TBR News December 4, 2016
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. December 4r, 2016:”We will be out of the country for four days. Ed.”
UN to pursue further inquiry into death of Dag Hammarskjöld
General Assembly to pass resolution recognising need to investigate death of former general secretary who died in 1961 plane crash
December 3, 2016
by Jamie Doward
The Guardian
What caused the 1961 plane crash that killed former UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld? A Swedish-led UN inquiry the following year concluded that the plane, the Albertina, had crashed in northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) as a result of “pilot error”. But this failed to satisfy many who have long suspected foul play.
There were claims that the Albertina, which was carrying Hammarskjöld and a 15-strong team seeking to negotiate a ceasefire in the breakaway African republic of Katanga, was riddled with bullets. Several witnesses said they saw as many as eight white men, armed and in combat fatigues, at the crash site.
An industrialist in the copper belt of the old northern Rhodesia apparently saw convoys of Land Rovers heading into the bush after the crash.
Even the US president, Harry Truman, was suspicious. The day after the crash he told reporters that Hammarskjöld was at “the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him’.”
Now, more than 50 years on, the UN is poised to accept that the findings of its original inquiry could be wrong. In a historic move, the UN general assembly will pass a resolution this Tuesday reaffirming its “responsibility to pursue the full truth concerning the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him”.
The resolution recognises “that a further inquiry or investigation would be necessary to finally establish the facts of the matter” and requests that the secretary general “appoint an eminent person to review the potential new information, including that which may be available from member states, to assess its probative value and to determine the scope that any further inquiry or investigation should take”.
The eminent person will have their work cut out. Few who have studied the crash will be confident that anyone can ever know what really happened. But a plausible theory is starting to emerge.
A report from a panel of distinguished international jurists, commissioned by the Hammarskjöld Inquiry Trust chaired by Lord Lea of Crondall and submitted to the UN last year, heard suggestions “that a group representing a number of European political and business interests … wanted the secretary general’s plane diverted from Ndola [city in Zambia] … in order to persuade him of the case for Katanga’s continued independence”.
The group feared what would happen to their mining concessions if Katanga was reabsorbed into Soviet-backed Congo.
There has been speculation that in the attempt to force the plane to land, the Albertina was either mistakenly strafed with bullets or disorientated by lights from another plane, which caused it to crash.
Lea said: “With the likely adoption of this new Swedish resolution sponsored by 56 countries, the UN position is patently shifting from what in the language of the Swedish inquiry in 1962 had been unequivocally ‘pilot error’ to what in a coroner’s court in the UK would be termed an ‘open verdict’. This will be pursued further by the new and more focused remit to be given to the new UN investigator to throw a further spotlight on key areas of emerging new evidence.”
The UN resolution urges “all member states to release any relevant records in their possession” and “to ensure that any relevant records related to the death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him that remain classified, more than 50 years after the fact, are declassified or otherwise made available for review.”
This is potentially significant. It is believed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) may be in possession of crucial radio intercepts taken from pilots who were in the area at the time the Albertina came down.
Dag Hammarskjold: Comments
Hammarskjöld (July 29, 1905 – September 18, 1961) was a Swedish diplomat and the second Secretary-General of the United Nations. He served from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961.
On July 29, 2005, exactly 100 years after Hammarskjöld’s birth, the Norwegian Major General Bjørn Egge gave an interview to the newspaper Aftenposten on the events surrounding his death. According to Egge, who was the first UN officer to see the body, Hammarskjöld had a hole in his forehead, and this hole was subsequently airbrushed from photos taken of the body. It appeared to Egge that Hammarskjöld had been thrown from the plane, and grass and leaves in his hands might indicate that he survived the crash, and had tried to scramble away from the wreckage. Egge’s statement does not, however, align with Archbishop Tutu’s informationSouth Africa’s truth commission chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Wednesday released documents he said suggested a Western plot was behind the death of the head of the United Nations in 1961.
Tutu said his Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is investigating crimes committed during the apartheid era, had decided to release the documents although it could not verify their authenticity. “The commission has discovered…documents discussing the sabotage of the aircraft in which the U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold died on the night of September 17 to 18, 1961,” Tutu told a news conference before leaving to spend a year in the United States. “We have been unable to investigate the veracity of these documents and of allegations that South Africa or other Western intelligence agencies were involved in bringing about the air crash,” he said.
The letters, headed the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR)– said to be a front company for the South African military– include references to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British MI5 security service. “In a meeting between MI5, special ops executive and the SAIMR, the following emerged,” reads one document marked Top Secret, “it is felt that Hammarskjold should be removed.” “I want his removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice,” the document said. The CIA last year opened its files on Cold War assassinations and admitted it ordered the murder of Patrice Lumumba, Congolese independence hero and pro-Soviet prime minister. Another letter headed “Operation Celeste” gives details of orders to plant explosives in the wheel bay of an aircraft primed to go off as the wheels were retracted on takeoff.
Hammarskjold and 15 other people were killed when their aircraft crashed entering what was then Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, where the U.N. head was due to meet rebel leader Moise Tshombe to negotiate a truce in the Congolese civil war. The United Nations sent a peacekeeping force to newly liberated Congo in 1960 when the new government asked for help in the face of mutiny in its army, secession in Tshombe’s Katanga provinces and the invervention of Belgian troops. Newspapers at the time alleged British involvement in a plot to kill Hammarskjold to prevent U.N. support for Tshombe and his diamond-rich Katanga province. “We have it on good authority that UNO (the United Nations Organisation) will want to get its greedy paws on the province,” reads a letter dated July 12, 1960.
The letters came to light as truth commission researchers were ploughing through South African security documents in preparation for the truth commission’s final report. Tutu said the truth commission mandate to investigate such matters expired at the end of July and it therefore decided to publish the documents with names of individuals deleted and hand them to Justice Minister Dullah Omar. The archbishop, whose purple-robed figure has come to symbolise the painful process of reconciliation in South Africa, said he hoped releasing the documents would help set an example for more transparency in government.
In September 1961, Hammarskjöld found out about the fighting between non-combatant UN forces and Katanga troops of Moise Tshombe. He was en route to negotiate a cease-fire on the night of September 17-18 when his plane crashed near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). He and fifteen others perished. There is still speculation as to the cause of the crash.
The explanation of investigators at the time is that Hammarskjöld’s aircraft descended too low on its approach to Ndola’s airport at night. The crew had filed no flight plan for security reasons. No evidence of a bomb, surface-to-air missile or hijacking has ever been presented. It has been speculated that the crew of the DC-6 incorrectly used altitude data for Ndolo (915 ft, 279 m), which is in the Congo and at lower altitude, rather than Ndola ( 4167ft, 1270 m) in Northern Rhodesia.
On August 19, 1998, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), revealed that recently-uncovered letters had implicated British MI5, American CIA and South African intelligence services in the 1961 crash of Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane. One TRC letter said that a bomb in the aircraft’s wheel-bay was set to detonate when the wheels came down for landing
A less conspiratorial theory holds that Hammarskjöld’s plane struck some treetops as it was preparing for landing. Hammarskjöld was the only person whose body was separate from the wreckage and therefore not burnt due to his aversion to seatbelts. He was thrown from the crash able to crawl away from the plane, but his injuries were severe enough that he was already dead by the time the plane was found.
The exploration and mining of radioactive ores in the United States began around the turn of the 20th century. Sources for radium (contained in uranium ore) were sought for use as luminous paint for watch dials and other instruments, as well as for health-related applications (some of which in retrospect were incredibly unhealthy). Because of the need for the element during World War II, the Manhattan Project contracted with numerous vanadium mining companies in the American Southwest, and also purchased uranium ore from the Belgian Congo, through the Union Minière du Haut Katanga, and in Canada from the Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited company, which had large stocks of uranium as waste from its radium refining activities. American uranium ores mined in Colorado were primarily mixes of vanadium and uranium, but because of wartime secrecy the Manhattan Project would only publicly admit to purchasing the vanadium, and did not pay the uranium miners for the uranium ore (in a much later lawsuit, many miners were able to reclaim lost profits from the U.S. government). American uranium ores did not have nearly as high uranium concentrations as the ore from the Belgian Congo, but they were pursued vigorously to ensure nuclear self-sufficiency. Similar efforts were undertaken in the Soviet Union, which did not have native stocks of uranium when it started developing its own weapons program.
The Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) is a Belgian mining company, once operating in Katanga, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly, Congo Free State, from 1908, Belgian Congo, from 1972, Zaire). It was created on October 28, 1906, as a result of a merger of a company created by Léopold II and Tanganyika Concessions Ltd (a British company created by Robert Williams, which started prospecting for minerals in 1899, and was granted mining concessions in 1900), in order to exploit the mineral wealth of Katanga. It was owned jointly by the Société Générale de Belgique, Belgium’s largest holding company (which controlled 70% of the Congolese economy) and Tanganyika Concessions Ltd.
The Broken Encirclement Plan: Nato in Eastern Europe
December 4, 2016
by Arthur D. Royster
The first serious, and successful, U.S. direct interference in Russian leadership policies was in 1953. An ageing Josef Stalin, suffering from arteriosclerosis and becoming increasingly hostile to his subordinates, was poisoned by Laverenti P. Beria, head of his secret police. Beria, was a Mingrelian Jew, very ruthless and a man who ordered and often supervised the executions of people Stalin suspected of plotting against him, had fallen out of favor with Stalin and had come to believe that he was on the list of those Stalin wished to remove. With his intelligence connection, Beria was contacted by the American CIA through one of his trusted agents in Helskinki and through this contact, Beria was supplied dosages of warfarin The first drug in the class to be widely commercialized was dicoumarol itself, patented in 1941 and later used as a pharmaceutical. It was a potent coumarin-based anticoagulants for use as rodent poisons, resulting in warfarin in 1948. The name warfarin stems from the acronym WARF, for Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation + the ending -arin indicating its link with coumarin. Warfarin was first registered for use as a rodenticide in the US in 1948, and was immediately popular; although it was developed by Link, the WARF financially supported the research and was assigned the patent.
Warfarin was used by a Lavrenti Beria to poison Stalin. Stalin’s cooks and personal bodyguards were all under the direct control of Beria. He acknowledged to other top Soviet leaders that he had poisoned Stalin, according to Molotov’s memoirs. Nikita Khrushchev and others to poison Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Warfarin is tasteless and colorless, and produces symptoms similar to those that Stalin exhibited. Stalin collapsed during the night after a dinner with Beria and other Soviet leaders, and died four days later on 5 March 1953.
Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, in his political memoirs (published posthumously in 1993), claimed that Beria told him that he had poisoned Stalin. “I took him out,” Beria supposedly boasted. There is evidence that after Stalin was found unconscious, medical care was not provided for many hours. Other evidence of the murder of Stalin by Beria associates was presented by Edvard Radzinsky in his biography Stalin. It has been suggested that warfarin was used; it would have produced the symptoms reported.
After the fall of Gorbachev and his replacement by Boris Yeltsin, a known CIA connection, the Russian criminal mob was encouraged by the CIA to move into the potentially highly lucrative Russian natural resource field.
By 1993 almost all banks in Russia were owned by the mafia, and 80% of businesses were paying protection money. In that year, 1400 people were murdered in Moscow, crime members killed businessmen who would not pay money to them, as well as reporters, politicians, bank owners and others opposed to them. The new criminal class of Russia took on a more Westernized and businesslike approach to organized crime as the more code-of-honor based Vory faded into extinction.
The Izmaylovskaya gang was considered one of the country’s most important and oldest Russian Mafia groups in Moscow and also had a presence in Tel Aviv, Berlin, Paris, Toronto, Miami and New York City. It was founded during the 1980s under the leadership of Oleg Ivanov and was estimated to consist of about 200 active members (according to other data of 300–500 people). In principle, the organization was divided into two separate bodies—Izmailovskaya and Gol’yanovskaya which utilized quasi-military ranks and strict internal discipline. It was involved extensively in murder-for-hire, extortions, and infiltration of legitimate businesses.
The gangs were termed the Oligarchy and were funded by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Israeli-owned Bank of New York all with the assisance of the American government.
The arrival of Vladimir Putin as the new leader of Russia was at first ignored in Washington. A former KGB Lt. Colonel who had been stationed in East Germany, Putin was viewed as inconsequential, bland and colorless by the purported Russian experts in both the Department of State and the CIA.
Putin, however, proved to be a dangerous opponent who blocked the Oligarchs attempt to control the oil fields and other assets, eventual control of which had been promised to both American and British firms.
The Oligarchs were allowed to leave the country and those remaining behind were forced to follow Putin’s policies. Foreign control over Russian natural resources ceased and as both the CIA, various foreign firms and the American government had spent huge sums greasing the skids, there was now considerable negative feelings towards Putin.
The next serious moves against Russia came with a plan conceived by the CIA and fully approved by President George W. Bush, whose father had once been head of the CIA.
This consisted of ‘Opertion Sickle’ which was designed to surround the western and southern borders of Russia with states controlled by the United States through the guise of NATO membership. Included in this enricelement program were the Baltic States, Poland, the Czech Republic, Georgia and a number of Asiatic states bordering southern Russia. It was the stated intention of the NATO leadership to put military missiles in all these countries. The so-called “Orange Revolution” funded and directed by the CIA, overthrew the pro-Moscow government in the Ukraine, giving the United States theoretical control over the heavy industrialized Donetz Basin and most importantly, the huge former Soviet naval base at Sebastopol.
The Georgia Train and Equip Program (GTEP) was an American-sponsored 18-month, $64-million program aimed at increasing the capabilities of the Georgian armed forces by training and equipping four 600-man battalions with light weapons, vehicles and communications. The program enabled the US to expedite funding for the Georgian military for Operation Enduring Freedom.
On February 27, 2002, the US media reported that the U.S. would send approximately two hundred United States Army Special Forces soldiers to Georgia to train Georgian troops. The program implemented President Bush’s decision to respond to the Government of Georgia’s request for assistance to enhance its counter-terrorism capabilities and addressed the situation in the Pankisi Gorge.
The program began in May 2002 when American special forces soldiers began training select units of the Georgian Armed Forces, including the 12th Commando Light Infantry Battalion, the 16th Mountain-Infantry Battalion, the 13th “Shavnabada” Light Infantry Battalion, the 11th Light Infantry Battalion, a mechanized company and small numbers of Interior Ministry troops and border guards.
Eventually, responsibility for training Georgian forces was turned over to the US Marine Corps in conjunction with the British Army. British and American teams worked as part of a joint effort to train each of the four infantry battalion staffs and their organic rifle companies. This training began with the individual soldier and continued through fire team, squad, platoon, company, and battalion level tactics as well as staff planning and organization. Upon completing training, each of the new Georgian infantry battalions began preparing for deployment rotations in support of the Global War on Terrorism
The CIA were instrumental in getting Mikheil Saakashvili, an erratic policician, pro-West, into the presidency of Georgia but although he allowed the country to be flooded with American arms and “military trainers” he was not a man easily controlled and under the mistaken belief that Ameriacn military might supported him, commenced to threaten Moscow. Two Georgian provinces were heavily populated by Russians and objected to the inclusion in Georgia and against them, Saakashvili began to make threatening moves.
The 2008 South Ossetia War or Russo-Georgian War (in Russia also known as the Five-Day War) was an armed conflict in August 2008 between Georgia on one side, and Russia and separatist governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia on the other.
During the night of 7 to 8 August 2008, Georgia launched a large-scale military offensive against South Ossetia, in an attempt to reclaim the territory. Georgia claimed that it was responding to attacks on its peacekeepers and villages in South Ossetia, and that Russia was moving non-peacekeeping units into the country. The Georgian attack caused casualties among Russian peacekeepers, who resisted the assault along with Ossetian militia. Georgia successfully captured most of Tskhinvali within hours. Russia reacted by deploying units of the Russian 58th Army and Russian Airborne Troops in South Ossetia, and launching airstrikes against Georgian forces in South Ossetia and military and logistical targets in Georgia proper. Russia claimed these actions were a necessary humanitarian intervention and peace enforcement.
When the Russian incursion was seen as massive and serious, U.S. president George W. Bush’s statement to Russia was: “Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.” The US Embassy in Georgia, describing the Matthew Bryza press-conference, called the war an “incursion by one of the world’s strongest powers to destroy the democratically elected government of a smaller neighbor”.
Initially the Bush Administration seriously considered a military response to defend Georgia, but such an intervention was ruled out by the Pentagon due to the inevitable conflict it would lead to with Russia. Instead, Bush opted for a softer option by sending humanitarian supplies to Georgia by military, rather than civilian, aircraft. And he ordered the immediate evacuation of all American military units from Georgia. The huge CIA contingent in the Georgian capital fled by aircraft and the American troops, mostly U.S. Marines, evacuated quickly to the Black Sea where they were evacuated by the U.S. Navy. British and Israeli military units also fled the country and all of them had to leave behind an enormous amount of military eqipment to include tanks, light armored vehicles, small arms, radio equipment, and trucks full of intelligence data they had neither the time nor forersignt to destroy.
The immediate result of this demarche was the defection of the so-called “NATO Block” eastern Europeans from the Bush/CIA project who saw the United States as a paper tiger that would not, and could not, defend them against the Russians. In a sense, the Russian incursion into Georgia was a massive political, not a military, victory.
The CIA was not happy with the actions of Vladimir Putin and when he ran for reelection, they poured money into the hands of Putin’s enemies, hoping to reprise the Ukrainian Orange Revolution but the effort was in vain. The CIA was, however, much more successful later in deposing the pro-Russian Ukranian leader and replacing him with another Yeltsin-style puppet.
And again, they lost when Putin gained control of the oil-rich Crimea by means of a quite legal referendum.
WikiLeaks publishes docs on inquiry into German cooperation with NSA
by Joe Uchill
December 1, 2016
The Hill
WikiLeaks released Thursday a massive trove of what it claims are documents from an ongoing German parliamentary probe into the country’s relationship with the National Security Agency (NSA).
The site claims its 90-gigabyte cache contains over 2,400 files from an investigation into how Germany’s chief intelligence agency partnered with the NSA for mass surveillance without informing much of the government. The inquiry launched in 2014.
“A number of the documents show how intelligence agencies find ways to work around their own government,” reads a statement accompanying the release.
The files are available for download through the torrent system of file sharing.
In the website statement, WikiLeaks head Julian Assange chided the German government for launching the inquiry without the testimony of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, whose documents ultimately provided its foundation. Having leaked U.S. secrets, Snowden is still a politically difficult figure for many nations to cooperate with.
“This substantial body of evidence proves that the inquiry has been using documents from Mr. Snowden and yet it has been too cowardly to permit him to testify. Germany can not take a leadership role within the EU if it’s own parliamentary processes are subservient to the wishes of a non-EU state,” he wrote.
With the top economy in Europe, Germany is generally considered to have a leadership role within the European Union
Fearing abandonment by Trump, CIA-backed rebels in Syria mull alternatives
December 3, 2016
by Karen DeYoung and Louisa Loveluck
The Washington Post
Three years after the CIA began secretly shipping lethal aid to rebels fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, battlefield losses and fears that a Donald Trump administration will abandon them have left tens of thousands of opposition fighters weighing their alternatives.
Among the options, say U.S. officials, regional experts and the rebels themselves, are a closer alliance with better-armed al-Qaeda and other extremist groups, receipt of more sophisticated weaponry from Sunni states in the Persian Gulf region opposed to a U.S. pullback, and adoption of more traditional guerrilla tactics, including sniper and other small-scale attacks on both Syrian and Russian targets.
Just over a year ago, the opposition held significant territory inside Syria. Since then, in the absence of effective international pushback, Russian and Syrian airstrikes have relentlessly bombarded their positions and the civilians alongside them. On the ground, Syrian government troops — bolstered by Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Shiite militia forces from Iraq — have retaken much of that ground.
In brutal attacks over the past three weeks, they have been driven out of much of the eastern Aleppo stronghold that they have occupied since 2012.
Trump has made clear that his priority in Syria is the separate fight against the Islamic State, ideally in cooperation with Russia and the Syrian government, as well as other allies. While still vague about his plans, the president-elect has rejected the Obama administration’s view that ending the civil war and bringing Assad to the negotiating table are ultimately key to victory over the Islamic militants, and indicated he will curtail support for the opposition.
Trump has repeatedly dismissed the rebels, saying, “We have no idea who these people are.”
“My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS,” he told the Wall Street Journal last month, using another name for the Islamic State.
Assad, in an interview the week after Trump’s election, called the United States a “natural” counterterrorism ally. He has long labeled the opposition as terrorists equal to the Islamic State.
The possibility of cutting loose opposition groups it has vetted, trained and armed would be a jolt to a CIA already unsettled by the low opinion of U.S. intelligence capabilities that Trump had expressed during his presidential campaign.
From a slow and disorganized start, the opposition “accomplished many of the goals the U.S. hoped for,” including their development into a credible fighting force that showed signs of pressuring Assad into negotiations, had Russia not begun bombing and Iran stepped up its presence on the ground, said one of several U.S. officials who discussed the situation on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The United States estimates that there are 50,000 or more fighters it calls “moderate opposition,” concentrated in the northwest province of Idlib, in Aleppo and in smaller pockets throughout western and southern Syria, and that they are not likely to give up.
“They’ve been fighting for years, and they’ve managed to survive,” the U.S. official said. “Their opposition to Assad is not going to fade away.”
Although their fortunes were boosted last year by U.S. and Saudi Arabia-provided TOW antitank missiles, the rebels have long complained that American assistance has been stingy and has come with too many strings attached. Concerned that more sophisticated weapons, including portable antiaircraft missiles, would end up in the hands of extremists, President Obama refused to send them and prevailed upon regional allies to impose similar restrictions on their own arms shipments.
Now, said one U.S.-vetted rebel commander, “we are very frustrated. The United States refuses to provide weapons we need, and yet it still thinks it can tell us what to do. They promise support and then watch us drown.”
“America will have no influence if our comrades are forced [to retreat to] Idlib” from Aleppo, said the commander, who asked not to be identified to speak about sensitive rebel relations with the United States.
Most rebels already forced to relinquish territory have gone to Idlib, which is fast becoming a holding pen for what is left of the rebellion. The area is dominated by as many as 10,000 fighters for Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda-linked group now known as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, and an equal number of Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamist group tied to the wider rebel movement that the United States does not consider terrorist.
Some experts, including Trump’s designated White House national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, think that the growing operational alliance between the rebels and extremist groups began long ago.
Flynn argued last year that Obama’s Syria strategy of first withholding, then offering only measured support for the opposition through a covert CIA program, effectively allowed extremist organizations to grow at rebel expense. Asked in a July 2015 al Jazeera interview whether there should have been stronger early support for the opposition, Flynn said: “When you don’t get in and help somebody, they’re going to find other means to achieve their goals. . . . We should have done more earlier on in this effort.”
At the same time, Flynn has said, the administration downplayed early intelligence indicating that al-Nusra and eventually the Islamic State organization, which combined Islamist extremists and former Iraqi army officers left adrift by the 2003 U.S. invasion, were growing rapidly.
In a book published last summer, Flynn wrote that they are allied with those who “share their hatred of the West,” including “North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela.”
But in an analysis looking forward, echoed by Trump and certain to be influential in the incoming White House, Flynn has also outlined a World War II -type global alliance, including both the United States and Russia, under a single leadership, to combat what he has called “Islam’s . . . political ideology.”
Others have noted that cutting off the opposition would not only support Russian and Syrian aims but also would benefit Iran at the perceived expense of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other regional U.S. allies who view that country as an existential threat.
“There will be significant reputational costs with our allies in the region if we abandon support of the moderate opposition,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
He said the question is “whether our Gulf allies can count on us or they can’t, whether the Iranians are going to be given free rein or they won’t.”
“A lot obviously will depend on what the president-elect does, what his advisers urge him to do,” Schiff said. Referring to retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Schiff added, “I think Gen. Mattis will have different views . . . [that] recognize the implications in terms of Iranian influence in the region.”
Disagreement over whether to take a tougher line against Russia in Syria — including direct military intervention on behalf of civilians and, indirectly, the rebels — in Aleppo and beyond has already caused deep divisions between Obama’s State Department and the reluctant Defense Department and the White House.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry has continued negotiations over a cease-fire, meeting again with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Rome on Friday. Talks have focused on an agreement to safely deliver humanitarian aid and to evacuate both civilians, who want to leave, and the al-Nusra forces that Russia says are the majority of some several thousand anti-Assad fighters in the eastern part of the city. U.S. officials think the militants there number in the hundreds.
But Kerry has had little leverage to persuade Moscow to change its strategy, designed to ensure a military victory for Assad.
As the incoming Trump administration considers withdrawing from involvement in either assisting or resolving the civil war, others have indicated they will move into the anticipated vacuum.
Qatar has said it will continue supporting and supplying the rebels, regardless of what the United States decides.
“We want to have the U.S. with us, for sure. They have been our historic ally,” Qatar Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Jassim al-Thani said last week in an interview with Reuters in Doha. “But if they want to change their minds . . . we are not going to change our position.”
Loveluck reported from Beirut.
Why Everything You’ve Read About Syria and Iraq Could be Wrong
December 2, 2016
by Patrick Cockburn
The Unz Review
The Iraqi army, backed by US-led airstrikes, is trying to capture east Mosul at the same time as the Syrian army and its Shia paramilitary allies are fighting their way into east Aleppo. An estimated 300 civilians have been killed in Aleppo by government artillery and bombing in the last fortnight, and in Mosul there are reportedly some 600 civilian dead over a month.
Despite these similarities, the reporting by the international media of these two sieges is radically different.
In Mosul, civilian loss of life is blamed on Isis, with its indiscriminate use of mortars and suicide bombers, while the Iraqi army and their air support are largely given a free pass. Isis is accused of preventing civilians from leaving the city so they can be used as human shields.
Contrast this with Western media descriptions of the inhuman savagery of President Assad’s forces indiscriminately slaughtering civilians regardless of whether they stay or try to flee. The UN chief of humanitarian affairs, Stephen O’Brien, suggested this week that the rebels in east Aleppo were stopping civilians departing – but unlike Mosul, the issue gets little coverage.
One factor making the sieges of east Aleppo and east Mosul so similar, and different, from past sieges in the Middle East, such as the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 or of Gaza in 2014, is that there are no independent foreign journalists present. They are not there for the very good reason that Isis imprisons and beheads foreigners while Jabhat al-Nusra, until recently the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, is only a shade less bloodthirsty and generally holds them for ransom.
These are the two groups that dominate the armed opposition in Syria as a whole. In Aleppo, though only about 20 per cent of the 10,000 fighters are Nusra, it is they – along with their allies in Ahrar al-Sham – who are leading the resistance.
Unsurprisingly, foreign journalists covering developments in east Aleppo and rebel-held areas of Syria overwhelmingly do so from Lebanon or Turkey. A number of intrepid correspondents who tried to do eyewitness reporting from rebel-held areas swiftly found themselves tipped into the boots of cars or otherwise incarcerated.
Experience shows that foreign reporters are quite right not to trust their lives even to the most moderate of the armed opposition inside Syria. But, strangely enough, the same media organisations continue to put their trust in the veracity of information coming out of areas under the control of these same potential kidnappers and hostage takers. They would probably defend themselves by saying they rely on non-partisan activists, but all the evidence is that these can only operate in east Aleppo under license from the al-Qaeda-type groups.
It is inevitable that an opposition movement fighting for its life in wartime will only produce, or allow to be produced by others, information that is essentially propaganda for its own side. The fault lies not with them but a media that allows itself to be spoon-fed with dubious or one-sided stories.
For instance, the film coming out of east Aleppo in recent weeks focuses almost exclusively on heartrending scenes of human tragedy such as the death or maiming of civilians. One seldom sees shots of the 10,000 fighters, whether they are wounded or alive and well.
None of this is new. The present wars in the Middle East started with the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 which was justified by the supposed threat from Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Western journalists largely went along with this thesis, happily citing evidence from the Iraqi opposition who predictably confirmed the existence of WMD.
Some of those who produced these stories later had the gall to criticise the Iraqi opposition for misleading them, as if they had any right to expect unbiased information from people who had dedicated their lives to overthrowing Saddam Hussein or, in this particular case, getting the Americans to do so for them.
Much the same self-serving media credulity was evident in Libya during the 2011 Nato-backed uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.
Atrocity stories emanating from the Libyan opposition, many of which were subsequently proved to be baseless by human rights organisations, were rapidly promoted to lead the news, however partial the source.
The Syrian war is especially difficult to report because Isis and various al-Qaeda clones made it too dangerous to report from within opposition-held areas. There is a tremendous hunger for news from just such places, so the temptation is for the media give credence to information they get second hand from people who could in practice only operate if they belong to or are in sympathy with the dominant jihadi opposition groups.
It is always a weakness of journalists that they pretend to excavate the truth when in fact they are the conduit rather than the originator of information produced by others in their own interests. Reporters learn early that people tell them things because they are promoting some cause which might be their own career or related to bureaucratic infighting or, just possibly, hatred of lies and injustice.
A word here in defence of the humble reporter in the field: usually, it is not he or she, but the home office or media herd instinct, that decides the story of the day. Those closest to the action may be dubious about some juicy tale which is heading the news, but there is not much they can do about it.
Thus, in 2002 and 2003, several New York Times journalists wrote stories casting doubt on WMD only to find them buried deep inside the newspaper which was led by articles proving that Saddam had WMD and was a threat to the world.
Journalists and public alike should regard all information about Syria and Iraq with reasoned scepticism. They should keep in mind the words of Lakhdar Brahimi, the former UN and Arab League Special Envoy to Syria. Speaking after he had resigned in frustration in 2014, he said that “everybody had their agenda and the interests of the Syrian people came second, third or not at all”.
The quote comes from The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips, which is one of the best informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet published. He judiciously weighs the evidence for rival explanations for what happened and why. He understands the degree to which the agenda and pace events in Syria were determined externally by the intervention of foreign powers pursuing their own interests.
Overall, government experts did better than journalists, who bought into simple-minded explanations of developments, convinced that Assad was always on the verge of being overthrown.
Phillips records that at a high point of the popular uprising in July 2011, when the media was assuming that Assad was finished, that the long-serving British ambassador in Damascus, Simon Collis, wrote that “Assad can still probably count on the support of 30-40 per cent of the population.”
The French ambassador Eric Chevallier was similarly cautious, only to receive a classic rebuke from his masters in Paris who said: “Your information does not interest us. Bashar al-Assad must fall and will fall.”
The Smear Campaign Against Keith Ellison is Repugnant but Reveals Much About Washington
December 4 2016,
by Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept
Ever since he announced his candidacy to lead the Democratic National Committee, Keith Ellison, the first American Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, has been the target of a defamation campaign that is deceitful, repugnant, and yet quite predictable. At first expressed in whispers, but now being yelled from the rooftops by some of the party’s most influential figures, Ellison is being smeared as both an anti-Semite and enemy of Israel – the same smears virtually any critic of the Israeli government reflexively encounters, rendered far worse if the critic is a prominent American Muslim.
Three days ago, the now-ironically-named Anti-Defamation League pronounced Ellison’s 2010 comments about Israel “deeply disturbing and disqualifying.” What was Ellison’s “disqualifying” sin? He said in a 2010 speech that while he “wanted the U.S. to be friends with Israel,” the U.S. “can’t allow another country to treat us like we’re their ATM.”
As the full speech makes clear, he was referring to the indisputable fact that while Israel continues to take billions of dollars every year from the U.S. – far more than any other country receives in aid – it continually disregards and violates U.S. requests to stop ongoing expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, often in ways seemingly designed to impose the greatest humiliation on its benefactor:
Stop, you know why are we sending a mill-, $2.8 billion dollars a year over there whenthey won’t even honor our request to stop building in East Jerusalem? Where is the future Palestinian state going to be if it’s colonized before it even gets up off the ground?. . . .Now you got Clinton, Biden and the President who’s told them – stop. Now this has happened before. They beat back a President before. Bush 41 said – stop, and they said – we don’t want to stop, and by the way we want our money and we want it now. [Ellison laughs.] Right? You know, I mean we can’t allow, we’re Americans, right? We can’t allow another country to treat us like we’re their ATM. Right? And so we ought to stand up as Americans.
Equally sinful in the eyes of the ADL was this statement on U.S. foreign policy:
The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of seven million people. A region of 350 million all turns on a country of seven million. Does that make sense? [A male says “no”]. Is that logic? Right? When the people who, when the Americans who trace their roots back to those 350 million get involved, everything changes.
As J.J. Goldberg of the Forward noted, Ellison there wasn’t lamenting the insidious influence of U.S. Jews – as the ADL shamefully claimed – but rather was “plainly describing how American Muslims could have greater influence on American policy if they learned to organize.”
And agree or disagree with those positions, it is an indisputable fact that Israel receives far more in U.S. aid than any other country yet continually does exactly that which numerous U.S. President have insisted they not do, often to the detriment of U.S. interests. And many prominent foreign policy experts – including David Petraeus – have warned that excessive U.S. support for the worst actions of the Israeli government endangers U.S. national security by alienating Arabs in the region and fueling support for anti-American terrorism. The idea that a member of Congress is not permitted to debate these policies without being branded an anti-Semite is sheer insanity: malicious insanity at that.
But that insanity is par for the course in Washington, where anyone who even questions U.S. policy toward Israel is smeared in this way – from James Baker to Howard Dean to Bernie Sanders and even Donald Trump. So pernicious is this framework that the U.S. Senate just passed legislation expressly equating what it regards as unfair criticism of the Israeli government with “anti-Semitism.” And when one is an American Muslim, ugly stereotypes and pervasive Islamophobia are added to this toxic brew to make the smears worse by many magnitudes.
This smear campaign against Ellison received a major boost Friday night when the single largest funder of both the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban, said at the Brookings Institution, a part of which he funds: “if you go back to his positions, his papers, his speeches, the way he has voted, he is clearly an anti-Semite and anti-Israel individual.” Saban added: “Keith Ellison would be a disaster for the relationship between the Jewish community and the Democratic Party.”
That Saban plays such a vital role in Democratic Party politics says a great deal. To the New York Times, this is how he described himself: “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” In late 2015, Ali Gharib wrote in the Forward: “Saban’s top priority isn’t a liberal vision of American life. It’s Israel.” When Hillary Clinton in 2015 condemned the boycott movement aimed at ending Israeli settlements, she did it in the form of a letter addressed personally to Saban.
The Democratic Party’s central reliance on billionaire funders like Saban is a key reason that debates over Israel policy are not permitted within the party. It’s why any attempt to raise such issues will prompt systematic campaigns of reputation destruction like the one we’re witnessing with Ellison.
To get a sense for just how prohibited are the most benign and basic debates when it comes to Israel, consider the quotes from Ellison’s college days dug up by CNN as supposedly incriminating. In 1990, while a law student at the University of Minnesota, Ellison blasted the university president for condemning a speaking event featuring the anti-Zionist civil rights icon Kwame Ture (also known as Stokely Carmichael); Ellison’s argument was that all ideas, including Zionism, should be regarded as debatable in a college environment:
The University’s position appears to be this: Political Zionism is off-limits no matter what dubious circumstances Israel was founded under; no matter what the Zionists do to the Palestinians; and no matter what wicked regimes Israel allies itself with — like South Africa. This position is untenable.
In other words, Ellison – 26 years ago, while a college student – simply argued that college campuses should not be deemed “safe spaces” in which debates over Israel are barred: an utterly mainstream view when the topic to be debated is something other than Israel.
Leave aside the bizarre attempt to use someone’s college-aged political activism against them three decades later. As my colleague Zaid Jilani very ably documented several days ago, even the most inflammatory of Ellison’s campus statements – including his long-ago-renounced praise for the Nation of Islam – were grounded in righteous opposition to “white supremacy and the policies of the state of Israel” and “show him expressing sympathy for the plight of underprivileged whites and making clear that he was not antagonistic toward Jewish people.” Writing about the smear campaign circulating on the internet against Ellison, the Forward’s Goldberg said he found “the evidence to be either frivolous, distorted or simply false.”
As CNN itself acknowledged when digging up these old Ellison quotes: “None of the records reviewed found examples of Ellison making any anti-Semitic comments himself.” How is that, by itself, not the end of the controversy?
The reason why it isn’t is a glaring irony. With the advent of Donald Trump and policies such as banning all Muslims from the country, Democrats this year incorporated anti-Islamophobia rhetoric into their repertoire. Yet what is being done to Ellison by the ADL, Saban and others is Islamophobia in its purest and most classic form.
Faiz Shakir is a Senior Advisor to Harry Reid, who previously worked for Nancy Pelosi and the ThinkProgress blog at the Center for American Progress. He explains, from personal experience, that the vile treatment to which Ellison is now being subjected is common for American Muslims in political life.
Shakir is referring to the fact that, to their credit, other Democratic voices – such as American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, J Street, and, most important, Chuck Schumer – continue to defend Ellison. J Street’s statement made the critical point: “It is time to retire the playbook that aims to silence any American official seeking high office who has dared to criticize certain Israeli government policies.”
But even these commendable defenses of Ellison illustrate highlight how constricted the permissible range of views on Israel is within the Democratic Party. J Street vouched for Ellison by saying that he “is and has long been a friend of Israel” and is “a champion of pro-Israel, pro-peace policies.” Schumer went further, saying that while he disagrees with Ellison on numerous issues, “I saw him orchestrate one of the most pro-Israel platforms in decades.” Notably, demonstrating steadfast support for the polices of the Israeli government is literally a job requirement to lead the Democratic National Committee – and for every other significant position in Washington.
But Ellison has actually fulfilled that requirement. Even his opponents admit: “Ellison unambiguously self-identifies as pro-Israel, supports a two-state solution without reservation, has repeatedly said that Israel has a right to defend itself and expressed the importance of protecting and maintaining Israel’s security, and there is no evidence that he has ever supported or advocated for BDS.” It’s true that, as Jay Michaelson wrote in an excellent Daily Beast column, Ellison “has been critical of Israeli settlements, of right-wing Israeli governments, and of America’s unconditional support for Israel.” But even his Israel advocacy is rather banal, as Goldberg wrote.
It must be acknowledged that Ellison’s first loyalty in the Middle East is not to Israel. He is a Muslim, and he makes no secret of his sympathy for the Palestinians. That said, he is a Muslim peacenik. Since entering politics, he has consistently spoken out in favor of the two-state solution, by which he means Israel and a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security. He’s been active on that front, frequently partnering with J Street and other liberal Zionist groups on efforts to promote peace and security.
In other words, Ellison is a mainstream liberal Democrat, albeit situated on the left wing of the party as it is currently constituted in Congress (which is not very far to the left given that Nancy Pelosi resides in a nearby ideological precinct).
What makes him such an easy and vulnerable target for smear campaigns such as the one Saban and the ADL are pursuing is that he is Muslim – a black Muslim to boot. Just look at the obvious codes in this paragraph from Michael J. Koplow, the policy director of the Israel Policy Forum, writing in Haaretz under the headline “Keith Ellison Has a Real Israel Problem.”
Ellison is not a figure whom anyone would normally expect to be a supporter of Israel. He is an African-American Muslim who did not grow up in a particularly Jewish area of the country, came of age after 1967, when Israel’s image as a David began shifting to that of a Goliath, did not have any prominent Jewish mentors, and has a background in radical politics. As a student, he was harshly critical of Zionism and its legitimacy.
Those are the demographic attributes giving the fuel to this revolting campaign. As Michaelson, who previously worked with the ADL, acknowledged: “there’s plenty of Islamophobia within my Jewish community as well,” and “the ADL is a perfect example,” citing the group’s shameful opposition to the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan.
If you’re a Democrat, it’s easy to embrace the language of anti-Islamophobia when it comes to condemning Donald Trump and other Republicans. It’s more difficult, but more important, to do so when that poison is coming from within the Democratic Party itself.
One of the few silver linings of the ugly Trump rhetoric on Muslims can and should be (and has been) a unified rejection of this sort of toxicity, regardless of where it comes from. Democrats who are sincere about wanting to oppose anti-Muslim bigotry can do so by defending Keith Ellison from these incredibly ugly, baseless and defamatory attacks.
Mainstream media’s Russian ‘fake news’ narrative kills real debate – Spectator deputy editor
December 4, 2016
RT
Western mainstream media’s ‘McCarthian’ witch hunt for Russia’s influence on the media shuns objectivity in favor of hysteria – a dangerous reductionism that dumbs down the debate on information warfare, argues Spectator deputy editor Freddy Gray.
There has recently been a proliferation of the ‘fake news’ narratives in the Western media, which shows no signs of dying down. The gist of these stories is essentially that false news stories have been planted by a foreign actor in order to influence the political affairs of another, and the consequent accusations asserting that the 2016 US presidential election was swayed in favor of Donald Trump by such alleged manipulation of the news by Russia has thrust the issue into the spotlight.
A Washington Post article recently accused 200 US news sites of being “routine peddlers” of Russian propaganda. New Yorker magazine subsequently released an article entitled ‘The Propaganda about Russian Propaganda,’ which slammed the report as a total mess.
Gray examines what this means for journalistic standards and integrity.
RT: This story came out last week but keeps getting pushed and pushed by the mainstream media. Why do you think they are so keen on it at the moment?
Freddy Gray: I think it is obvious to anyone with a brain that the Democrats are trying to blame Russian propaganda for the fact that they dramatically misunderstood the American electorate. The problem is that it creates a sort of atmosphere of hysteria when people see Russian influence everywhere.
And, in this atmosphere of hysteria, a lot of things get missed. For example, the disinformation that Russia does spread gets missed because we’re so busy being hysterical about Russian hacking, and so on, and things for which there is not much evidence, that we miss the fact that there is a Russian propaganda operation just like there are other propaganda operations, and we are in danger of being the boy who cried “Wolf!” In danger of being the boy who cried “Propaganda!”
RT: What is your view on the actual list itself? The fact that there are 200 organizations which have now been labeled, essentially, as “Fake news – do not read.” Many people would say – “This is all freedom of speech, whether you agree with it or not. Why shouldn’t there be sides that disagree with, perhaps, a mainstream narrative?”
FG: I think the whole fake news has a strong Orwellian quality. I think what the media needs to do is to remember they are there to pass a message, not protect a message. And that, actually, by telling people that what they are listening to is fake news, that they’re indulging in fake news themselves. Generally, what we are trying to do at the Spectator is inform the reader. We don’t try and tell him that everything he is reading is lies. We trust that the reader is clever enough to perceive bias in him or herself.
RT: Just on that point, we know that you did run on your front page with a picture of Vladimir Putin holding up an iPad with RT on it – you were jumping on the bandwagon yourselves.
FG: I do think that RT is a propaganda arm of Vladimir Putin. I don’t think there’s any denying that really by any rational means. But I think, if you’ve read the article, what it was saying is that Western media shouldn’t be so hysterical about it. It should be realistic about what Russia is doing or something that RT does and not try to pretend that it’s got a more sinister influence than it does.
RT: Is it a danger, though, when you label something as propaganda? Because you do stigmatize it, don’t you? There are many valid points that are made by alternative media, too, that shouldn’t go unheard.
FG: Sure. Propaganda is itself a provocative word, and that’s not a bad point. I mean a state-owned broadcaster is propaganda. You could probably say the same about BBC, but I think RT is slightly different. So, I think Western media need to be realistic about what RT is, and not see it as a mortal enemy – but also accept that you are going to have your biases, just like, perhaps, we have our biases too.
RT: Have you noticed that people are latching onto this fake news and also equating it with Russian propaganda, because they seem to be mixing the two quite readily. Why is that?
FG: Yes, I think nobody really has an idea of what is true anymore, which is more to do with a sort of collapse of Western morality, perhaps, than anything else. So, therefore, people are desperate to spy conspiracy, they are desperate to be suspicious of the media. And they generally don’t trust what they are reading and what they are listening to. And that is because all round the place they’re being pushed a message rather than told what is going on. I think that is a crisis for the media.
RT: I suppose one argument would be: Many people are turning towards alternative media because they’re fed up of, perhaps, what they’ve been told by the mainstream media, that they’ve found out not to be true.
FG: Well, I quite agree with that. The exciting thing for journalists like me is that, finally, Trump’s election has large downsides, but also some upsides, in that the media now have really got to sharpen up its act and stop just peddling the usual rubbish that they peddle. And the battle for ideas generally is hotting up, so the people are interested in what the media has to say, and they’re skeptical. And therefore, the duty of journalism has been strengthened, I think.
RT: Generally speaking about this fake news list, the criteria that was used seem to be quite loose too. This story sort of got legs – when it first came out, many people were critical of it. The New Yorker said it was a complete mess, the criteria that it used. Is there a danger that people will be influenced now by what they read and, perhaps, might decide, just because of this article, that they shouldn’t go near these 200 or so names that are on this list?
FG: Well, there’s a problem in, I think it was a Washington Post article originally, there’s a problem in that the financial model of journalism, as it was, has collapsed, and therefore a lot of reporters will just take a steer from someone who is just feeding them a story, because they’re desperately rushed, desperately overworked, they’re probably spending most of their time on Twitter, and therefore they’re not really doing their job as a journalist. And I think that’s finally bringing a change – people are getting much more skeptical about what they’re reading in the so-called mainstream media, and I think, perhaps, that’s a good thing.
RT: Sure, and what’s your take on the whole issue of Russia influencing elections? An overreaction?
FG: I think, definitely, there’s hysteria in America at the moment. I think there’s no doubt about that. I do think Russia tried to influence the election. I don’t actually think it, probably… probably the Kremlin wanted Trump to win eventually, but, certainly, they were against the Clintons, and understandably so. But countries always try and spread a message that’s favorable to them – that’s natural.
FG: Well, I quite agree with that. The exciting thing for journalists like me is that, finally, Trump’s election has large downsides, but also some upsides, in that the media now have really got to sharpen up its act and stop just peddling the usual rubbish that they peddle. And the battle for ideas generally is hotting up, so the people are interested in what the media has to say, and they’re skeptical. And therefore, the duty of journalism has been strengthened, I think.
RT: Generally speaking about this fake news list, the criteria that was used seem to be quite loose too. This story sort of got legs – when it first came out, many people were critical of it. The New Yorker said it was a complete mess, the criteria that it used. Is there a danger that people will be influenced now by what they read and, perhaps, might decide, just because of this article, that they shouldn’t go near these 200 or so names that are on this list?
FG: Well, there’s a problem in, I think it was a Washington Post article originally, there’s a problem in that the financial model of journalism, as it was, has collapsed, and therefore a lot of reporters will just take a steer from someone who is just feeding them a story, because they’re desperately rushed, desperately overworked, they’re probably spending most of their time on Twitter, and therefore they’re not really doing their job as a journalist. And I think that’s finally bringing a change – people are getting much more skeptical about what they’re reading in the so-called mainstream media, and I think, perhaps, that’s a good thing.
RT: Sure, and what’s your take on the whole issue of Russia influencing elections? An overreaction?
FG: I think, definitely, there’s hysteria in America at the moment. I think there’s no doubt about that. I do think Russia tried to influence the election. I don’t actually think it, probably… probably the Kremlin wanted Trump to win eventually, but, certainly, they were against the Clintons, and understandably so. But countries always try and spread a message that’s favorable to them – that’s natural.
Trump warns of ‘retribution’ for companies that offshore jobs, threatening 35 percent tariff
December 4, 2016
by Ylan Q. Mui
The Washington Post
President-elect Donald Trump fired another warning shot Sunday at U.S. companies considering moving their operations out of the country, threatening “retributions or consequences” such as a hefty border tax if they do.
The pronouncements came in a string of early morning tweets. Trump declared that he intends to incentivize businesses to stay in America by lowering corporate taxes and slashing regulations, two key components of his economic agenda. But he also warned that companies with offshore factories would face a 35 percent tariff on goods sold back to the United States.
Trump’s comments follow his direct intervention in an Indiana factory owned by Carrier, which makes heating and air conditioning units, where production was scheduled to shift to Mexico. Trump announced last week that he had negotiated a deal to keep the plant in the state. Indiana promised to provide Carrier about $7 million in incentives, while the company would invest $16 million in the factory over the next two years.
About 800 jobs that had been slated to move to Mexico will remain at the plant, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. About 300 to 600 Carrier positions — including 700 at one of the company’s other factories in the state — will still be cut.
Trump’s messages Sunday morning drew skepticism from some Republicans such as Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, who have generally favored a hands-off approach to the economy.
On the stump, Trump espoused an aggressively protectionist stance toward international trade, and his skepticism of the benefits of globalization resonated with many middle-class voters who bore the brunt of its downside.
But since his election, his advisers have softened some of his most heated rhetoric. Trump’s pick for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and commerce secretary nominee Wilbur Ross both said that they would pursue bilateral trade agreements with other countries but remained wary of sweeping regional deals. Ross also said that blanket double-digit tariffs on goods from Mexico and China — which many economists warned could spark a damaging trade war — would only be used as a last resort.
But Trump’s comments Sunday indicate that he is not backing away from one key pledge: to punish companies that offshore jobs.
“We’re living through the greatest jobs theft in the history of the world,” Trump said last week.
Trump celebrated the deal with a tour of the factory last week, followed by a rally in Cincinnati to kick off his “Thank You tour.” On Capitol Hill, some conservatives criticized the deal as a government distortion of the free market, while liberal lawmakers called the tax breaks a corporate subsidy. But business groups generally welcomed the move.
“Now, hundreds of Indiana workers will now keep good jobs, preserving their place in the middle class,” Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, said in a statement Friday. “While inducements and high-level interventions aren’t the most efficient ways to keep jobs here, they’re sometimes absolutely necessary.”