in Turkish safe havens – or even from temporary residences in the beltway. It is a proven fact that most of the weapons supplied by the CIA and the gulf states were either sold to the Nusra Front and other jihadist factions or ended up in their hands when the CIA’s "moderate" trainees defected to the radicals.

    So the question recurs. Why did Washington embark on this tremendous, pointless folly?

    The answer is straight forward. Washington has become an Imperial City populated by a permanent class of sunshine patriots and self-appointed global field marshals like Senator McCain, who do the bidding of the military/industrial complex and its far-flung Warfare State apparatus.

    That is, they identify and demonize the enemies and villains that are needed to keep the money flowing into the Empire’s $700 billion budget. In this case, Assad drew the short straw because as a member of the greater Shiite confession in the Islamic world he was naturally allied with the Shiite regime of Iran.

    In part 2 we will take up the real reason for McCain’s War in Syria. It was a proxy war and a provocation designed to prosecute the real neocon target – the endlessly vilified Shiite regime in Tehran.

    Part 2

    Syria was never meant to be a real country. Its borders were scratched on a map in 1916 by Messrs. Picot and Sykes of the French and British foreign office, respectively, and was an old-fashioned exercise in dividing the spoils of war amidst the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It was most definitely not a product of what in the present era Imperial Washington is pleased to call “nation-building”.

    The short history of the next hundred years is that Syria never worked as a nation because the straight lines traced to the map by the Sykes-Picot ruler encompassed an immense gaggle of ethnic and sectarian peoples, tribes and regions that could not get along and had no common bonds of nationality. The polyglot of Sunni and Alawite (Shiite) Arabs, Sunni Kurds, Druse, Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Turkmen, and sundry more were kept intact under the unitary state in Damascus only due to a succession of strongmen and generals who took turns ruling the gaggle by bribe and sword.

    At length, Syria became a pawn in the cold war when the anti-communism obsessed Dulles brothers decided to stiff Colonel Nasser of Egypt for not sharing their Christian zeal against the godless rulers of the Kremlin. The latter then offered to build the Aswan Dam when Washington canned the funding.

    That led, in turn, to the short-lived Egypt-Syria merger, a failed CIA coup in Damascus and the eventual permanent alliance of Hafez Assad (Bashar’s father) with the Soviets after he consolidated power in the early 1970s.

    Whether Washington’s animosity to the Syrian regime owing to its choice of cold-war patrons ever made any difference to the security and safety of the American people is surely debatable, but when the cold war ended so should have the debate. Whatever happened in the polyglot of Syria thereafter had absolutely no bearing on the security of the American homeland – including indirectly via its nearby ally in Israel.

    That is, once the cold war was over and the Soviet Union descended into economic and military senescence after 1991, the Israelis had overwhelming military superiority over Damascus, and needed no help from Washington. But that pregnant opportunity for Washington to put Syria out of sight and out of mind entirely was killed in the cradle at nearly the moment it arose.

    In a word, the Washington War Party desperately needed an enemy once the Soviet Union was no more – in order to justify the massive girth of its global empire and the vastly elevated spending levels for conventional war-making (600 ship Navy, new tanks and fighters, airlift and cruise missiles etc.) that Ronald Reagan had unfortunately set in place. So the neocons in the administration of Bush the Elder seized on the Iranians.

    Needless to say, with memories of the prolonged hostage crisis in Tehran of a decade earlier still fresh in the memories of the American public, it was easy for Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al. to vilify Tehran as the seat of an America-hating Islamist theocracy. But so doing, they put America on the wrong side of the 1300-year old Sunni/Shiite divide.

    That’s because the minor sliver of Islam motivated by fanatical jihadism and the duty to eradicate nonbelievers and apostates is rooted in the Wahhabi branch of the Sunni confession and is domiciled in Arabia, not the Shiite communities on its periphery. The latter are spread in a crescent arcing from Iran through lower Iraq and extending to the Alawite and Shiite communities of Syria and southern Lebanon – including the territories dominated by Lebanon’s largest political party (Hezbollah).

    The 40 years prior to 1991 had given the Iranians plenty of cause to despise Washington, beginning with the CIA-sponsored coup against the democratically elected Mosaddeq in 1953. That move, in turn, paved the way for the rapacious and brutal regime of the Shah until 1978 when he was overthrown by a massive uprising of the Iranian people led by Shiite clerics.

    But to add insult to injury, the Reagan White House effected a "tilt" to Saddam Hussein after he invaded Iran in September 1980, and provided the satellite based tracking services that enabled Saddam’s horrific chemical attacks on Iranian troops in the field, many of them barely armed teenagers.

    So Tehran had valid reasons for its rhetorical assaults on Washington, but there was no symmetry to it. That is, Washington had no honest beef against Tehran, and no dog in the Sunni-Shiite fight.

    The only fig leaf of justification we’ve ever heard is that the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 by local Shiite militants was allegedly aided by the Iranians. But your editor sat on the national security council at the time and recalls vividly that Ronald Reagan’s decision was not to take the fight to Tehran, but to question why the Marines needed to be in harms’ way in the first place and to "reposition" them quickly to the safety of a Naval aircraft carrier deep in the Mediterranean

    In any event, the Iranians elected a moderate President in 1988, and Rafsanjani did seek rapprochement with Washington – even helping to free some American hostages in Lebanon as a good will gesture to the incoming George HW Bush Administration.

    But it was for naught once Cheney and his neocon henchman piled into the equation. The military-industrial complex needed an enemy and Cheney & Co. saw to it that the Shiite regime in Tehran became just that.

    And that get’s us to our Part 1 thesis about McCain’s War in Syria and its prototype in Charlie Wilson’s War in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In fact, the latter wasn’t just a model; it was the proximate cause.

    That is, Wilson’s War via the covert CIA training and arming of the Mujahedeen and the recruitment of Sunni Arab fighters from Saudi Arabia and other Sunni tribes ultimately gifted the world with al-Qaeda, but even then it took the feckless Imperial arm of Washington to complete the nightmare.

    Bin-Laden was actually celebrated as a hero in the West until 1991. Thereupon history flowed around a hinge point marked by the demise of the Soviet Union on one side and George HW Bush’s utterly pointless war against Saddam Hussein in February 1991 on the other.

    In this case Washington’s pretext for intervention was a petty squabble over directional drilling in the Rumaila oil field which straddled the border of Kuwait and Iraq. But there wasn’t an iota of homeland security at issue in that tiff between opulent Emir of Kuwait and the bombastic dictator from Baghdad.

    In fact, Kuwait wasn’t even a real country; it was (and still is) essentially a large bank account with its own oilfield that had been scratched on a map by the British in 1913 as part of its maneuvering for hegemony in the Persian Gulf region.

    Likewise, Iraq was also the product of the infamous Sykes-Picot straight-edged ruler of 1916, but the world price of oil would not have changed in the longer run by a single cent – whether Kuwait remained independent or was incorporated as the 19th province of the arbitrary but serviceable state of Baathist Iraq.

    Beyond the false case of oil economics was the even more ridiculous underlying proposition that the oilfield boundary in dispute – which had been haggled out in an Arab League meeting in 1960 – implicated the safety and security of American citizens in Lincoln NE and Springfield MA.

    No it didn’t – not in the slightest. But what did dramatically implicate their security was George HW Bush’s peevish insistence that Saddam be given a good, hard spanking, which resulted in 500,000 pairs of "crusader" boots on the sacred soil of Arabia.

    Right there bin-Laden swiveled on a dime and launched his demented crusade to rid the "land of the holy shrines" of the American occupation. Right there the mujahedeen became al-Qaeda, modern jihadi terrorism was born and the catastrophe of 9/11 and all that followed was set in motion.

    Yes, it took the even greater folly of Bush the Younger to actually light the fuse with his insensible and idiotic "shock and awe" demolition of Iraq after March 2003. But that did open the gates of Hell – even if the actual agents were the mujahedeen fighters and their followers and assigns who assembled in (Sunni) Anbar province after it was laid to waste by the Pentagon.

    In a word, Bush and his neocon warriors destroyed the serviceable state of Iraq and the tenuous Sunni/Shiite/Kurd modus vivendi that Saddam had enforced with the spoils of the oilfields and the superiority of his arms. In that context the idea that the government in Baghdad represented a nation and fielded an Iraqi national army was a sheer fairy tale.

    What Bush and Obama left behind was a vengeful, incompetent, corrupt sectarian government backed by sundry Shiite militia. To spend $25 billion – as Washington did – training and arming a ghost nation was an act of incomparable folly.

    It guaranteed a hot war between the Sunni and Shiite, and that the billions of state of the art weapons Washington left behind for the self-defense of the nation it hadn’t built would fall into the hands of the Sunni terrorists.

    At length, they did. The crucible of Anbar gave rise to ISIS and the tens of thousands of Humvees, tanks, heavy artillery pieces and millions of light weapons bivouacked in Mosul fell into its hands when the Shiite militias fled from Iraq’s second city and predominately Sunni enclave in June 2014.

    And then McCain’s proxy War in Syria against the Iranians did its part. That is, the Sunni villages and towns of the Euphrates Valley had always been the most tenuous components of the Assads’ system of rule.

    But when the McCain/CIA rebel armies badly impaired Assad’s military and economic capacity to pacify his country in the normal middle eastern manner of repression, a giant power vacuum was created into which ISIS rushed and from which the Islamic caliphate was born.

    In a word, Wilson’s War begat Sunni jihadism; HW Bush’s war turned it against America; Dubya’s War opened the gates of Hell in Anbar province; and McCain’s War enabled the destruction of the Syrian state and the rise of a medievalist chamber of butchery and demented Sharia extremism in Raqqa, Mosul and the hapless Sunni lands in between.

    At last, however, this chain of imperial pretense and insanity has been broken with a 140 character Tweet.

    Bravo, Donald!

    By sending the War Party into a paroxysm of denunciation and self-righteous indignation Trump actually provoked the Deep State into spilling the beans.

    To wit, its neocon megaphone at the Washington Post, David Ignatius, penned an unhinged column immediately after Trump’s tweet about ending "massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad", lamenting that the US hadn’t given jihadist "rebels" antiaircraft missiles!

    But in a full bore eruption of outrage, Ignatius also revealed new information based on a quote from an official with initimate knowledge of the CIA program:

    Run from secret operations centers in Turkey and Jordan, the program pumped many hundreds of millions of dollars to many dozens of militia groups. One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years.

    Whether that was an exaggeration or proximate expression of the truth doesn’t really matter. It means Imperial Washington has been carrying on a world-scale war in Syria with not even the pretense of a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or authorization for the use of force as in Iraq in 2003.

    So that’s McCain’s War. Eleven million refugees, a destroyed country, 400,000 civilians dead and a decimated army of a nation that poses a zero threat to the American homeland. And all for the purpose of hazing the rulers of Tehran who never did have a program to get a nuke, according to Washington’s own 17-agency NIEs (national intelligence estimates); and gave it up anyway with ironclad mechanisms for international enforcement.

    We have no idea where this will lead, but by the day it increasingly looks as if McCain’s War is indeed being shutdown.

    We can only hope for a respite to the folly, and that the Donald keeps on tweeting exactly this sort of madman’s stab at rationality.

  • William Shatner Slams SJWs – Says 'Snowflakes' "Stand For Inequality" And "Misandry"

    William Shatner, the actor who famously portrayed Captain James Kirk in the original 1960s run of Star Trek spoke out against his progressive critics, claiming that SJWs “stand for inequality” while defending his use of terms like “snowflake” and “misandry” – a phenomenon that angry feminists insist has been extinguished in modern society.

    Shatner, a Canadian citizen who’s publicly empathized with the far-right and President Donald Trump, has repeatedly feuded with Trekkies who feel that he has turned away from the show’s culturally-progressive message (Star Trek made television history by broadcasting television’s first interracial kiss, between Shatner and castmate Nichelle Nichols). The actor often calls out examples of what he considers to be unwarranted attacks on men.

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    Shatner’s signature was notably absent from a February letter sent by the original Star Trek cast condemning President Donald Trump’s “racism and bigotry."

    At least one liberal critic accused the actor of “tarnishing” Star Trek’s legacy with his “alt-right language,” according to Gizmodo.

    "‘It seems that Shatner has not so much misunderstood the source material than turned away from it,’ Manu Saadia, author of Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek.

     

    ‘Star Trek is the lone TV show that has carried the torch of equality, progress, and utopia in popular culture. To see one of its most famous ambassador using alt-right language should be a wake up call to fans,’ Saadia continued.

     

    ‘It is ruinous for the 50-year-old franchise, especially so close to the launch of its first new show in more than a decade. Shatner is known to be prickly and jealous of his status in Star Trek. Maybe he can’t stand that the limelights are now trained on a new, diverse crew?’ said Saadia.”

    According to Saadia, the show tacitly endorsed socialistic policies, like the notion that wealth should be evenly distributed throughout the population.

    “Star Trek is a lot of things but, at its heart it stands for the ideal that the fruits of technological and social progress should be equally shared among all of humanity. That’s definitely not what Shatner is advocating here,” said Saadia.

    Funny, that wasn’t our interpretation.
     

  • McMaster And Mattis Have Twelve Months To Succeed In Afghanistan

    Authored by James Durso via RealClearDefense.com,

    Recently we learned that Erik Prince, founder of the security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Steve Feinberg, financier, and owner of DynCorp International, a leading military logistics, and training contractor, approached the Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, with their plan to use contractors instead of American troops to stabilize Afghanistan. The meeting was arranged at the behest of President Trump’s advisors who want to ensure their boss is apprised of the full range of options in Afghanistan.

    The Secretary decided to stick with an in-house solution, that is to say, more of the same, for a war we are, in his words, “not winning.” Secretary Mattis is no enemy of contractors, but hopefully, he reflected on what Messrs. Prince and Feinberg said before he briefed President Trump last week on the way ahead in Afghanistan.

    Let’s review our progress in Afghanistan:

    • Provinces under central government control: according to data from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, “the Afghan government controls or influences just 52 percent of the nation’s districts today [February 2017] compared to 72 percent in November 2015.”
    • Opium production increased 43% from 2015 to 2016 and has been on an upward trend since 2001.
    • U.S. casualties: 2385 dead and 20,290 wounded military; 1691 dead contractors.
    • Money spent: over $700 billion, though some analysts say the true cost is in the trillions. 

    I previously said we should let the Afghans and the neighbors – Iran, Pakistan, and China – try to sort it out, and minimize our work with Afghanistan to counternarcotics and intelligence sharing while we work with the Central Asian states to secure their borders. During the campaign, candidate Trump described the war in Afghanistan as “a complete waste” and has focused his efforts since inauguration on everything else, leaving the policy review to the national security advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, which brings us to the problem…

    General McMaster spent several months trying to convince the President to commit more troops and agree to a four-year timeline in advance of May’s NATO summit meeting; he was blocked by the secretaries of Defense and State.  McMaster then made a second try at last week’s National Security Council Principals Committee, only to get pushback from Trump. Seen in that light, the suggestion that the White House would consider the Prince-Feinberg plan was a billboard-sized hint that the President does not want a more-of-the-same solution.

    There is no Afghanistan “policy vacuum,” General McMaster has simply forgotten that it is his job to get in sync with the President, not the other way around.  His thinking is emblematic of the military’s approach to sunk costs – the dead and wounded soldiers – as opposed to a businessman’s.  The military may be reluctant to abandon a political objective if it feels doing so will dishonor the sacrifice of the soldiers who died and were wounded trying to achieve the objective.  It is an understandable sentiment, but illogical to someone with a business background asking for a solution to a $700 billion campaign almost two decades old and with no end in sight. 

    President Trump understandably wants to see if his administration can stabilize Afghanistan, so using contractors may give him the option to try something new while reducing military casualties that grab the headlines. (He is no doubt aware that the parts of the country that provide most of the military’s troops are part of his electoral base.)  

    If President Trump approves a McMaster plan that Mattis is comfortable with, as Defense will have to be on board, he should give them twelve months – not four years – to show real progress – not PowerPoint progress – defined as more provinces under central government control, and a sharp reduction in opium cultivation. Metrics such as the number of Afghan police and soldiers trained are merely inputs, not the only output that counts: the provision of public safety in Afghanistan’s ungoverned spaces.

    The U.S. has been militarily and diplomatically engaged in Afghanistan for 16 years so cries for “more time” ring hollow. Messrs. McMaster and Mattis are not new to Afghanistan so they can start implementing their good ideas immediately.

    Most importantly, a twelve-month deadline will give the President the option to fire McMaster or Mattis before the November 2018 elections if the “M&M” plan fails to show progress. The President needs to heed President Bush’s mistake of not firing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld before the 2006 election, which contributed to the Democrats gaining 31 seats in the House of Representative and 6 seats in the Senate, giving the Democrats control of both chambers, until the GOP took back the House in 2011 and the Senate in 2015.  

    And to any caviling about domestic concerns affecting our foreign policy, I say, “Darn right. Why shouldn’t they?” Foreign and defense policy should not be a consequence-free zone for the staff practitioners, who have to answer to elected officials who take seriously their obligation to keep their promises to the voters.

  • Pelosi Positioning To Retake The Speakership: "Can Smell A Good Midterm Election"

    In a characteristically confusing and thoroughly cringe-worthy interview on Fox News over the weekend, Nancy Pelosi sat down with Chris Wallace to engage in a little “self promotion” on why she would be the best candidate for the Speaker seat in 2019.  Not surprisingly, the interview got a little confusing moments later when Pelosi seemed to imply that it’s “unimportant” whether Democrats win in 2018 and/or who fills the Speaker position on the off chance they do…which we’re sure makes perfect sense to Nancy.

    Asked by Wallace whether she was simply too old to run for the Speaker position, Pelosi seemed to come out swinging by describing herself as a “master legislator.”

    Pelosi:  “Self promotion is a terrible thing but somebody has to do it.  I am a master legislator.  I know the budget to n-th degree.  I feel very confident about the support I have in my caucus.”

    But, pressed again on whether Democrats had a shot of retaking the House in 2018 and whether she would seek the speakership, Pelosi seemed to think such questions were “unimportant.”

    Pelosi:  “That’s so unimportant.  What is important is that we have a lively debate on a better deal.  Better pay, better jobs and a better future.”

    And it all ended with Pelosi very awkwardly thanking Wallace for being a “guardian of our democracy…the press.”

     

    Of course, the political positioning from Nancy comes after several House Democrats attempted to lead a coup earlier this year to have her removed from the minority leader role.  As Real Clear Politics reporter A.B. Stoddard noted, “Democrats had their chance to get rid of Nancy” but now she can sense a strong midterm and she’s not going anywhere.

    “Democrats had their chance to get rid of Nancy Pelosi in November and they didn’t do it and that was their window,” Stoddard said.

     

    “It’s too late now. She can smell a good midterm election for Democrats. She’s not going to step down. She believe she’ll be Speaker again,” the Real Clear Politics reporter added.

    Despite her often incomprehensible interviews, the Washington Examiner revealed the real reason why the Democratic party refuses to dump Pelosi: fundraising.  With Pelosi’s San Francisco district flush with tech start-up billionaires, the minority leader is a goldmine for the DCCC having already raised nearly $26 million so far this year.

    House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has brought in nearly $26 million for the Democratic Party so far this year, according to a report.

     

    The majority of the $25.9 million Pelosi raised will go to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which will lead the Democrats’ efforts to regain control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections.

     

    This year, the minority leader has sent the DCCC $24.7 million, which is $10 million more than Pelosi raised for the committee in the same period two years ago, according to the Washington Post.

     

    Pelosi raised millions through three “Speakers Cabinet” VIP events that have taken place in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles and has participated in 124 events in 22 cities.

     

    More than $2 million of Pelosi’s fundraising haul came from 115,000 small donors solicited through a DCCC email campaign.

    After literally wasting millions and millions of dollars on the failed campaigns of Hillary Clinton and John Ossoff, one would think that Democrats would have learned by now that money wasn’t really their main problem…apparently that’s not the case.

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