Jan 31

Today’s News 31st January 2019

  • US Intel Confirm China Tests "World's Most Powerful Railgun" At Sea

    Just on the heels of an alarming recent Pentagon intelligence study which assessed that China “already leads the world” in key areas of advanced defense technology, CNBC reports a huge breakthrough concerning what’s long been rumored the most feared and devastating futuristic weapon in Beijing’s arsenal: it’s now successfully tested “the world’s most powerful naval gun” — the ultra high velocity electromagnetically powered railgun — which is expected to be battlefield ready “by 2025, according to people with direct knowledge of a U.S. intelligence report.”

    Railgun spotted on Chinese vessel last year, via South China Morning Post

    Speculation has long surrounded China’s massive railgun, which uses electromagnetic energy instead of gunpowder or explosive propelled rounds, which was first seen in 2011 and reportedly went through testing and calibration to reach extended ranges in the years following.

    However, western military planners were generally shocked by how rapidly the Chinese were able to advance the project to the point that by Dec. 2017, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was able to mount it on a warship for sea testing — something no other country has accomplished and which the Pentagon hasn’t even come close to. US intelligence officials now say China will complete sea-testing of the railgun by 2023. 

    And the Pentagon has ample reason to worry given the railgun’s specs and capabilities. Citing intelligence sources and analysts, CNBC notes the weapon’s massive projectile can travel at a speed which would allow it to go a distance the equivalent of the length between Philadelphia and Washington in under 90 seconds.

    The CNBC report describes China’s  futuristic electromagnetic railgun as “capable of striking a target 124 miles away at speeds of up to 1.6 miles per second, according to the people who have knowledge of the intelligence report.”

    This makes it the most powerful cannon to ever roam the high seas, and is now doing so ahead of schedule given prior US intelligence predictions. By comparison CNBC notes:

    The U.S. Navy’s railgun, which is years away from being operational, remains a classified system still in development under the Office of Naval Research.

    The gun can launch metal projectiles from dual electrified rails at a speed ranging from Mach 4 to Mach 7, making it capable of punching holes in enemy vessels or aircraft up to 150km away.

    According to new intelligence cited in the CNBC report, the rounds used by the railgun cost between $25,000 and $50,0000 each, making it extremely cost effective in future operations. By comparison the US Tomahawk cruise missile has an estimated price tag of $1.4 million each.

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    As we previously reported Chinese media outlets, such as the state-affiliated Global Times, revealed last year in March that nearly two months after the first pictures of what was initially dubbed the “Yangtze River Monster” showed up online, the PLA began touting that it was “making notable achievements on advanced weapons, including sea tests of electromagnetic railguns.”

    More recently Chinese ships were spotted with what appeared to be massive mounted railguns for sea-tests.

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    “Chinese warships will ‘soon’ be equipped with world-leading electromagnetic railguns, as breakthroughs have been made … in multiple sectors,” China’s Global Times reported recently. The pro-Beijing newspaper proudly asserted that “China’s naval electromagnetic weapon and equipment have surpassed other countries and become a world leader.”

    Both Russia and Iran have also reportedly been seeking to acquire their own railgun technology, according to US defense officials.

    A future potential operational railgun roaming the South China Sea could given the PLA total dominance in a region increasingly growing hot as US ships and aircraft continue “freedom of navigation” operations, possibly provoking Beijing to assert itself and respond more aggressively. 

  • The Making Of Juan Guaidó: How The US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela's Coup Leader

    Authored by Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal via GrayZoneProject.com,

    Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization.

    Before the fateful day of January 22, fewer than one in five Venezuelans had heard of Juan Guaidó. Only a few months ago, the 35-year-old was an obscure character in a politically marginal far-right group closely associated with gruesome acts of street violence. Even in his own party, Guaidó had been a mid-level figure in the opposition-dominated National Assembly, which is now held under contempt according to Venezuela’s constitution.

    But after a single phone call from from US Vice President Mike Pence, Guaidó proclaimed himself president of Venezuela. Anointed as the leader of his country by Washington, a previously unknown political bottom-dweller was vaulted onto the international stage as the US-selected leader of the nation with the world’s largest oil reserves.

    Echoing the Washington consensus, the New York Times editorial board hailed Guaidó as a “credible rival” to Maduro with a “refreshing style and vision of taking the country forward.” The Bloomberg News editorial board applauded him for seeking “restoration of democracy” and the Wall Street Journal declared him “a new democratic leader.” Meanwhile, Canada, numerous European nations, Israel, and the bloc of right-wing Latin American governments known as the Lima Group recognized Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela.

    While Guaidó seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, he was, in fact, the product of more than a decade of assiduous grooming by the US government’s elite regime change factories. Alongside a cadre of right-wing student activists, Guaidó was cultivated to undermine Venezuela’s socialist-oriented government, destabilize the country, and one day seize power. Though he has been a minor figure in Venezuelan politics, he had spent years quietly demonstrated his worthiness in Washington’s halls of power.

    “Juan Guaidó is a character that has been created for this circumstance,” Marco Teruggi, an Argentinian sociologist and leading chronicler of Venezuelan politics, told The Grayzone. “It’s the logic of a laboratory – Guaidó is like a mixture of several elements that create a character who, in all honesty, oscillates between laughable and worrying.”

    Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist and writer for the investigative outlet Misión Verdad, agreed: “Guaidó is more popular outside Venezuela than inside, especially in the elite Ivy League and Washington circles,” Sequera remarked to The Grayzone, “He’s a known character there, is predictably right-wing, and is considered loyal to the program.”

    While Guaidó is today sold as the face of democratic restoration, he spent his career in the most violent faction of Venezuela’s most radical opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one destabilization campaign after another. His party has been widely discredited inside Venezuela, and is held partly responsible for fragmenting a badly weakened opposition.

    “‘These radical leaders have no more than 20 percent in opinion polls,” wrote Luis Vicente León, Venezuela’s leading pollster. According to León, Guaidó’s party remains isolated because the majority of the population “does not want war. ‘What they want is a solution.’”

    But this is precisely why he Guaidó was selected by Washington: He is not expected to lead Venezuela toward democracy, but to collapse a country that for the past two decades has been a bulwark of resistance to US hegemony. His unlikely rise signals the culmination of a two decades-long project to destroy a robust socialist experiment.

    Targeting the “troika of tyranny”

    Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, the United States has fought to restore control over Venezuela and is vast oil reserves. Chávez’s socialist programs may have redistributed the country’s wealth and helped lift millions out of poverty, but they also earned him a target on his back.

    In 2002, Venezuela’s right-wing opposition briefly ousted Chávez with US support and recognition, before the military restored his presidency following a mass popular mobilization. Throughout the administrations of US Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Chávez survived numerous assassination plots, before succumbing to cancer in 2013. His successor, Nicolas Maduro, has survived three attempts on his life.

    The Trump administration immediately elevated Venezuela to the top of Washington’s regime change target list, branding it the leader of a “troika of tyranny.” Last year, Trump’s national security team attempted to recruit members of the military brass to mount a military junta, but that effort failed.

    According to the Venezuelan government, the US was also involved in a plot, codenamed Operation Constitution, to capture Maduro at the Miraflores presidential palace; and another, called Operation Armageddon, to assassinate him at a military parade in July 2017. Just over a year later, exiled opposition leaders tried and failed to kill Maduro with drone bombs during a military parade in Caracas.

    More than a decade before these intrigues, a group of right-wing opposition students were hand-selected and groomed by an elite US-funded regime change training academy to topple Venezuela’s government and restore the neoliberal order.

    Training from the “‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions”

    On October 5, 2005, with Chavez’s popularity at its peak and his government planning sweeping socialist programs, five Venezuelan “student leaders” arrived in Belgrade, Serbia to begin training for an insurrection.

    The students had arrived from Venezuela courtesy of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS. This group is funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government’s main arm of promoting regime change; and offshoots like the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. According to leaked internal emails from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the “shadow CIA,” “[CANVAS] may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.”

    CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means “resistance” in Serbian, was the student group that gained international fame – and Hollywood-level promotion – by mobilizing the protests that eventually toppled Slobodan Milosevic. This small cell of regime change specialists was operating according to the theories of the late Gene Sharp, the so-called “Clausewitz of non-violent struggle.” Sharp had worked with a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, Col. Robert Helvey, to conceive a strategic blueprint that weaponized protest as a form of hybrid warfare, aiming it at states that resisted Washington’s unipolar domination.

    Otpor at the 1998 MTV Europe Music Awards

    Otpor was supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID and Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute. Sinisa Sikman, one of Otpor’s main trainers, once said the group even received direct CIA funding. According to a leaked email from a Stratfor staffer, after running Milosevic out of power, “the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other words a ;export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”

    Stratfor revealed that CANVAS “turned its attention to Venezuela” in 2005 after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations across Eastern Europe.

    While monitoring the CANVAS training program, Stratfor outlined its insurrectionist agenda in strikingly blunt language: “Success is by no means guaranteed, and student movements are only at the beginning of what could be a years-long effort to trigger a revolution in Venezuela, but the trainers themselves are the people who cut their teeth on the ‘Butcher of the Balkans.’ They’ve got mad skills. When you see students at five Venezuelan universities hold simultaneous demonstrations, you will know that the training is over and the real work has begun.”

    Birthing the “Generation 2007” regime change cadre

    The “real work” began two years later, in 2007, when Guaidó graduated from Andrés Bello Catholic University of Caracas. He moved to Washington DC to enroll in the Governance and Political Management Program at George Washington University under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists. Berrizbeitia is a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund who spent more than a decade working in Venezuelan energy sector under the oligarchic old regime that was ousted by Chavez.

    That year, Guaidó helped lead anti-government rallies after the Venezuelan government declined to to renew the license of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV). This privately-owned station played a leading role in the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez. RCTV helped mobilize anti-government demonstrators, falsified information blaming government supporters for acts of violence carried out by opposition members, and banned pro-government reporting amid the coup. The role of RCTV and other oligarch-owned stations in driving the failed coup attempt was chronicled in the acclaimed documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

    That same year, the students claimed credit for stymying Chavez’s constitutional referendum for a “21st century socialism” that promised “to set the legal framework for the political and social reorganization of the country, giving direct power to organized communities as a prerequisite for the development of a new economic system.”

    From the protests around RCTV and the referendum, a specialized cadre of US-backed class of regime change activists was born. They called themselves “Generation 2007.”

    The Stratfor and CANVAS trainers of this cell identified Guaidó’s ally – a street organizer named Yon Goicoechea – as a “key factor” in defeating the constitutional referendum. The following year, Goicochea was rewarded for his efforts with the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, along with a $500,000 prize, which he promptly invested into building his own Liberty First (Primero Justicia) political network.

    Friedman, of course, was the godfather of the notorious neoliberal Chicago Boys who were imported into Chile by dictatorial junta leader Augusto Pinochet to implement policies of radical “shock doctrine”-style fiscal austerity. And the Cato Institute is the libertarian Washington DC-based think tank founded by the Koch Brothers, two top Republican Party donors who have become aggressive supporters of the right-wing across Latin America.

    Wikileaks published a 2007 email from American ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield sent to the State Department, National Security Council and Department of Defense Southern Command praising “Generation of ’07” for having “forced the Venezuelan president, accustomed to setting the political agenda, to (over)react.” Among the “emerging leaders” Brownfield identified were Freddy Guevara and Yon Goicoechea. He applauded the latter figure as “one of the students’ most articulate defenders of civil liberties.”

    Flush with cash from libertarian oligarchs and US government soft power outfits, the radical Venezuelan cadre took their Otpor tactics to the streets, along with a version of the group’s logo, as seen below:

    “Galvanizing public unrest…to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez”

    In 2009, the Generation 2007 youth activists staged their most provocative demonstration yet, dropping their pants on public roads and aping the outrageous guerrilla theater tactics outlined by Gene Sharp in his regime change manuals. The protesters had mobilized against the arrest of an ally from another newfangled youth group called JAVU. This far-right group “gathered funds from a variety of US government sources, which allowed it to gain notoriety quickly as the hardline wing of opposition street movements,” according to academic George Ciccariello-Maher’s book, “Building the Commune.”

    While video of the protest is not available, many Venezuelans have identified Guaidó as one of its key participants. While the allegation is unconfirmed, it is certainly plausible; the bare-buttocks protesters were members of the Generation 2007 inner core that Guaidó belonged to, and were clad in their trademark Resistencia! Venezuela t-shirts, as seen below:

    Is this the ass that Trump wants to install in Venezuela’s seat of power?

    That year, Guaidó exposed himself to the public in another way, founding a political party to capture the anti-Chavez energy his Generation 2007 had cultivated. Called Popular Will, it was led by Leopoldo López, a Princeton-educated right-wing firebrand heavily involved in National Endowment for Democracy programs and elected as the mayor of a district in Caracas that was one of the wealthiest in the country. Lopez was a portrait of Venezuelan aristocracy, directly descended from his country’s first president. He was also the first cousin of Thor Halvorssen, founder of the US-based Human Rights Foundation that functions as a de facto publicity shop for US-backed anti-government activists in countries targeted by Washington for regime change.

    Though Lopez’s interests aligned neatly with Washington’s, US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks highlighted the fanatical tendencies that would ultimately lead to Popular Will’s marginalization. One cable identified Lopez as “a divisive figure within the opposition… often described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry.” Others highlighted his obsession with street confrontations and his “uncompromising approach” as a source of tension with other opposition leaders who prioritized unity and participation in the country’s democratic institutions.

    Popular Will founder Leopoldo Lopez cruising with his wife, Lilian Tintori

    By 2010, Popular Will and its foreign backers moved to exploit the worst drought to hit Venezuela in decades. Massive electricity shortages had struck the country due the dearth of water, which was needed to power hydroelectric plants. A global economic recession and declining oil prices compounded the crisis, driving public discontentment.

    Stratfor and CANVAS – key advisors of Guaidó and his anti-government cadre – devised a shockingly cynical plan to drive a dagger through the heart of the Bolivarian revolution. The scheme hinged on a 70% collapse of the country’s electrical system by as early as April 2010.

    “This could be the watershed event, as there is little that Chavez can do to protect the poor from the failure of that system,” the Stratfor internal memo declared. “This would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate. At that point in time, an opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.”

    By this point, the Venezuelan opposition was receiving a staggering $40-50 million a year from US government organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, according to a report by the Spanish think tank, the FRIDE Institute. It also had massive wealth to draw on from its own accounts, which were mostly outside the country.

    While the scenario envisioned by Statfor did not come to fruition, the Popular Will party activists and their allies cast aside any pretense of non-violence and joined a radical plan to destabilize the country.

    Towards violent destabilization

    In November, 2010, according to emails obtained by Venezuelan security services and presented by former Justice Minister Miguel Rodríguez Torres, Guaidó, Goicoechea, and several other student activists attended a secret five-day training at the Fiesta Mexicana hotel in Mexico City. The sessions were run by Otpor, the Belgrade-based regime change trainers backed by the US government. The meeting had reportedly received the blessing of Otto Reich, a fanatically anti-Castro Cuban exile working in George W. Bush’s Department of State, and the right-wing former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

    At the Fiesta Mexicana hotel, the emails stated, Guaidó and his fellow activists hatched a plan to overthrow President Hugo Chavez by generating chaos through protracted spasms of street violence.

    Three petroleum industry figureheads – Gustavo Torrar, Eligio Cedeño and Pedro Burelli – allegedly covered the $52,000 tab to hold the meeting. Torrar is a self-described “human rights activist” and “intellectual” whose younger brother Reynaldo Tovar Arroyo is the representative in Venezuela of the private Mexican oil and gas company Petroquimica del Golfo, which holds a contract with the Venezuelan state.

    Cedeño, for his part, is a fugitive Venezuelan businessman who claimed asylum in the United States, and Pedro Burelli a former JP Morgan executive and the former director of Venezuela’s national oil company, Petroleum of Venezuela (PDVSA). He left PDVSA in 1998 as Hugo Chavez took power and is on the advisory committeeof Georgetown University’s Latin America Leadership Program.

    Burelli insisted that the emails detailing his participation had been fabricated and even hired a private investigator to prove it. The investigator declared that Google’s records showed the emails alleged to be his were never transmitted.

    Yet today Burelli makes no secret of his desire to see Venezuela’s current president, Nicolás Maduro, deposed – and even dragged through the streets and sodomized with a bayonet, as Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi was by NATO-backed militiamen. 

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    Update: Burelli contacted the Grayzone after the publication of this article to clarify his participation in the “Fiesta Mexicana” plot.

    Burelli called the meeting “a legitimate activity that took place in a hotel by a different name” in Mexico.

    Asked if OTPOR coordinated the meeting, he would only state that he “likes” the work of OTPOR/CANVAS and while not a funder of it, has “recommended activists from different countries to track them and participate in the activities they conduct in various countries.”

    Burelli added: “The Einstein Institute trained thousands openly in Venezuela. Gene Sharpe’s philosophy was widely studied and embraced. And this has probably kept the struggle from turning into a civil war.”

    The alleged Fiesta Mexicana plot flowed into another destabilization plan revealed in a series of documents produced by the Venezuelan government. In May 2014, Caracas released documents detailing an assassination plot against President Nicolás Maduro. The leaks identified the Miami-based Maria Corina Machado as a leader of the scheme. A hardliner with a penchant for extreme rhetoric, Machado has functioned as an international liaison for the opposition, visiting President George W. Bush in 2005.

    Machado and George W. Bush, 2005

    “I think it is time to gather efforts; make the necessary calls, and obtain financing to annihilate Maduro and the rest will fall apart,” Machado wrote in an email to former Venezuelan diplomat Diego Arria in 2014.

    In another email, Machado claimed that the violent plot had the blessing of US Ambassador to Colombia, Kevin Whitaker. “I have already made up my mind and this fight will continue until this regime is overthrown and we deliver to our friends in the world. If I went to San Cristobal and exposed myself before the OAS, I fear nothing. Kevin Whitaker has already reconfirmed his support and he pointed out the new steps. We have a checkbook stronger than the regime’s to break the international security ring.”

    Guaidó heads to the barricades

    That February, student demonstrators acting as shock troops for the exiled oligarchy erected violent barricades across the country, turning opposition-controlled quarters into violent fortresses known as guarimbas. While international media portrayed the upheaval as a spontaneous protest against Maduro’s iron-fisted rule, there was ample evidence that Popular Will was orchestrating the show.

    “None of the protesters at the universities wore their university t-shirts, they all wore Popular Will or Justice First t-shirts,” a guarimba participant said at the time. “They might have been student groups, but the student councils are affiliated to the political opposition parties and they are accountable to them.”

    Asked who the ringleaders were, the guarimba participant said, “Well if I am totally honest, those guys are legislators now.”

    Around 43 were killed during the 2014 guarimbas. Three years later, they erupted again, causing mass destruction of public infrastructure, the murder of government supporters, and the deaths of 126 people, many of whom were Chavistas. In several cases, supporters of the government were burned alive by armed gangs.

    Guaidó was directly involved in the 2014 guarimbas. In fact, he tweeted video showing himself clad in a helmet and gas mask, surrounded by masked and armed elements that had shut down a highway that were engaging in a violent clash with the police. Alluding to his participation in Generation 2007, he proclaimed, “I remember in 2007, we proclaimed, ‘Students!’ Now, we shout, ‘Resistance! Resistance!’” 

    Guaidó has deleted the tweet, demonstrating apparent concern for his image as a champion of democracy.

    On February 12, 2014, during the height of that year’s guarimbas, Guaidó joined Lopez on stage at a rally of Popular Will and Justice First. During a lengthy diatribe against the government, Lopez urged the crowd to march to the office of Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz. Soon after, Diaz’s office came under attack by armed gangs who attempted to burn it to the ground. She denounced what she called “planned and premeditated violence.”

    Guaido alongside Lopez at the fateful February 12, 2014 rally

    In an televised appearance in 2016, Guaidó dismissed deaths resulting from guayas – a guarimba tactic involving stretching steel wire across a roadway in order to injure or kill motorcyclists – as a “myth.” His comments whitewashed a deadly tactic that had killedunarmed civilians like Santiago Pedroza and decapitated a man named Elvis Durán, among many others.

    This callous disregard for human life would define his Popular Will party in the eyes of much of the public, including many opponents of Maduro.

    Cracking down on Popular Will

    As violence and political polarization escalated across the country, the government began to act against the Popular Will leaders who helped stoke it.

    Freddy Guevara, the National Assembly Vice-President and second in command of Popular Will, was a principal leader in the 2017 street riots. Facing a trial for his role in the violence, Guevara took shelter in the Chilean embassy, where he remains.

    Lester Toledo, a Popular Will legislator from the state of Zulia, was wanted by Venezuelan government in September 2016 on charges of financing terrorism and plotting assassinations. The plans were said to be made with former Colombian President Álavaro Uribe. Toledo escaped Venezuela and went on several speaking tours with Human Rights Watch, the US government-backed Freedom House, the Spanish Congress and European Parliament.

    Carlos Graffe, another Otpor-trained Generation 2007 member who led Popular Will, was arrested in July 2017. According to police, he was in possession of a bag filled with nails, C4 explosives and a detonator. He was released on December 27, 2017.

    Leopoldo Lopez, the longtime Popular Will leader, is today under house arrest, accused of a key role in deaths of 13 people during the guarimbas in 2014. Amnesty International lauded Lopez as a “prisoner of conscience” and slammed his transfer from prison to house as “not good enough.” Meanwhile, family members of guarimba victims introduced a petition for more charges against Lopez.

    Yon Goicoechea, the Koch Brothers posterboy and US-backed founder of Justice First, was arrested in 2016 by security forces who claimed they found found a kilo of explosives in his vehicle. In a New York Times op-ed, Goicoechea protested the charges as “trumped-up” and claimed he had been imprisoned simply for his “dream of a democratic society, free of Communism.” He was freedin November 2017.

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    David Smolansky, also a member of the original Otpor-trained Generation 2007, became Venezuela’s youngest-ever mayor when he was elected in 2013 in the affluent suburb of El Hatillo. But he was stripped of his position and sentenced to 15 months in prison by the Supreme Court after it found him culpable of stirring the violent guarimbas.  

    Facing arrest, Smolansky shaved his beard, donned sunglasses and slipped into Brazil disguised as a priest with a bible in hand and rosary around his neck. He now lives in Washington, DC, where he was hand picked by Secretary of the Organization of American States Luis Almagro to lead the working group on the Venezuelan migrant and refugee crisis.

    This July 26, Smolansky held what he called a “cordial reunion” with Elliot Abrams, the convicted Iran-Contra felon installed by Trump as special US envoy to Venezuela. Abrams is notorious for overseeing the US covert policy of arming right-wing death squads during the 1980’s in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. His lead role in the Venezuelan coup has stoked fears that another blood-drenched proxy war might be on the way.

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    Four days earlier, Machado rumbled another violent threat against Maduro, declaring that if he “wants to save his life, he should understand that his time is up.”

    A pawn in their game

    The collapse of Popular Will under the weight of the violent campaign of destabilization it ran alienated large sectors of the public and wound much of its leadership up in exile or in custody. Guaidó had remained a relatively minor figure, having spent most of his nine-year career in the National Assembly as an alternate deputy. Hailing from one of Venezuela’s least populous states, Guaidó came in second place during the 2015 parliamentary elections, winning just 26% of votes cast in order to secure his place in the National Assembly. Indeed, his bottom may have been better known than his face.

    Guaidó is known as the president of the opposition-dominated National Assembly, but he was never elected to the position. The four opposition parties that comprised the Assembly’s Democratic Unity Table had decided to establish a rotating presidency. Popular Will’s turn was on the way, but its founder, Lopez, was under house arrest. Meanwhile, his second-in-charge, Guevara, had taken refuge in the Chilean embassy. A figure named Juan Andrés Mejía would have been next in line but reasons that are only now clear, Juan Guaido was selected.   

    “There is a class reasoning that explains Guaidó’s rise,” Sequera, the Venezuelan analyst, observed. “Mejía is high class, studied at one of the most expensive private universities in Venezuela, and could not be easily marketed to the public the way Guaidó could. For one, Guaidó has common mestizo features like most Venezuelans do, and seems like more like a man of the people. Also, he had not been overexposed in the media, so he could be built up into pretty much anything.”

    In December 2018, Guaidó sneaked across the border and junketed to Washington, Colombia and Brazil to coordinate the plan to hold mass demonstrations during the inauguration of President Maduro. The night before Maduro’s swearing-in ceremony, both Vice President Mike Pence and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland called Guaidó to affirm their support.

    A week later, Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart – all lawmakers from the Florida base of the right-wing Cuban exile lobby – joined President Trump and Vice President Pence at the White House. At their request, Trump agreed that if Guaidó declared himself president, he would back him.

    Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met personally withGuaidó on January 10, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, Pompeo could not pronounce Guaidó’s name when he mentioned him in a press briefing on January 25, referring to him as “Juan Guido.”

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    By January 11, Guaidó’s Wikipedia page had been edited 37 times, highlighting the struggle to shape the image of a previously anonymous figure who was now a tableau for Washington’s regime change ambitions. In the end, editorial oversight of his page was handed over to Wikipedia’s elite council of “librarians,” who pronounced him the “contested” president of Venezuela.

    Guaidó might have been an obscure figure, but his combination of radicalism and opportunism satisfied Washington’s needs. “That internal piece was missing,” a Trump administration said of Guaidó. “He was the piece we needed for our strategy to be coherent and complete.”

    “For the first time,” Brownfield, the former American ambassador to Venezuela, gushed to the New York Times, “you have an opposition leader who is clearly signaling to the armed forces and to law enforcement that he wants to keep them on the side of the angels and with the good guys.”

    But Guaidó’s Popular Will party formed the shock troops of the guarimbas that caused the deaths of police officers and common citizens alike. He had even boasted of his own participation in street riots. And now, to win the hearts and minds of the military and police, Guaido had to erase this blood-soaked history.

    On January 21, a day before the coup began in earnest, Guaidó’s wife delivered a video address calling on the military to rise up against Maduro. Her performance was wooden and uninspiring, underscoring the her husband’s limited political prospects.

    At a press conference before supporters four days later, Guaidó announced his solution to the crisis: “Authorize a humanitarian intervention!”

    While he waits on direct assistance, Guaidó remains what he has always been – a pet project of cynical outside forces. “It doesn’t matter if he crashes and burns after all these misadventures,” Sequera said of the coup figurehead. “To the Americans, he is expendable.”

  • Armed Services Committee Chairman Warns US And China "Headed For World War III"

    Given that China’s President Xi Jinping started the year by obliquely warning the US to stay out of Taiwan’s business, perhaps it’s not surprising that Senators are starting to join US military commanders in warning Americans not to underestimate the threat posed by China’s unprecedented military buildup in the Pacific.

    In the latest – and perhaps the most stark – warning to date, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma – who recently took over as the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee – warned during a hearing about the challenges posed by China and Russia on Tuesday that people need to better understand the threats both countries pose to the international world order that America helped create, according to the Military Times.

    Inhofe

    America has stood idly by as China has built airstrips and military bases out of a series of rocky atolls in the Spratley Archipelago, preparing to flex its military muscle in the Pacific. China’s increasingly aggressive behavior was on display last fall when a Chinese Navy ship nearly rammed the USS Decatur while it was carrying out a “freedom of operation” mission.

    While the U.S. military has a presence in and around the South China Sea and the larger western Pacific Ocean, Inhofe said America largely watched China lay claim to its rocks and islets before turning other reefs into fortifications, brimming with arms and stockpiled with materiel.

    Beijing’s ongoing expansion into the Spratly archipelago agitates neighboring nations and continues to challenge international law, an assertiveness the U.S. Navy attempts to check through routine freedom of navigation operations, or FONOPs.

    The days of absolute military dominance in the South China Sea have ended, Inhofe said. But strangely, many Americans don’t seem to understand the magnitude of this shift – or its implications. With its One Belt, One Road initiative, debt diplomacy and other efforts, China has managed to pull some of the US’s traditional allies away from its orbit, and closer to Beijing.

    “It’s like you’re preparing for World War III,” Inhofe said. “You’re talking to our allies over there and you wonder whose side they’re going to be on.”

    Inhofe and other senators, as well as experts who testified before the committee, noted that the urgency of the Chinese threat against America and today’s world order may not be fully appreciated by U.S. citizens.

    “I’m concerned our message is not getting across,” said Inhofe, who took over the committee this month.

    A military analyst quoted by the Military Times reinforced Inhofe’s warning, saying that Americans should be prepared for long-term competition with China.

    A fellow hand at CNAS, Ely Ratner, added that it’s important for Senators and all other Americans to know that Washington’s rocky relationship with China is neither “an episodic downturn” nor a problem that began with President Donald Trump and his administration’s policies.

    Saying that the American people “should be preparing for long-term competition with China,” Ratner also warned Beijing’s support for embattled Venezuelan strongman Nicholas Maduro should be viewed as a sign of things to come.

    “I think it’s a harbinger of what a China-led order would look like…in terms of protecting and defending non-democratic regimes and impeding the ability of the international community to galvanize and respond,” said Ratner, a former deputy national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden.

    “If we don’t get our act together in Asia, we’re going to see this movie over and over and over again throughout the developing world.”

    Unsurprisingly, China wasn’t thrilled with Inhofe’s assessment; the editor of the English-language Global Times, a Communist Party mouthpiece, accused the senator of having “mental problems.”

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    Beijing, which has repeatedly pushed back against the US’s aggressive rhetoric by dismissing its warnings, will be just thrilled to hear from Inhofe, particularly on the day that the “high-level” trade talks between the two countries began.

  • Jackboots In The Morning: No One Is Spared From This American Nightmare

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “This is jackboots in the morning. This is an American nightmare that they would arrest somebody like this.”—Judge Andrew Napolitano

    The American Police State does not discriminate.

    Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

    We’ve been having this same debate about the perils of government overreach for the past 50-plus years, and still we don’t seem to learn, or if we learn, we learn too late.

    For too long now, the American people have allowed their personal prejudices and politics to cloud their judgment and render them incapable of seeing that the treatment being doled out by the government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the threat.

    All of the excessive, abusive tactics employed by the government today—warrantless surveillance, stop and frisk searches, SWAT team raids, roadside strip searches, asset forfeiture schemes, private prisons, indefinite detention, militarized police, etc.—will eventually be meted out on the general populace.

    At that point, when you find yourself in the government’s crosshairs, it will not matter whether your skin is black or yellow or brown or white; it will not matter whether you’re an immigrant or a citizen; it will not matter whether you’re rich or poor; it will not matter whether you’re Republican or Democrat; and it certainly won’t matter who you voted for in the last presidential election.

    At that point—at the point you find yourself subjected to dehumanizing, demoralizing, thuggish behavior by government bureaucrats who are hyped up on the power of their badges and empowered to detain, search, interrogate, threaten and generally harass anyone they see fit—remember you were warned.

    Take Roger Stone, one of President Trump’s longtime supporters, for example.

    This is a guy accused of witness tampering, obstruction of justice and lying to Congress.

    As far as we know, this guy is not the kingpin of a violent mob or drug-laundering scheme. He’s been charged with a political crime. So what does the FBI do? They send 29 heavily armed agents in 17 vehicles to carry out a SWAT-style raid on Stone’s Florida home just before dawn on Jan. 25, 2019.

    As the Boston Herald reports:

    “After his arraignment on witness tampering, obstruction and lying to Congress, a rattled Stone was quoted as saying 29 agents ‘pounded on the door,’ pointed automatic weapons at him and ‘terrorized’ his wife and dogs. Stone was taken away in handcuffs, the sixth associate of President Trump to be indicted in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. All the charges have been related to either lying or tax evasion, with no evidence of so-called ‘collusion’ with Russia emerging to date.”

    Overkill? Sure.

    Yet another example of government overreach and brutality? Definitely.

    But here’s the thing: while Tucker Carlson and Chris Christie and other Trump apologists appear shocked that law enforcement personnel would stage a military assault against “an unarmed 66-year-old man who has been charged with a nonviolent crime,” this is nothing new.

    Indeed, this is blowback, one more vivid example of how the government’s short-sighted use of immoral, illegal and unconstitutional tactics become dangerous weapons turned against the American people.

    To be clear, this Stone raid is far from the first time a SWAT team has been employed in non-violent scenarios.

    Nationwide, SWAT teams routinely invade homes, break down doors, kill family pets (they always shoot the dogs first), damage furnishings, terrorize families, and wound or kill those unlucky enough to be present during a raid.

    Payton, a 7-year-old black Labrador retriever, and 4-year-old Chase, also a black Lab, were shot and killed after a SWAT team mistakenly raided the mayor’s home while searching for drugs. Police shot Payton four times. Chase was shot twice, once from behind as he ran away. “My government blew through my doors and killed my dogs. They thought we were drug dealers, and we were treated as such. I don’t think they really ever considered that we weren’t,” recalls Mayor Cheye Calvo, who described being handcuffed and interrogated for hours—wearing only underwear and socks—surrounded by the dogs’ carcasses and pools of the dogs’ blood.

    SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of so-called criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling. In some instances, SWAT teams are even employed, in full armament, to perform routine patrols.

    If these raids are becoming increasingly common and widespread, you can chalk it up to the “make-work” philosophy, in which you assign at-times unnecessary jobs to individuals to keep them busy or employed. In this case, however, the make-work principle is being used to justify the use of sophisticated military equipment and, in the process, qualify for federal funding.

    SWAT teams originated as specialized units dedicated to defusing extremely sensitive, dangerous situations. They were never meant to be used for routine police work such as serving a warrant.

    Frequently justified as vital tools necessary to combat terrorism and deal with rare but extremely dangerous criminal situations, such as those involving hostages, SWAT teams—which first appeared on the scene in California in the 1960s—have now become intrinsic parts of federal and local law enforcement operations, thanks in large part to substantial federal assistance and the Pentagon’s 1033 military surplus recycling program, which allows the transfer of military equipment, weapons and training to local police for free or at sharp discounts.

    Mind you, this is the same program that President Trump breathed new life into back in 2017.

    As the role of paramilitary forces has expanded to include involvement in nondescript police work targeting nonviolent suspects, the mere presence of SWAT units has actually injected a level of danger and violence into police-citizen interactions that was not present as long as these interactions were handled by traditional civilian officers. 

    There are few communities without a SWAT team today.

    In 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT team-style raids in the US.

    Incredibly, that number has since grown to more than 80,000 SWAT team raids per year.

    Where this becomes a problem of life and death for Americans is when these militarized SWAT teams are assigned to carry out routine law enforcement tasks.

    No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day.

    In the state of Maryland alone, 92 percent of 8200 SWAT missions were used to execute search or arrest warrants.

    Police in both Baltimore and Dallas have used SWAT teams to bust up poker games.

    A Connecticut SWAT team swarmed a bar suspected of serving alcohol to underage individuals.

    In Arizona, a SWAT team was used to break up an alleged cockfighting ring.

    An Atlanta SWAT team raided a music studio, allegedly out of a concern that it might have been involved in illegal music piracy.

    A Minnesota SWAT team raided the wrong house in the middle of the night, handcuffed the three young children, held the mother on the floor at gunpoint, shot the family dog, and then “forced the handcuffed children to sit next to the carcass of their dead pet and bloody pet for more than an hour” while they searched the home.

    A California SWAT team drove an armored Lenco Bearcat into Roger Serrato’s yard, surrounded his home with paramilitary troops wearing face masks, threw a fire-starting flashbang grenade into the house in order, then when Serrato appeared at a window, unarmed and wearing only his shorts, held him at bay with rifles. Serrato died of asphyxiation from being trapped in the flame-filled house. Incredibly, the father of four had done nothing wrong. The SWAT team had misidentified him as someone involved in a shooting.

    And then there was the police officer who tripped and “accidentally” shot and killed Eurie Stamps, an unarmed grandfather of 12, who had been forced to lie facedown on the floor of his home at gunpoint while a SWAT team attempted to execute a search warrant against his stepson.

    Equally outrageous was the four-hour SWAT team raid on a California high school, where students were locked down in classrooms, forced to urinate in overturned desks and generally terrorized by heavily armed, masked gunmen searching for possible weapons that were never found.

    These incidents are just the tip of the iceberg.

    What we are witnessing is an inversion of the police-civilian relationship.

    Rather than compelling police officers to remain within constitutional bounds as servants of the people, ordinary Americans are being placed at the mercy of militarized police units.

    This is what happens when paramilitary forces are used to conduct ordinary policing operations, such as executing warrants on nonviolent defendants.

    Unfortunately, general incompetence, collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids tend to go hand in hand with an overuse of paramilitary forces.

    In some cases, officers misread the address on the warrant.

    In others, they simply barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building.

    In another subset of cases (such as the Department of Education raid on Anthony Wright’s home), police conduct a search of a building where the suspect no longer resides.

    If you’re wondering why the Education Department needs a SWAT team, you’re not alone.

    Among those federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions are the State Department, Department of Education, Department of Energy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service, to name just a few. In fact, it says something about our reliance on the military that federal agencies having nothing whatsoever to do with national defense now see the need for their own paramilitary units.

    SWAT teams have even on occasion conducted multiple, sequential raids on wrong addresses or executed search warrants despite the fact that the suspect is already in police custody. Police have also raided homes on the basis of mistaking the presence or scent of legal substances for drugs. Incredibly, these substances have included tomatoes, sunflowers, fish, elderberry bushes, kenaf plants, hibiscus, and ragweed.

    As you can see, all too often, botched SWAT team raids have resulted in one tragedy after another for the residents with little consequences for law enforcement.

    Unfortunately, judges tend to afford extreme levels of deference to police officers who have mistakenly killed innocent civilians but do not afford similar leniency to civilians who have injured police officers in acts of self-defense.

    Even homeowners who mistake officers for robbers can be sentenced for assault or murder if they take defensive actions resulting in harm to police.

    And as journalist Radley Balko shows in his in-depth study of police militarization, the shock-and-awe tactics utilized by many SWAT teams only increases the likelihood that someone will get hurt.

    Drug warrants, for instance, are typically served by paramilitary units late at night or shortly before dawn. Unfortunately, to the unsuspecting homeowner—especially in cases involving mistaken identities or wrong addresses—a raid can appear to be nothing less than a violent home invasion, with armed intruders crashing through their door. The natural reaction would be to engage in self-defense. Yet such a defensive reaction on the part of a homeowner, particularly a gun owner, will spur officers to employ lethal force.

    That’s exactly what happened to Jose Guerena, the young ex-Marine who was killed after a SWAT team kicked open the door of his Arizona home during a drug raid and opened fire. According to news reports, Guerena, 26 years old and the father of two young children, grabbed a gun in response to the forced invasion but never fired. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. Police officers were not as restrained. The young Iraqi war veteran was allegedly fired upon 71 times. Guerena had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

    Aiyana Jones is dead because of a SWAT raid gone awry. The 7-year-old was killed after a Detroit SWAT team—searching for a suspect—launched a flash-bang grenade into her family’s apartment, broke through the door and opened fire, hitting the little girl who was asleep on the living room couch. The cops weren’t even in the right apartment.

    Exhibiting a similar lack of basic concern for public safety, a Georgia SWAT team launched a flash-bang grenade into the house in which Baby Bou Bou, his three sisters and his parents were staying. The grenade landed in the 2-year-old’s crib, burning a hole in his chest and leaving him with scarring that a lifetime of surgeries will not be able to easily undo.

    Alberto Sepulveda, 11, died from one “accidental” shotgun round to the back after a SWAT team raided his parents’ home.

    The problems inherent in these situations are further compounded by the fact that SWAT teams are granted “no-knock” warrants at high rates such that the warrants themselves are rendered practically meaningless.

    This sorry state of affairs is made even worse by U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have essentially done away with the need for a “no-knock” warrant altogether, giving the police authority to disregard the protections afforded American citizens by the Fourth Amendment.

    In the process, Americans are rendered altogether helpless and terror-stricken as a result of these confrontations with the police.

    Indeed, “terrorizing” is a mild term to describe the effect on those who survive such vigilante tactics. “It was terrible. It was the most frightening experience of my life. I thought it was a terrorist attack,” said 84-year-old Leona Goldberg, a victim of such a raid. 

    Yet this type of “terrorizing” activity is characteristic of the culture that we have created.

    If ever there were a time to de-militarize and de-weaponize local police forces, it’s now.

    While we are now grappling with a power-hungry police state at the federal level, the militarization of domestic American law enforcement is largely the result of the militarization of local police forces, which are increasingly militaristic in their uniforms, weaponry, language, training, and tactics and have come to rely on SWAT teams in matters that once could have been satisfactorily performed by traditional civilian officers.

    Yet American police forces were never supposed to be a branch of the military, nor were they meant to be private security forces for the reigning political faction.

    Instead, they were intended to be an aggregation of countless local police units, composed of citizens like you and me that exist for a sole purpose: to serve and protect the citizens of each and every American community.

    As a result of the increasing militarization of the police in recent years, however, the police now not only look like the military—with their foreboding uniforms and phalanx of lethal weapons—but they function like them, as well.

    Thus, no more do we have a civilian force of peace officers entrusted with serving and protecting the American people.  Instead, today’s militarized law enforcement officials have shifted their allegiance from the citizenry to the state, acting preemptively to ward off any possible challenges to the government’s power, unrestrained by the boundaries of the Fourth Amendment.

    As journalist Herman Schwartz observed, “The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official.”

    Heavily armed police officers, the end product of the government—federal, local and state—and law enforcement agencies having merged, have become a “standing” or permanent army, composed of full-time professional soldiers who do not disband.

    Yet these permanent armies are exactly what those who drafted the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights feared as tools used by despotic governments to wage war against its citizens.

    This phenomenon we are experiencing with the police is what philosopher Abraham Kaplan referred to as the law of the instrument, which essentially says that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

    In the scenario that has been playing out in recent years, we the citizenry have become the nails to be hammered by the government’s henchmen, a.k.a. its guns for hire, a.k.a. its standing army, a.k.a. the nation’s law enforcement agencies.

    The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”

    A study by a political scientist at Princeton University concludes that militarizing police and SWAT teams “provide no detectable benefits in terms of officer safety or violent crime reduction.”

    The study, the first systematic analysis on the use and consequences of militarized force, reveals that “police militarization neither reduces rates of violent crime nor changes the number of officers assaulted or killed.”

    In other words, warrior cops aren’t making us or themselves any safer.

    Indeed, as I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it is increasingly evident that militarized police armed with weapons of war who are empowered to carry out pre-dawn raids on our homes, shoot our pets, and terrorize our families have not made America any safer or freer.

    The sticking point is not whether Americans must see eye-to-eye on the pressing issues of the day, but whether we can agree that no one should be treated in such a fashion by their own government.

  • Inside The Nevada "Doomsday Prepper Dream Home" That Can Be Yours For Just $900,000

    A four-story, 22-room, 8,000-square-foot prepper castle in the middle of the Nevada desert can be yours for just $900,000, according to CNBC.

    Sporting 16″ thick walls, self-sustained wind and solar systems and a 4,000-gallon water storage/rain catchment system, the Hard Luck Mine Castle even sports its own gold mine that operated from 1897 to around World War II. 

    Gold claims dating back to 1897 signed by President William McKinley, included the Emerson and Hard Luck Lodes, the two twenty-acre patent claims that comprise the Hard Luck Mine. After the war, the mine never reopened. –Hardluckcastle

    In addition to two kitchens, three full bathrooms, a wood shop, wine cellar (the “lick-her” vault), theater, game room, glass solarium, planetarium and fountain room, the castle has two vintage pipe organs for the new owners to play a “phantom of the apocalypse” duet. 

    “In a lot of ways, it’s a ‘doomsday prepper’ dream home…extremely self-sustaining, secure and — admittedly — quite odd,” realtor Jake Rasmuson told CNBC. “Basically this property is an enormous, privately owned fortress…” 

    Current owner, Randy Johnston, who bought the property in 1998, according to the website, spent more than $3 million constructing the “castle,” Rasmuson tells CNBC Make It. It went on the market in late October for $1.2 million. “Pricing is very difficult on a property as unique as this,” Rasmuson tells CNBC Make It. “Given HOW unique it is, it may be difficult to recoup the total investment on any time frame. The pricing has been established in a realistic range to gain interest…. [Y]ou can get an 8,000-square-foot castle for the same price as one-bedroom condo in San Francisco.”

    …

    The Hard Luck Castle comes with 40 acres of land off Highway 267 in Esmeralda County. It gets hot in the summer — 90 degrees in July — and is just below the snow line, according to Rasmuson’s listing for the property. –CNBC

    Out front is a tall, white compass with each of the presidents’ names listed in descending order. 

  • Tesla Shocks Investors By Sneaking CFO Resignation Announcement In Last Minute Of Conference Call

    For all intents and purposes, it had been a relatively “normal” Tesla conference call. There were no “boring, bonehead” questions; Bloomberg’s real time commentary even said “Besides a loud Elon Musk cackle, this may be the most ho-hum Tesla investor call in ages.”

    And then all hell broke loose.

    * * *

    As was typical for virtually every Tesla call, today too was replete with doubletalk, nonsense and extremely optimistic forward-looking statements: the stuff most propaganda is made of. It had the requisite curiosities: a pickup truck supposedly coming this summer, no details on financing in China, the company claiming its battery costs were “proprietary” and the company’s capex relative to depreciation dropping to its lowest level in five years hardly what one would expect from a “growth” story…

    …but by Tesla standards, the call actually went relatively normally.

    Even Elon Musk, inbetween stuttering and lobbing sophisticated sounding guesses at questions from analysts, for the most part stayed on script. He refrained from calling analysts “boneheads”, he didn’t say “Let’s go to YouTube” and did not appear to be using drugs or under the influence.

    But then, literally in the last minutes of the call when everybody thought that the quarter was going to come and go without any shockers the call turned back to Musk who, in Steve Jobs fashion, had to announce just “one more thing.” Only unlike Jobs, the announcement wasn’t good news.

    After all questions had been taken and most analyst lines disconnected, Musk matter-of-factly announced that the $60 billion company’s CFO, Deepak Ahuja, was quitting… for the second and final time.

    Not only did the announcement stun everybody – at least those who were still connected – it was not included anywhere in the shareholder letter or mentioned previously during the call which ended roughly a few minutes after the announcement. Tesla executives signed off by saying they’d speak to investors in three months, as if the idea of boring, bonehead follow-up questions from the announcement was beyond comprehension.

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    What made the announcement even more bizarre, is that it was Ahuja’s second term as CFO, and many of the people reporting directly to him have since resigned or otherwise left the company over the last couple of years.

    Who took his place?

    Tesla announced that the CFO’s replacement was “Zach”, who was identified only by his first name at initially Elon couldn’t remember his last name. He was later revealed to be 31-year-old Zachary Kirkhorn, a senior finance analyst at the company.

    Naturally, this provoked bemused reactions on Twitter and everywhere else. “Zach’s” credentials were immediately called into question.

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    Others seemed to take slight exception with how the news was released.

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    Even the mainstream press couldn’t help but be skeptical. Forbes contributor Jim Collins called the departure of Ahuja “a huge negative”. Bloomberg called his departure at this point during Tesla’s global expansion “truly astounding”, and the market agreed, slamming the stock to session lows after the surreal announcement.

    But not everyone was negative. Who needs experience when you can have a “great” young guy at the helm, a prominent Tesla bull argued.

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    This wasn’t the first time Ahuja stole the show during the conference call. Earlier in the call, when asked by an analysts about the number of reservations that the company still had yet to fulfill, Ahuja replied that reservations were “irrelevant”. This also inspired shock amid the investing public.

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    Later, The Wall Street Journal’s Charley Grant was first to point out that the reservations were so irrelevant, they made their way onto the front page of a $1.8 billion equity raise prospectus back in 2016.

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    The Ahuja news firmly replaced what had been the obvious candidate for most ridiculous thing said on a conference call, when earlier in the call CEO Musk claimed that the Model 3 had “insanely high” demand, but that this demand was being inhibited by people’s ability to pay for the car.

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    If only demand could be measured by people who merely “want” things, without being actually required to pay for them.

    As one would expect, Tesla stock which was down about 2% heading into the call, finished the after hours session down about 4%, tumbling on the literally last minute news.

    In short, brace for another rollercoaster year for the company which has now seen the departure of about 40 senior level professionals in the past 2 year, and whose CEO was so busy when drafting the stream of consciousness essay that passes for a Tesla earnings report, that he totally forgot to announce that the company’s 2nd in command was retiring.

  • China, Russia Preparing For "Blackout Warfare" With "Super-EMP" Bombs

    Russia, China and several other nations are developing powerful high-altitude nuclear bombs that can produce super-electromagnetic pulse (EMP) waves capable of knocking out critical electronic infrastructure, according to several declassified 2017 reports from the now-defunct Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack (see below). 

    “Foreign adversaries may aptly consider nuclear EMP attack a weapon that can gravely damage the U.S. by striking at its technological Achilles Heel, without having to confront the U.S. military,” reads the report, which notes how foreign actors could use EMP attacks virtually anywhere in the world. 

    “Super-EMP” weapons, as they are termed by Russia, are nuclear weapons specially designed to generate an extraordinarily powerful E1 EMP field. Super-EMP warheads are designed to produce gamma rays, which generate the E1 EMP effect, not a big explosion, and typically have very low explosive yields, only 1-10 kilotons … Even EMP hardened U.S. strategic forces and command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) systems are potentially vulnerable to such a threat. –Firstempcommission.org

    “Nuclear EMP attack is part of the military doctrines, plans, and exercises of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran for a revolutionary new way of warfare against military forces and civilian critical infrastructures by cyber, sabotage, and EMP,” the report continues. 

    “The Commission sees the high-altitude nuclear explosion-generated electromagnetic pulse as an existential threat to the survival of the United States and its allies that can be exploited by major nuclear powers and small-scale nuclear weapon powers, including North Korea and non-state actors, such as nuclear-armed terrorists.” 

    Nuclear-electronic warfare is also known as “Blackout War” according to the Washington Free Beacon. 

    EMP attacks will be carried out at such high altitudes they will produce no blast or other immediate effects harmful to humans. Instead, three types of EMP waves in seconds damage electronics and the strikes are regarded by adversaries as not an act of nuclear war.

    “Potential adversaries understand that millions could die from the long-term collateral effects of EMP and cyber-attacks that cause protracted black-out of national electric grids and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures,” the report said.

    The attacks are regarded by enemy military planners as a relatively easy, potentially unattributable means of inflicting mass destruction and forcing opponents to capitulate.

    EMP strikes can be adjusted in the size of the area and the intensity of the wave by detonating at different altitudes. The closer to the earth the more powerful is the pulse. The higher the altitude, the wider the area of impact. –Free Beacon

    EMP attacks do not require accuracy, nor do the bombs require a re-entry vehicle, heat shield or shock absorbers like standard nuclear weapons, and they can be delivered through several methods – including satellites, short – medium – long range missiles, or even from a jet, commercial airliner or a meteorological balloon. 

     

    We’ve seen how this ends: 

    The Commission’s recommendations are as follows: 

    Recommendation 1: The Commission recommends the President establish an Executive Agent with the authority, accountability, and resources to manage U.S. national infrastructure protection and defense against the existential EMP threat.

    Recommendation 2: The Commission strongly recommends that implementation of cybersecurity for the electric grid and other critical infrastructures include EMP protection. 

    Recommendation 3: The Commission encourages the President to work with Congressional leaders to establish a joint Presidential-Congressional Commission, with its members charged with supporting the Nation’s leadership to achieve, on an accelerated basis, the protection of critical national infrastructures.

    Recommendation 4: The Commission recommends that government agencies and industries adopt new standards to protect critical national infrastructures from damaging E3 EMP heave fields, with more realistic standards of 85 V/km.

    Recommendation 5: The Commission recommends that the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy provide expedited threat-level, full-system testing of large power transformers in wide use within the bulk electric system and share key findings with the electric utility industry.

    Recommendation 6: The Commission recommends the Director of National Intelligence circulate to all recipients of the 2014 JAEIC report the EMP Commission critique and direct a new assessment be prepared that supersedes the 2014 JAEIC EMP report.

    And for what to do after an EMP attack, the Commission has provided a handy report titled: “LIFE WITHOUT ELECTRICITY: STORM-INDUCED BLACKOUTS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR EMP ATTACK“

  • Lindsey Graham Demands FBI Briefing After Dramatic Roger Stone Arrest; Trump May Launch Inquiry

    Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) demanded an explanation over last week’s arrest of longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, according to the Washington Post. 

    Stone was arrested on Friday in an early morning raid by heavily armed federal agents as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. Hours later, Stone was out on $250,000 signature bond – leaving many to note that the whole thing appears to have been a dramatic waste of taxpayer money that could have been handled by simply notifying Stone’s attorney of the indictment. 

    Graham – who was pictured having dinner with Trump, VP Mike Pence, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Mnuchin’s Chief of Staff – said in his letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray that he was concerned over “the number of agents involved, the tactics employed, the timing of the arrest” and whether the media was tipped off. 

    “The American public has had enough of the media circus that surrounds the Special Counsel’s investigation,” reads Graham’s letter, referring to Mueller’s probe. “Yet, the manner of this arrest appears to have only added to the spectacle.”

    In Wednesday comments to the Daily Caller, President Trump said that he was “speaking for a lot of people that were very disappointed to see that go down that way. To see it happen where it was on camera, on top of it. That was a very, very disappointing scene,” and that he would “think about” asking the FBI to review its use of force. 

    Stone was charged with obstruction, witness tampering and lying to Congress in connection to the Mueller investigation. He pleaded not guilty on Tuesday. 

    According to Stone, the FBI agents “terrorized my wife and my dogs,” adding that the agency used “greater force than was used to take down bin Laden or El Chapo or Pablo Escobar.”

  • "Largest Fleet Of Satellites In Human History" Set To Revolutionize Space-Based Spying

    A San Francisco-based aerospace company has begun to revolutionize space-based spying after launching a “fleet” of nearly 300 satellites into orbit – nearly half of which were sent up last year. 

    Founded in 2010 by ex-NASA scientists Will Marshall, Robbie Schingler and Chris Boshuizen, Planet Labs has perfected the art of shrinking truck sized surveillance satellites down to the size of a loaf of bread. Planet now has just over 400 employees, most of them in San Francisco. 

    Packed with some of the same electronics used in smartphones, the satellites are known as “doves,” which sit in their “nests” until they are ready to be launched in “flocks,” where they join an array of satellites which can image the entire earth once every 24-hours – flooding data centers with a stream of 1.2 million pictures each day. 

    “It’s a line-scanner for the planet,” said Marshall during a 2014 Ted Talk. 

    The images can then be manually compared, or fed into algorithms which can look for minor changes such as new roads or building construction. 

    “I’m always astonished that almost every picture we get down, we compare it to the picture from yesterday, and something’s changed,” says Marshall, who sat down with 60 Minutes. “We see rivers move, we see trees go down, we see vehicles move, we see road surfaces change and it gives you a perspective of the planet as a dynamic and evolving thing that we need to take care of.“

    While most of the Planet’s 200-plus customers are agricultural companies looking to monitor the health of their crops, their most important customer is the National Geospacial Intelligence Agency (NGA) – the government body responsible for analyzing satellite photos from its 2.7 million square-foot headquarters south of Washington D.C. staffed with 14,500 employees. 

    “I’m quite excited about capabilities such as what Planet’s putting up in space,” says NGA director Robert Cardillo. 

    It’s space-age hide and seek. Adversaries know when and where American spy satellites are looking but can never be sure what they’re finding.

    Robert Cardillo: This is what NGA developed in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.

    Before President Obama and his national security team, including Cardillo there on the left, gathered in the White House Situation Room on the night of the raid, NGA had gone back in time through seven years of satellite imagery to construct this scale model of Bin Laden’s hideout.

    Robert Cardillo: We had historic imagery of this compound that enabled us to reverse time.

    NGA could see not just the outside, but inside as well.

    Robert Cardillo: It enabled us to go back to the point of construction. And essentially through our imagery archive to rebuild the house so, we could see how the first floor was designed and how the rooms would lay out, where are the stairs from the first to the second floor and the second to the third floor.

    David Martin: So old pictures show that building before the roof went on?

    Robert Cardillo: We had pictures before the compound existed. We saw it when it was first constructed and as it, as it was built over time. Correct.

    David Martin: And that’s how you could find out the dimensions of each room?

    Robert Cardillo: Indeed. -60 Minutes

    Robert Cardillo

    NGA’s capabilities are of course top secret, however they have been collecting the bulk of their images from three multi-billion dollar satellites the size of a city bus, according to satellite tracker Ted Molczan – who uses giant binoculars. 

    The satellites that made that possible are the equivalent of a Hubble Space Telescope. But instead of taking pictures of the heavens they are zeroed in on Earth, able to make out objects just four inches across.

    For decades they have been indispensable to knowing what America’s adversaries are up to, but like Hubble they cost billions of dollars each. Which is one reason there are so few in orbit.

    David Martin: Are they putting more up?

    Ted Molczan: They’ve never had more than four up at a time.

    Which is why Cardillo is so interested in Planet and its small satellites that deliver a tsunami of data like NGA has never seen.  -60 Minutes

    Ted Molczan

    According to Robert Cardillo, the NGA would need six million humans to exploit all the imagery they have access to – which Planet’s Shawna Wolverton explains can be accomplished through algorithms. 

    Planet’s Shawna Wolverton showed us how a computer can be programmed to help track the impact of Syria’s Civil War on the people who live there.

    Shawna Wolverton: So, what we’ve done is created a algorithm that looks for new roads and buildings.

    An algorithm that rifled through reams of satellite photos and identified the first signs of a new refugee camp.

    Shawna Wolverton: Here’s that first image.

    David Martin: So, that red grid is what?

    Shawna Wolverton: Those are new roads. And all of these blue spots that you can see here are buildings.

    David Martin: So, this is one little corner of, of Syria. Could you do this for the entire country?

    Shawna Wolverton: We can absolutely do this for the entire country. I can show you over here. We can zoom out. And you can see that we’ve run this algorithm over the entire country and you can see all of the roads and buildings. -60 Minutes

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