TBR News June 8, 2017

 

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., June 8, 2017: “”In American intelligence circles there have been growing fears that somehow outsiders have been able to penetrate into the confidential computer files of government agencies, business entities such as banks and defense contractors and individuals.

Some of this appeared to be an attempt to obtain highly classified information that could be of use to others and in other instances, attempts to get into the personal, and corporate, bank accounts of individuals and corporations.

Some of the first public notice of this problem surfaced first in Israel in 2004 when Israeli law enforcement cyber crime experts discovered that what is known as a Trojan Horse (illicit spyware planted on an unsuspecting computer) had been inserted into about 60 major Israeli businesses.

Israeli law enforcement subsequently indicted various members of three of Israel’s largest private investigative agencies on charges of criminal fraud. These spyware plants were in various commercial areas such as : Israeli military contracting, telephone systems, cable television, finance, automobile and cigarette importing, journalism and high technology. These intrusive spyware plants were nearly identical with ones developed by the American NSA and widely used inside the United States to glean political, economic and counter-intelligence information from a huge number of American businesses and agencies. Israeli investigators believed that there was illicit cooperation between the American agency and a counterpart in Israel.

These Trojan horses that penetrated the Israeli computers came packaged inside a compact disc or were sent as an e-mail message that appeared to be from an institution or a person that the victims thought they knew very well. Once the program was installed, it functioned every time the victim’s computer system was in use, logging keystrokes or collecting sensitive documents and passwords before transmitting the information elsewhere.”

 

Table of Contents

• Infamy at Sea: Israel’s Attack on the USS Liberty 50 Years Later
• Remembering the U.S.S. Liberty
• Germany withdraws troops from anti-IS base in Turkey row
• North Korea launches missile salvo at area where US aircraft carrier fleet had sailed
• Notes on Saudi Arabia 
• A report on Israeli/Iranian conflicts
• James Comey Statement Describes Unsettling and Awkward Meetings With Trump

 Infamy at Sea: Israel’s Attack on the USS Liberty 50 Years Later

June 2, 2017

by Jeffrey St. Clair

Counterpunch

In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel’s attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.

Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.

Soon more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.

A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship’s top officers.

The Liberty’s radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called “a buzzsaw sound.” Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message it was under attack to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet’s large aircraft carrier.

Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty’s aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. “Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately,” he barked. McNamara’s injunction was reiterated in saltier terms by Admiral David L. McDonald, the chief of Naval Operations: “You get those fucking airplanes back on deck, and you get them back down.” The planes turned around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.

After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.

As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gun fire. No body was going to get out alive that way.

After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: “Do you need any help?”

The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: “Fuck you.”

The Israeli boat turned and left.

A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty’s conning officer refused.

Finally, 16 hours after the attack two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men not to talk about their ordeal with the press.

The following morning Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.

Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. “These errors do occur,” McNamara concluded.

In Assault on the Liberty, a harrowing first-hand account by James Ennes Jr., McNamara’s version of events is proven to be as big a sham as his concurrent lies about Vietnam. Ennes’s book created a media storm when it was first published by Random House in 1980, including (predictably) charges that Ennes was a liar and an anti-Semite. Still, the book sold more than 40,000 copies, but was eventually allowed to go out of print. Now Ennes has published an updated version, which incorporates much new evidence that the Israeli attack was deliberate and that the US government went to extraordinary lengths to disguise the truth.

It’s a story of Israel aggression, Pentagon incompetence, official lies, and a cover-up that persists to this day. The book gains much of its power from the immediacy of Ennes’s first-hand account of the attack and the lies that followed.

Now, decades later, Ennes warns that the bloodbath on board the Liberty and its aftermath should serve as a tragic cautionary tale about the continuing ties between the US government and the government of Israel.

The Attack on the Liberty is the kind of book that makes your blood seethe. Ennes skillfully documents the life of the average sailor on one of the more peculiar vessels in the US Navy, with an attention for detail that reminds one of Dana or O’Brien. After all, the year was 1967 and most of the men on the Liberty were certainly glad to be on a non-combat ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, rather than in the Gulf of Tonkin or Mekong Delta.

But this isn’t Two Years Before the Mast. In fact, Ennes’s tour on the Liberty last only a few short weeks. He had scarcely settled into a routine before his new ship was shattered before his eyes.

Ennes joined the Liberty in May of 1967, as an Electronics Material Officer. Serving on a “spook ship”, as the Liberty was known to Navy wives, was supposed to be a sure path to career enhancement. The Liberty’s normal routine was to ply the African coast, tuning in its eavesdropping equipment on the electronic traffic in the region.

The Liberty had barely reached Africa when it received a flash message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sail from the Ivory Coast to the Mediterranean, where it was to re-deploy off the coast of the Sinai to monitor the Israeli attack on Egypt and the allied Arab nations.

As the war intensified, the Liberty sent a request to the fleet headquarters requesting an escort. It was denied by Admiral William Martin. The Liberty moved alone to a position in international waters about 13 miles from the shore at El Arish, then under furious siege by the IDF.

On June 6, the Joint Chiefs sent Admiral McCain, father of the senator from Arizona, an urgent message instructing him to move the Liberty out of the war zone to a position at least 100 miles off the Gaza Coast. McCain never forwarded the message to the ship.

A little after seven in the morning on June 8, Ennes entered the bridge of the Liberty to take the morning watch. Ennes was told that an hour earlier a “flying boxcar” (later identified as a twin-engine Nord 2501 Noratlas) had flown over the ship at a low level.

Ennes says he noticed that the ship’s American flag had become stained with soot and ordered a new flag run up the mast. The morning was clear and calm, with a light breeze.

At 9 am, Ennes spotted another reconnaissance plane, which circled the Liberty. An hour later two Israeli fighter jets buzzed the ship. Over the next four hours, Israeli planes flew over the Liberty five more times.

When the first fighter jet struck, a little before two in the afternoon, Ennes was scanning the skies from the starboard side of the bridge, binoculars in his hands. A rocket hit the ship just below where Ennes was standing, the fragments shredded the men closest to him.

After the explosion, Ennes noticed that he was the only man left standing. But he also had been hit by more than 20 shards of shrapnel and the force of the blast had shattered his left leg. As he crawled into the pilothouse, a second fighter jet streaked above them and unleashed its payload on the hobbled Liberty.

At that point, Ennes says the crew of the Liberty had no idea who was attacking them or why. For a few moments, they suspected it might be the Soviets, after an officer mistakenly identified the fighters as MIG-15s. They knew that the Egyptian air force already had been decimated by the Israelis. The idea that the Israelis might be attacking them didn’t occur to them until one of the crew spotted a Star of David on the wing of one of the French-built Mystere jets.

Ennes was finally taken below deck to a makeshift dressing station, with other wounded men. It was hardly a safe harbor. As Ennes worried that his fractured leg might slice through his femoral artery leaving him to bleed to death, the Liberty was pummeled by rockets, machine-gun fire and an Italian-made torpedo packed with 1,000-pounds of explosive.

After the attack ended, Ennes was approached by his friend Pat O’Malley, a junior officer, who had just sent a list of killed and wounded to the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He got an immediate message back. “They said, ‘Wounded in what action? Killed in what action?’,” O’Malley told Ennes. “They said it wasn’t an ‘action,’ it was an accident. I’d like for them to come out here and see the difference between an action and an accident. Stupid bastards.”

The cover-up had begun.

The Pentagon lied to the public about the attack on the Liberty from the very beginning. In a decision personally approved by the loathsome McNamara, the Pentagon denied to the press that the Liberty was an intelligence ship, referring to it instead as a Technical Research ship, as if it were little more than a military version of Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso.

The military press corps on the USS America, where most of the wounded sailors had been taken, were placed under extreme restrictions. All of the stories filed from the carrier were first routed through the Pentagon for security clearance, objectionable material was removed with barely a bleat of protest from the reporters or their publications.

Predictably, Israel’s first response was to blame the victim, a tactic that has served them so well in the Palestinian situation. First, the IDF alleged that it had asked the State Department and the Pentagon to identify any US ships in the area and was told that there were none. Then the Israeli government charged that the Liberty failed to fly its flag and didn’t respond to calls for it to identify itself. The Israelis contended that they assumed the Liberty was an Egyptian supply ship called El Quseir, which, even though it was a rusting transport ship then docked in Alexandria, the IDF said it suspected of shelling Israeli troops from the sea. Under these circumstances, the Israeli’s said they were justified in opening fire on the Liberty. The Israelis said that they halted the attack almost immediately, when they realized their mistake.

“The Liberty contributed decisively toward its identification as an enemy ship,” the IDF report concluded. This was a blatant falsehood, since the Israelis had identified the Liberty at least six hours prior to the attack on the ship.

Even though the Pentagon knew better, it gave credence to the Israeli account by saying that perhaps the Liberty’s flag had lain limp on the flagpole in a windless sea. The Pentagon also suggested that the attack might have lasted less than 20 minutes.

After the initial battery of misinformation, the Pentagon imposed a news blackout on the Liberty disaster until after the completion of a Court of Inquiry investigation.

The inquiry was headed by Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd. Kidd didn’t have a free hand. He’d been instructed by Vice-Admiral McCain to limit the damage to the Pentagon and to protect the reputation of Israel.

The Kidd interviewed the crew on June 14 and 15. The questioning was extremely circumscribed. According to Ennes, the investigators “asked nothing that might be embarrassing to Israeland testimony that tended to embarrass Israel was covered with a ‘Top Secret’ label, if it was accepted at all.”

Ennes notes that even testimony by the Liberty’s communications officers about the jamming of the ship’s radios was classified as “Top Secret.” The reason? It proved that Israel knew it was attacking an American ship. “Here was strong evidence that the attack was planned in advance and that our ship’s identity was known to the attackers (for it its practically impossible to jam the radio of a stranger), but this information was hushed up and no conclusions were drawn from it,” Ennes writes.

Similarly, the Court of Inquiry deep-sixed testimony and affidavits regarding the flag-Ennes had ordered a crisp new one deployed early on the morning of the attack. The investigators buried intercepts of conversations between IDF pilots identifying the ship as flying an American flag.

It also refused to accept evidence about the IDF’s use of napalm during the attacks and choose not to hear testimony regarding the duration of the attacks and the fact that the US Navy failed to send planes to defend the ship.

“No one came to help us,” said Dr. Richard F. Kiepfer, the Liberty’s physician. “We were promised help, but no help came. The Russians arrived before our own ships did. We asked for an escort before we ever came to the war zone and we were turned down.”

None of this made its way into the 700-page Court of Inquiry report, which was completed within a couple of weeks and sent to Admiral McCain in London for review.

McCain approved the report over the objections of Captain Merlin Staring, the Navy legal officer assigned to the inquiry, who found the report to be flawed, incomplete and contrary to the evidence.

Staring sent a letter to the Judge Advocate General of the Navy disavowing himself from the report. The JAG seemed to take Staring’s objections to heart. It prepared a summary for the Chief of Naval Operations that almost completely ignored the Kidd/McCain report. Instead, it concluded:

that the Liberty was easily recognizable as an American naval vessel; that it’s flag was fully deployed and flying in a moderate breeze; that Israeli planes made at least eight reconnaissance flights at close range; the ship came under a prolonged attack from Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats.

This succinct and largely accurate report was stamped Top Secret by Navy brass and stayed locked up for many years. But it was seen by many in the Pentagon and some in the Oval Office. But here was enough grumbling about the way the Liberty incident had been handled that LBJ summoned that old Washington fixer Clark Clifford to do damage control. It didn’t take Clifford long to come up with the official line: the Israelis simply had made a tragic mistake.

It turns out that the Admiral Kidd and Captain Ward Boston, the two investigating officers who prepared the original report for Admiral McCain, both believed that the Israeli attack was intentional and sustained. In other words, the IDF knew that they were striking an American spy ship and they wanted to sink it and kill as many sailors as possible. Why then did the Navy investigators produce a sham report that concluded it was an accident?

Twenty-five years later we finally found out. In June of 2002, Captain Boston told the Navy Times: “Officers follow orders.”

It gets worse. There’s plenty of evidence that US intelligence agencies learned on June 7 that Israel intended to attack the Liberty on the following day and that the strike had been personally ordered by Moshe Dayan.

As the attacks were going on, conversations between Israeli pilots were overheard by US Air Force officers in an EC121 surveillance plane overhead. The spy plane was spotted by Israeli jets, which were given orders to shoot it down. The American plane narrowly avoided the IDF missiles.

Initial reports on the incident prepared by the CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the National Security Agency all reached similar conclusions.

A particularly damning report compiled by a CIA informant suggests that Israeli Defense minister Moshe Dayan personally ordered the attack and wanted it to proceed until the Liberty was sunk and all on board killed. A heavily redacted version of the report was released in 1977. It reads in part:

“[The source] said that Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship and that one of his generals adamantly opposed the action and said, ‘This is pure murder.’ One of the admirals who was present also disapproved of the action, and it was he who ordered it stopped and not Dayan.”

This amazing document generated little attention from the press and Dayan was never publicly questioned about his role in the attack.

The analyses by the intelligence agencies are collected in a 1967 investigation by the Defense Subcommittee on Appropriations. Two and half decades later that report remains classified. Why? A former committee staffer said: “So as not to embarrass Israel.”

More proof came to light from the Israeli side. A few years after Attack on the Liberty was originally published, Ennes got a call from Evan Toni, an Israeli pilot. Toni told Ennes that he had just read his book and wanted to tell him his story. Toni said that he was the pilot in the first Israeli Mirage fighter to reach the Liberty. He immediately recognized the ship to be a US Navy vessel. He radioed Israeli air command with this information and asked for instructions. Toni said he was ordered to “attack.” He refused and flew back to the air base at Ashdod. When he arrived he was summarily arrested for disobeying orders.

How tightly does the Israeli lobby control the Hill? For the first time in history, an attack on an America ship was not subjected to a public investigation by Congress. In 1980, Adlai Stevenson and Barry Goldwater planned to open a senate hearing into the Liberty affair. Then Jimmy Carter intervened by brokering a deal with Menachem Begin, where Israel agreed to pony up $6 million to pay for damages to the ship. A State Department press release announced the payment said, “The book is now closed on the USS Liberty.”

It certainly was the last chapter for Adlai Stevenson. He ran for governor of Illinois the following year, where his less than perfect record on Israel, and his unsettling questions about the Liberty affair, became an issue in the campaign. Big money flowed into the coffers of his Republican opponent, Big Jim Thompson, and Stevenson went down to a narrow defeat.

But the book wasn’t closed for the sailors either, of course. After a Newsweek story exposed the gist of what really happened on that day in the Mediterranean, an enraged Admiral McCain placed all the sailors under a gag order. When one sailor told an officer that he was having problems living with the cover-up, he was told: “Forget about it, that’s an order.”

The Navy went to bizarre lengths to keep the crew of the Liberty from telling what they knew. When gag orders didn’t work, they threatened sanctions. Ennes tells of the confinement and interrogation of two Liberty sailors that sounds like something right out of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program.

“In an incredible abuse of authority, military officers held two young Liberty sailors against their will in a locked and heavily guarded psychiatric ward of the base hospital,” Ennes writes. “For days these men were drugged and questioned about their recollections of the attack by a ‘therapist’ who admitted to being untrained in either psychiatry or psychology. At one point, they avoided electroshock only by bolting from the room and demanding to see the commanding officer.”

Since coming home, the veterans who have tried to tell of their ordeal have been harassed relentlessly. They’ve been branded as drunks, bigots, liars and frauds. Often, it turns out, these slurs have been leaked by the Pentagon. And, oh yeah, they’ve also been painted as anti-Semites.

In a recent column, Charley Reese describes just how mean-spirited and petty this campaign became. “When a small town in Wisconsin decided to name its library in honor of the USS Liberty crewmen, a campaign claiming it was anti-Semitic was launched,” writes Reese. “And when the town went ahead, the U.S. government ordered no Navy personnel to attend, and sent no messages. This little library was the first, and at the time the only, memorial to the men who died on the Liberty.”

So why then did the Israelis attack the Liberty?

A few days before the Six Days War, Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban visited Washington to inform LBJ about the forthcoming invasion. Johnson cautioned Eban that the US could not support such an attack.

It’s possible, then, that the IDF assumed that the Liberty was spying on the Israeli war plans. Possible, but not likely. Despite the official denials, as Andrew and Leslie Cockburn demonstrate in Dangerous Liaison, at the time of the Six Days War the US and Israel had developed a warm covert relationship. So closely were the two sides working that US intelligence aid certainly helped secure Israel’s devastating and swift victory. In fact, it’s possible that the Liberty had been sent to the region to spy for the IDF.

A somewhat more likely scenario holds that Moshe Dayan wanted to keep the lid on Israel’s plan to breach the new cease-fire and invade into Syria to seize the Golan.

It has also been suggested that Dayan ordered the attack on the Liberty with the intent of pinning the blame on the Egyptians and thus swinging public and political opinion in the United States solidly behind the Israelis. Of course, for this plan to work, the Liberty had to be destroyed and its crew killed.

There’s another factor. The Liberty was positioned just off the coast from the town of El Arish. In fact, Ennes and others had used town’s mosque tower to fix the location of the ship along the otherwise featureless desert shoreline. The IDF had seized El Arish and had used the airport there as a prisoner of war camp. On the very day the Liberty was attacked, the IDF was in the process of executing as many as 1,000 Palestinian and Egyptian POWs, a war crime that they surely wanted to conceal from prying eyes. According to Gabriel Bron, now an Israeli reporter, who witnessed part of the massacre as a soldier: “The Egyptian prisoners of war were ordered to dig pits and then army police shot them to death.”

The bigger question is why the US government would participate so enthusiastically in the cover-up of a war crime against its own sailors. Well, the Pentagon has never been slow to hide its own incompetence. And there’s plenty of that in the Liberty affair: bungled communications, refusal to provide an escort, situating the defenseless Liberty too close to a raging battle, the inability to intervene in the attack and the inexcusably long time it took to reach the battered ship and its wounded.

That’s but par for the course. But something else was going on that would only come to light later. Through most of the 1960s, the US congress had imposed a ban on the sale of arms to both Israel and Jordan. But at the time of the Liberty attack, the Pentagon (and its allies in the White House and on the Hill) was seeking to have this proscription overturned. The top brass certainly knew that any evidence of a deliberate attack on a US Navy ship by the IDF would scuttle their plans. So they hushed it up.

In January 1968, the arms embargo on Israel was lifted and the sale of American weapons began to flow. By 1971, Israel was buying $600 million of American-made weapons a year. Two years later the purchases topped $3 billion. Almost overnight, Israel had become the largest buyer of US-made arms and aircraft.

Perversely, then, the IDF’s strike on the Liberty served to weld the US and Israel together, in a kind of political and military embrace. Now, every time the IDF attacks defenseless villages in Gaza and the West Bank with F-16s and Apache helicopters, the Palestinians quite rightly see the bloody assaults as a joint operation, with the Pentagon as a hidden partner.

Thus, does the legacy of Liberty live on, one raid after another.

 

Remembering the U.S.S. Liberty

The 50 year cover-up of a mass murder of U.S. servicemen orchestrated by Israel and its friends

June 6, 2017

Philip Giraldi

The Unz Review

There has been a lot of media coverage mostly written by Israelis or American Jews regarding Israel’s “victory” fifty years ago during the so-called Six Days War directed against its Arab neighbors but I have yet to see an account that mentions the fate of the U.S.S. Liberty. Nevertheless, the Liberty is not forgotten. This Thursday at noon at Arlington National Cemetery there will be a small gathering for the annual coming together with the survivors and friends of the most decorated ship in the history of the U.S. Navy, a victim of a particularly brutal and unprovoked attack by Israel that has been covered up for half a century by the powers that be in Washington. The moving service will include reminiscences by surviving crew members plus the ringing of a ship’s bell for each one of the thirty-four American sailors, Marines and civilians that were killed in the deliberate Israeli air and sea onslaught that sought to sink the intelligence gathering ship and kill all its crew. Present will be a number of veterans like myself and other Americans who are committed to ensuring that the story of the Liberty will not die in hopes that someday the United States government will have the courage to acknowledge what actually happened on that fateful day.

The Liberty survivors who will be present in Arlington on Thursday will be fewer than usual because the crew is having its own 50th anniversary commemoration in Norfolk, Virginia, home of the U.S. Atlantic fleet. In truth the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty by Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967, has almost faded from memory, with a younger generation completely unaware that a United States naval vessel was once deliberately targeted and nearly sunk by America’s “greatest friend and ally” Israel. The attack was followed by a cover-up that demonstrated clearly that at least one president of the United States even back nearly fifty years ago valued his relationship with the state of Israel above his loyalty to his own country.

It was in truth the worst attack ever carried out on a U.S. Naval vessel in peace time. In addition to the death toll, 171 more of the crew were wounded in the two-hour assault, which was clearly intended to destroy the intelligence gathering vessel operating in international waters collecting information on the ongoing fighting between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The Israelis, whose planes had their Star of David markings covered up so Egypt could be blamed, attacked the ship repeatedly from the air and with gunboats from the sea. When one Israeli pilot hesitated, refusing to attack what was clearly an American ship, he was instructed to proceed anyway.

The most disgusting part of the tale relates to how U.S. warplanes sent to the Liberty’s aid from an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean were called back by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara acting under orders from President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who declared that he would rather see the ship go to the bottom of the sea than embarrass his good friend Israel. Ironically, the first ship to reach the Liberty and offer assistance was from the Soviet Union, an offer that was declined.

Johnson reportedly feared Jewish influence over Congress and in the media, which might work together to block his “Great Society” legislative initiatives, not to mention his expected reelection bid in 1968. It was an early manifestation of the power of the Jewish lobby in American politics and foreign relations. One has to hope that both LBJ and McNamara are currently burning in hell.

The incredible courage and determination of the surviving crew was the only thing that kept the Liberty from sinking. The ship’s commanding officer Captain William McGonagle was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic role in keeping the ship afloat, though President Lyndon Baines Johnson broke with tradition and refused to hold the medal ceremony in the White House, also declining to award it personally, delegating that task to the Secretary of the Navy in a closed to the public presentation made at the Washington Navy Yard. The additional medals given to other crew members in the aftermath of the attack made the U.S.S. Liberty the most decorated ship based on a single engagement with hostile forces in the history of the United States Navy.

The cover-up of the attack began immediately. The Liberty crew was sworn to secrecy over the incident, as were the Naval dockyard workers in Malta, and even the men of the U.S.S. Davis, which had assisted the badly damaged Liberty to port were ordered to be silent. A hastily convened and conducted court of inquiry headed by Admiral John McCain acted under orders from Washington to declare the attack a case of mistaken identity. The inquiry’s senior legal counsel Captain Ward Boston, who subsequently declared the attack to be a “deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew,” also described how “President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” The court’s findings were rewritten and sections relating to Israeli war crimes, to include the machine gunning of life rafts, were excised. Following in his father’s footsteps, Senator John McCain of Arizona has used his position on the Senate Armed Services Committee to effectively block any reconvening of a board of inquiry to reexamine the evidence. Most of the documents relating to the Liberty incident have never been released to the public in spite of the 50 years that have passed since the attack took place.

The faux court of inquiry and the medals awarded in secret were only the first steps in the cover-up, which has persisted to this day, orchestrated by politicians and a media that seem to place Israel’s interests ahead of those of the United States. Liberty survivors have been finding it difficult even to make their case in public. In April 2016 a billboard that read “Help the USS Liberty Survivors – Attacked by Israel” was taken down in New Bedford Massachusetts. The billboard had been placed by the Honor Liberty Vets Organization and, as is normal practice, was paid for through a contractual arrangement that would require the billboard company to post the image for a fixed length of time. It was one of a number of billboards placed in different states. Inevitably, Israel’s well connected friends began to complain. One Jewish businessman threatened to take his business elsewhere, so the advertising company obligingly removed the billboard two weeks early.

After fifty years, the dwindling number of survivors of the Liberty are not looking for punishment or revenge. When asked, they will tell you that they only ask for accountability, that an impartial inquiry into the attack be convened and that the true story of what took place finally be revealed to the public.

That Congress is deaf to the pleas of the Liberty crew should surprise no one as the nation’s legislative body has been for years, as Pat Buchanan once put it, “Israeli occupied territory.” The Lobby’s ability to force Congress and even the presidency to submit to its will has been spelled out in some detail by critics, first by Paul Findley in They Dare to Speak Out, later by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in The Israel Lobby, in Alison Weir’s Against Our Better Judgment, and most recently in Kirk Beattie’s excellent Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East.

Government willingness at all levels to protect Israel even when it is killing Americans is remarkable, but it is symptom of the deep corruption that has generated a tendency to go to bat for Israel reflexively, even when it is damaging to U.S. interests and to the rights that American citizens are supposed to enjoy. I note particularly legislation currently working its way through Congress and numerous statehouses make it illegal for any federal or state funding to go to any entity that supports the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, better known as BDS. BDS is a way to put pressure on the Israeli government over its human rights abuses that is both non-violent and potentially effective. Israel’s supporters have labeled BDS as anti-Semitic and have had some success in making any criticism of Israel labeled a “hate crime.”

So the treatment of the U.S.S. Liberty should surprise no one in a country whose governing class has been for decades doing the bidding of the powerful lobby of a tiny client state that has been nothing but trouble and expense for the United States of America. Will it ever end? As the Israel Lobby currently controls the relevant parts of the federal government and muchof the media, change is not likely to happen overnight, but there are some positive signs. The BDS movement is growing in spite of the pressure it is experiencing and will not go away. And opinion polls suggest that the American people are finally waking up to realize that they are sick and tired of the entire farce playing out in the Middle East under Israeli direction. Israel, which aggressively spies on us, kills our citizens and takes billions of dollars of our tax money which could be better spent here, is no friend of the United States and never has been. Just ask anyone who served on the U.S.S. Liberty.

Germany withdraws troops from anti-IS base in Turkey row

June 8, 2017

AFP

ANKARA: The German government decided Wednesday to withdraw its troops from Turkey’s Incirlik base near the Syrian border after last-ditch talks with Ankara failed to resolve an escalating row.

The military personnel along with Tornado surveillance jets and other hardware — deployed as part of the international coalition against the Islamic State group — will be moved to Jordan’s Azraq base instead, Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel sought to play down the dispute, saying she “views this issue as a very localised one”.

With the decision now made to move troops out of Turkey, Berlin can now “concentrate on other points” in its negotiations with Ankara, she added.

Germany has more than 250 troops stationed in Incirlik, flying surveillance missions over Syria and refuelling flights for partner nations battling the IS jihadists. But the deployment has become a bone of contention after Ankara repeatedly refused to allow German lawmakers to visit the base. Ankara had first denied German parliamentarians the right to travel to the site for several months last year, angered by a Bundestag vote to recognise the Ottoman Empire’s World War I-era massacre of Armenians as a genocide. A fresh row over lawmakers’ visits to the air base erupted last month.

This time, Ankara was protesting the fact that Berlin offered political asylum to Turkish nationals accused of complicity in the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in July 2016.

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel travelled to Turkey on Monday to hold last-ditch talks with his counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, but failed to sway Ankara.

After the talks, Cavusoglu repeated that “we would not like to see members of FETO take shelter in friendly country Germany”, referring to a movement led by US-based Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of orchestrating the failed coup.

Berlin has argued that it cannot deploy its soldiers in places which lawmakers are unable to visit, given that all military missions are mandated by parliament.

Von der Leyen said that Azraq in Jordan would be a new base for Germany’s troops.

The transfer will disrupt its air refuelling missions for two or three weeks, while Tornado surveillance flights will cease for two to three months, she said.

“I will therefore immediately speak with the Americans (who lead) the international coalition against terror, on how the gaps can be filled so that there is no negative impact,” she said, adding that “following that, we will draw up our time schedule”.

The transfer will not require a new mandate from the German parliament, as the current one specifies the deployment site as the airspace over Syria and its neighbouring countries, but does not specify the base, von der Leyen said.

Ties between the NATO allies have been strained since the failed coup in Turkey, and tensions have worsened over multiple issues including a referendum campaign to expand Erdogan’s powers.

Relations plunged further after Turkey imprisoned Deniz Yucel, a German-Turkish journalist with Germany’s Die Welt daily, on terror charges earlier this year.

 

North Korea launches missile salvo at area where US aircraft carrier fleet had sailed

Missiles land in part of Sea of Japan where USS Carl Vinson and USS Ronald Reagan had been conducting manoeuvres this week

June 7, 2017

by Justin McCurry

The Guardian

North Korea has fired a volley of what appeared to be land-to-ship missiles, hours after a senior US official said the regime’s recent advances in missile technology were causing “great concern” in Washington.

South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said several missiles – which are not thought to be ballistic – were launched from the North Korean eastern coastal town of Wonsan on Thursday morning.

They flew an estimated 200km and were intended to demonstrate the North’s ability to target a large enemy warship, the South Korean military said.

The salvo was aimed at an area in the Sea of Japan recently visited by two US aircraft carriers, the USS Carl Vinson and USS Ronald Reagan. The vessels left the area earlier this week after conducting joint manoeuvres with South Korean and Japanese forces.

“North Korea likely wanted to show off its ability to precisely target a large warship, in relation to the joint military drills involving US aircraft carriers,” Roh Jae-cheon, South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff spokesman, told reporters. “By testing different types of missiles, North Korea also appears to be aiming to secure the upper hand in relations with South Korea and the United States.”

At the end of last month, the North fired a short-range scud missile that landed in Japan’s maritime economic zone, drawing strong protests from Tokyo. The regime claimed that the rocket was equipped with a precision control guidance system and had landed within seven metres of its target.

In mid-May, it tested a powerful new midrange missile that it said could carry a nuclear warhead. That rocket flew higher and for a longer period than any other missile previously tested by North Korea.

Thursday’s multiple missile launches present an early diplomatic test for South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, a left-leaning liberal who supports engagement with Pyongyang as way of reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula.

North Korea has conducted four missiles launches in just over four weeks, in defiance of warnings from Donald Trump that the US would not rule out military action to prevent the regime from developing a nuclear-armed missile capable of striking the US mainland.

Pyongyang is believed to be at least three years away from building an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with sufficient range, but it already has conventional missiles capable of striking US military bases in South Korea and Japan.

The head of the US missile defence agency, vice admiral James Syring, warned that officials should assume that the US would one day be within reach of a North Korean nuclear missile.

“I would not say we are comfortably ahead of the threat; I would say we are addressing the threat that we know today,” Syring told a hearing of the house armed services committee on Wednesday. “The advancements in the last six months have caused great concern to me and others, in the advancement of and demonstration of technology of ballistic missiles from North Korea.

“It is incumbent on us to assume that North Korea today can range the United States with an ICBM carrying a nuclear warhead.”

Experts said Thursday’s launches were designed to show North Korea would not be pressured into abandoning its nuclear and missile programmes, a week after the UN security council adopted sanctions targeting North Korean officials and companies.

“North Korea has been stepping up missile tests … to project an image to the world that international sanctions can never bring it to its knees,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies.

Yang said the regime was also responding to the arrival earlier this week of a US nuclear submarine, the USS Cheyenne, in the South Korea port of Busan.

North Korea insists it has the right to develop nuclear weapons in response to US “aggression,” citing the recent presence of the US aircraft carriers in waters off the peninsula.

The foreign ministry in Pyongyang said in a recent statement that Washington’s opposition to missile tests was “the height of shameless arrogance, self-righteousness and double standards” given that the US was engaged in its own “military buildup”.

In response to the higher frequency of North Korean missile tests in recent months, the US and South Korea accelerated the deployment of a controversial missile defence system earlier this year.

But on Wednesday, South Korea said it would suspend further deployments of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence – known as Thaad – system until it has completed an environmental impact assessment, amid concern from local residents that its powerful radar could affect their health and livelihoods.

The review, ordered by Moon’s office, will not affect two launchers already in operation in the south-eastern region of Seongju, but it could delay the introduction of a remaining four launchers by more than a year, according to officials at the presidential Blue House in Seoul.

The review was ordered after Moon’s office complained that it had not been told about the arrival of the additional launchers – which have not been installed – last week.

“It doesn’t make sense to withdraw the two initial launchers which had already been deployed and installed, but additional installation will be decided after the environmental impact assessment is over,” a South Korean administration official told reporters.

The Pentagon said it would work with Seoul to ensure transparency, but added that it did not think the review would threaten Thaad’s future. “The US trusts the [South Korean government’s] official stance that the Thaad deployment was an alliance decision and it will not be reversed,” a Pentagon spokesman said.

China has urged South Korea to abandon Thaad, whose deployment was agreed by Moon’s conservative predecessor, Park Geun-hye.

Beijing claims that the system could be used to track its own missile programme and represents a threat to China’s security.

“China’s position is very clear. No matter what happens, we are firmly opposed to the deployment of the Thaad system by the US in the Republic of Korea,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Wednesday.

Notes on Saudi Arabia 

In the absence of national elections and political parties, politics in Saudi Arabia takes place in two distinct arenas: within the royal family, the Al Saud, and between the royal family and the rest of Saudi society. Outside of the Al-Saud, participation in the political process is limited to a relatively small segment of the population and takes the form of the royal family consulting with the ulema, tribal sheikhs and members of important commercial families on major decisions. This process is not reported by the Saudi media.

The royal family is politically divided by factions based on clan loyalties, personal ambitions and ideological differences. The most powerful clan faction is known as the ‘Sudairi Seven’, comprising the late King Fahd and his full brothers and their descendants. Ideological divisions include issues over the speed and direction of reform, and whether the role of the ulema should be increased or reduced. There were divisions within the family over who should succeed to the throne after the accession or earlier death of Prince Sultan. When prince Sultan died before ascending to the throne on 21 October 2011, King Abdullah appointed Prince Nayef as crown prince. Prince Nayef also died before ascending to the throne in 2012.

The Saudi government and the royal family have often, and over many years, been accused of extensive corruption. Saudi Arabia is  a country that is said to “belong” to the royal family and is named for them, the lines between state assets and the personal wealth of senior princes are blurred. The extent of corruption has been described as systemic and endemic, and its existence was acknowledged and defended by Prince Bandar bin Sultan (a senior member of the royal family) in an interview in 2001. Although corruption allegations have often been limited to broad undocumented accusations, specific allegations were made in 2007, when it was claimed that the British defence contractor BAE Systems had paid Prince Bandar US$2 billion in bribes relating to the Al-Yamamah arms deal. Prince Bandar denied the allegations. Investigations by both US and UK authorities resulted, in 2010, in plea bargain agreements with the company, by which it paid $447 million in fines but did not admit to bribery. Transparency International in its annual Corruption Perceptions Index recently  gave Saudi Arabia a score of 4.7 (on a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 is “highly corrupt” and 10 is “highly clean”).

There has been mounting pressure to reform and modernize the royal family’s rule, an agenda championed by King Abdullah both before and after his accession in 2005. The creation of the Consultative Council in the early 1990s did not satisfy demands for political participation, and, in 2003, an annual National Dialogue Forum was announced that would allow selected professionals and intellectuals to publicly debate current national issues, within certain prescribed parameters. In 2005, the first municipal elections were held. In 2007, the Allegiance Council was created to regulate the succession. In 2009, the king made significant personnel changes to the government by appointing reformers to key positions and the first woman to a ministerial post.However, the changes have been criticized as being too slow or merely cosmetic.

As a founding member of OPEC, its oil pricing policy has been generally to stabilize the world oil market and try to moderate sharp price movements so as to not jeopardise the Western economies.

Between the mid-1970s and 2002 Saudi Arabia expended over $70 billion in “overseas development aid”. However, there is evidence that the vast majority was, in fact, spent on propagating and extending the influence of Wahhabism at the expense of other forms of Islam. There has been an intense debate over whether Saudi aid and Wahhabism has fomented extremism in recipient countries. The two main allegations are that, by its nature, Wahhabism encourages intolerance and promotes terrorism. Former CIA director James Woolsey described it as “the soil in which Al-Qaeda and its sister terrorist organizations are flourishing.” However, the Saudi government strenuously denies these claims or that it exports religious or cultural extremism.

.In the Arab and Muslim worlds, Saudi Arabia is considered to be pro-Western and pro-American, and it is certainly a long-term ally of the United States. However, this and Saudi Arabia’s role in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, particularly the stationing of U.S. troops on Saudi soil from 1991, prompted the development of a hostile Islamist response internally. As a result, Saudi Arabia has, to some extent, distanced itself from the U.S. and, for example, refused to support or to participate in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Relations with the United States became strained following 9/11.American politicians and media accused the Saudi government of supporting terrorism and tolerating a jihadist culture. Indeed, Osama bin Laden and fifteen out of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. According to the former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups… Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

Saudi Arabia’s increasing alarm at the rise of Iran is reflected in the reported private comments of King Abdullah urging the US to attack Iran and “cut off the head of the snake”. The tentative rapprochement between the US and Iran that began in secret in 2011 was said to be feared by the Saudis, and, during the run up to the widely welcomed deal on Iran’s nuclear programme that capped the first stage of US–Iranian détente, Robert Jordan, who was U.S. ambassador to Riyadh from 2001 to 2003, said “[t]he Saudis’ worst nightmare would be the [Obama] administration striking a grand bargain with Iran.Saudi Arabia has been seen as a moderating influence in the Arab-Israeli conflict, periodically putting forward a peace plan between Israel and the Palestinians and condemning Hezbollah. Following the Arab Spring Saudi Arabia offered asylum to deposed President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and King Abdullah telephoned President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (prior to his deposition) to offer his support.

Al-Yamamah arms deal

.The Saudi military consists of the Royal Saudi Land Forces, the Royal Saudi Air Force, the Royal Saudi Navy, the Royal Saudi Air Defense, the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG, an independent military force), and paramilitary forces, totaling nearly 200,000 active-duty personnel. In 2005 the armed forces had the following personnel: the army, 75,000; the air force, 18,000; air defense, 16,000; the navy, 15,500 (including 3,000 marines); and the SANG had 75,000 active soldiers and 25,000 tribal levies.  In addition, there is an Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah military intelligence service.

The SANG is not a reserve but a fully operational front-line force, and originated out of Abdul Aziz’s tribal military-religious force, the Ikhwan, attributable to it being effectively Abdullah’s private army since the 1960s a. The SANG has been a counterbalance to the Sudairi faction in the royal family: Prince Sultan, the Minister of Defense and Aviation, is one of the so-called ‘Sudairi Seven’ and controls the remainder of the armed forces.

Saudi Arabia’s command economy is petroleum-based; roughly 75% of budget revenues and 90% of export earnings come from the oil industry. The oil industry comprises about 45% of Saudi Arabia’s nominal gross domestic product, compared with 40% from the private sector (see below). Saudi Arabia officially has about 260 billion barrels (4.1×1010 m3) of oil reserves, comprising about one-fifth of the world’s proven total petroleum reserves.

In the 1990s, Saudi Arabia experienced a significant contraction of oil revenues combined with a high rate of population growth. Per capita income fell from a high of $11,700 at the height of the oil boom in 1981 to $6,300 in 1998 Increases in oil prices since 2000 have helped boost per capita GDP to $17,000 in 2007 dollars, or about $7,400 adjusted for inflation.

OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) limits its members’ oil production based on their “proven reserves.” Saudi Arabia’s published reserves have shown little change since 1980, with the main exception being an increase of about 100 billion barrels (1.6×1010 m3) between 1987 and 1988 Matthew Simmons has suggested that Saudi Arabia is greatly exaggerating its reserves and may soon show production declines .

Saudi Arabia is the largest exporter of petroleum in the world.

Gold mining is carried out in the Mahd adh Dhahab region (also known as the “Cradle of Gold”). Saudi Arabian stores suffered a significant decrease in gold sales in 2012.

Reporting of poverty remains a state taboo.

The House of Saud is the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia. The family has thousands of members. It is composed of the descendants of Muhammad bin Saud and his brothers, though the ruling faction of the family is primarily led by the descendants of Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud.

The family is estimated to be composed of 15,000 members, but the majority of the power and wealth is possessed by a group of only about 2,000.

Estimates of royal net worth is at well over $1.4 trillion. This wealth distribution has allowed many senior princes and princesses to accumulate largely unauditable wealth and, in turn, pay out, in cash or kind, to lesser royals and commoners, and so gain political influence.

Due to its authoritarian and theocratic rule, the House of Saud has attracted much criticism during its rule of Saudi Arabia. Its opponents generally refer to the Saudi monarchy as totalitarians or dictators.

There have been numerous incidents of demonstrations and other forms of resistance against the House of Saud. These range from the Ikhwan uprising during the reign of Ibn Saud, to numerous coup attempts by the different branches of the Kingdom’s military. On 20 November 1979, the Holy Sanctuary in Mecca was violently seized by a group of dissidents. The seizure was carried out by 500 heavily armed and provisioned Saudi dissidents, consisting mostly of members of the former Ikhwan tribe of Otaibah but also of other peninsular Arabs and a few Egyptians enrolled in Islamic studies at the Islamic University of Medina.

The seizure was led by Juhayman al-Otaybi and Abdullah al-Qahtani who cited the corruption and ostentatiousness of the ruling house of Saud. al-Otaybi and his group spoke against the socio–technological changes taking place in Saudi Arabia. al-Otaybi demanded that oil should not be sold to the United States.

Al-Otaybi received little mass support outside of small circles of workers and students of tribal origin, and foreign labourers (from Egypt, Yemen and Pakistan). The Saudi royal family turned to the Ulema who duly issued a fatwa permitting the storming of the holy sanctuary. Saudi forces, aided by French and Pakistani special ops units, took two weeks to flush the rebels out of the holy sanctuary; the use of French commandos was surprising since, officially, non-Muslims may not enter the city of Mecca.

All surviving males (including Utaybi himself) were beheaded publicly in four cities of Saudi Arabia.

A report on Israeli/Iranian conflicts

(Heading and classification Redacted)

[translation from the xxxxxxx]

“That Israel is the main beneficiary of any damage done to Tehran’s nuclear program by the deaths of a number of senior Iranian scientists and engineers cannot seriously be doubted.

These killings were carried out by the Mossad “hit squad” known as the Kidon or its Israel Defense Forces (IDF) equivalent the Sayeret Matkal “Caesarea”

The Kidon (Hebrew for dagger) has about 40 trained officers, including a small number of women. The main operational and training base is hidden deep within the Negev desert in southern Israel.

They are handpicked from within the already elite special forces units such as the IDF’s Sayeret Matkal and S13. All are on short-term contracts, in their twenties or very early thirties and are highly trained marksmen, explosives experts and silent killers.

While all the members of Kidon are expert linguists, mainly in Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish, a small number are also fluent in Persian. They are considered far too important to risk in covert operations, but would prove to be invaluable as trainers and controllers for dissident groups tasked with conducting operations within Iran.

One of the killings of an Iranian scientist occurred early on November 29, 2010, when Dr Majid Shahriari was killed when attackers on a motorbike attached an explosive device similar to a World War II “sticky bomb” to his car.

Shahriari was the director of the team developing the design for a nuclear reactor core and had been described by the US magazine Time as the “highest-ranking non-appointed individual working on the project”.

This is but the latest of a number of killings of scientists linked to Iran’s nuclear program. In 2007, Dr Ardeshir Hassanpour was allegedly poisoned, which according to the United States think-tank Stratfor had all the hallmarks of an Israeli operation.

In January 2010, Dr Massoud Ali-Mohammadi was killed by a bomb attached to his car as he was driving to work in the morning. Despite rumors that he may have been targeted by MOIS (Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security) because of his reported connections to opposition groups, the modus operendi of his attackers is far too similar to that of numerous other incidents to give those rumors too much credence.

The actual attacks on the Iranian nuclear infrastructure are being carried out by Kurds and Balochs trained by Mossad.

Neither group has any love for the mullahs in Tehran and indeed both have been regularly in open conflict with the Iranian regime. There are intercepted Israeli intelligence reports that the Baloch insurgency in eastern Iran has recently reignited.

It cannot be denied that it would be very difficult for any foreign agent to operate effectively or for any length of time in the paranoid, high-security and repressive environment of modern Iran.

Even the well-trained and well-prepared Mossad operatives have had only limited success, while the much vaunted but highly overrated US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been largely bereft of serious HUMINT resources in Iran following a number of very incompetent intelligence blunders.

The CIA lost its entire agent network in Iran in 2004 when, according to US intelligence sources, “a CIA headquarters communications officer was about to send instructions to an agent via its Immarsat transmitter/receivers. The CIA officer attempted to download data intended for a single operative, but accidentally hit a button that sent it to the entire US spy network in Iran.” (source: CUX 305)

In what turned out to be an unmitigated intelligence disaster, the information was received by a double agent who forwarded it to MOIS, which was then quickly able to wrap up the entire US network, leaving Washington completely blind in HUMINT terms.

The CIA has still not recovered from this or several other setbacks at the hands of Iranian counter-Intelligence.

Most Western intelligence services have struggled to maintain any foothold within Iran, with the sole exception of the German BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), which has managed to run several small but effective Iranian rings for a number of years. The Germans, who are closely connected with the CIA,  do not share information with the Israelis but do with the Russians.

MOIS and its foreign espionage department VEVAK are rated by many observers as one of the most effective intelligence organizations in the Middle East today.

It is widely accepted that the Iranian national security services run deadly anti-dissident and highly effective counter-intelligence operations around the world, while they have a justified reputation for their fearsome and wide-ranging powers to suppress dissent within Iran.

It is unlikely that MOIS would ever tolerate the lax levels of security found in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where Mossad was responsible for assassinating a senior Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in January 2010.

It would be both difficult and dangerous for foreign intelligence services to attempt to deploy their own officers inside Iran for the long periods needed to acquire the targeting and surveillance information necessary to carry out a successful attack, even with the help and local knowledge of an in-country support network.

So again it is known and obvious that the most effective intelligence assets along with the probable culprits for the recent killings are drawn mainly from dissident nationalities such as those in the Kurdish and Baloch regions.

Israel maintains surveillance facilities and SIGINT sites run by the highly secretive Unit-8200 in northern Iraq and therefore are able to fund and assist in arming the Iranian Kurds. Earlier, it became known that Kurdish rebels attacking Turkish targets had also been trained and armed by the Mossad.

The recent attacks on the Iranian nuclear infrastructure by sabotage and the targeted use of a CIA- developed computer worm (Stuxnet)in a clandestine Canadian station has caused significant disruption, while the Israeli fomented assassinations of leading Iranian nuclear scientists is considered to have “significantly delayed the Iranian nuclear research and development program.” This quote from a highly classified report to the Israeli Embassy ink Washington under date of 9. December, 2010. All such claims are routinely denied by the authorities in Tehran.

More attacks can now be expected as Israel is becoming ever more frustrated at being prevented by the current US administration from taking unilateral military action and by a Washington that many Israelis see as seemingly unwilling to countenance direct action themselves.

Intercepted Israeli diplomatic cables show clearly that Israel has also faced considerable US opposition to Mossad-instigated assassinations, not only in Iran but in Lebanon and elsewhere. Specifically noted is the Mossad “removal” of Lebanon’s Harari by a heavy car bomb. Despite Washington’s reservations, Israel remains determined to continue its attempts to further delay Iran’s nuclear program by killing key Iranian scientists and religious leaders.

The covert operations also extend to disrupting and sabotaging Iran’s nuclear technology purchasing network abroad and its vital research and development infrastructure within Iran, US Intelligence sources have confirmed.

It is undeniable that anything short of a massive and prolonged air and missile attack would not be sufficient to seriously degrade, let alone destroy, a significant part of the Iranian nuclear facilities’ infrastructure.

Despite occasional bouts of saber-rattling by Washington, designed solely to placate the American Jewish community, there appears to be little chance of and real effective military action against Iran being taken by the Barack Obama administration.

Not only Israel, but Saudi Arabia and, quietly behind the scenes, Kuwait, some of the other smaller Gulf States, Jordan and even Egypt, have constantly been pressing a reluctant Washington to finally take decisive unilateral military action against Iran and thoroughly obliterate her potential current and future nuclear capacity.

Many of the Arab states – for a number of individual reasons – see a confident, expansionist, nuclear-armed Iran as a far greater long-term threat to their own security than Israel could ever be.

However Obama was widely perceived in certain circles in the Middle East as no longer listening to his ostensible closest allies in the region, wither Israeli or Muslim.

Iran can therefore expect its enemies, Israeli or Arab from without and the Kurds and Balochs from within, to redouble their attempts to both delay the possible development of a nuclear weapons capability and attempt to further destabilize an already shaky regime in the continuing absence of serious US military intervention.

The often controversial Meir Dagan was the memun or director of Mossad largely credited with developing assassination as a significant part of Israel’s operations to cripple any Iranian attempts to build a nuclear weapon.

On his first day in office , Dagan promised to support any operation against any of Israel’s enemies, with every means he had – legal or illegal.

He said that he would allow his field agents to use nerve toxins, dumdum bullets and methods of killing that even the Russian or Chinese secret services would not use.

“We are like the hangman, or the doctor on death row who administers the lethal injection,” Dagan continued, “Our actions are all endorsed by the state of Israel. When we kill we are not breaking the law. We are fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the day.”

Dagan, who retired as Mossad director, has apparently stated his belief recently that it is unlikely that Iran would be able to produce even a crude nuclear device before 2015.

There are a number of increasingly worried Middle Eastern leaders who will be hoping that Dagan is correct in his prediction and also that a far more responsive US president could be placed in the White House several years before that deadline is finally reached.”

James Comey Statement Describes Unsettling and Awkward Meetings With Trump

June 7 2017

by Mattathias Schwartz and Ryan Devereaux

The Intercept

Former FBI Director James Comey offered the first glimpse of what President Donald Trump looks like through his eyes in a seven-page “statement for the record” previewing his live testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. In the prepared remarks, released Wednesday, Comey narrates a pattern of encounters with Trump that he considered awkward and unsettling.

Most importantly, in Comey’s telling, is the threat that Trump posed to the independence of the FBI. The FBI has an ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, particularly those of Michael Flynn, who served as Trump national security adviser for the administration’s first 24 days. Comey’s statement suggests that Trump tried to quash that investigation in their meetings. Interference with the investigation could be considered obstruction of justice, a potentially impeachable offense, depending on how Congress interprets what transpired.

In his letter announcing Comey’s firing, Trump wrote that Comey had informed him “on three separate occasions” that he was not under investigation. Comey’s statement appears to verify Trump’s claim — though his version of events suggests a more complicated situation than the president’s letter let on. According to Comey, Trump was keenly interested in having the FBI director publicize that he was not under investigation.

In a March 30 phone call, Comey said Trump “repeatedly” told him, “We need to get that fact out.” Comey declined to do so, adding, “I did not tell the president that the FBI and the Department of Justice had been reluctant to make public statements that we did not have an open case on President Trump for a number of reasons, most importantly because it would create a duty to correct, should that change.”

In his Wednesday statement, Comey described his meetings with Trump one by one. In a January meeting at the White House, the pair’s second, Comey said Trump asked him if he wanted to keep the job of FBI director. That’s a question Comey “found strange,” with six years left in his 10-year-term, because he and Trump had already discussed that he was staying on.

“My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship,” Comey wrote in his statement. “That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.”

The awkward moments — and the questioning of Trump’s motives by Comey — keep coming after that.

The Trump who emerges is the familiar persona from Trump’s reality television career — a ham-handed operator who uses carrots and sticks to extract loyalty from subordinates. Comey’s first face-to-face meeting with the president-elect took place at Trump Tower in January, two weeks before Trump was sworn in. In Comey’s account, it was his job to stay behind after other intelligence officials had left and brief Trump on what he described as “some personally sensitive aspects” of the government’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

From that point forward, as Comey tells it, Trump repeatedly asked him to back off on the Russia investigation, at one point calling it a “cloud” that was “interfering with his ability to make deals for the country.” Comey repeatedly demurred.

“I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” Trump said, according to Comey’s statement, in a description of a January 27 one-on-one dinner that hews closely to a New York Times account of the encounter. “I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed,” Comey wrote. “We simply looked at each other in silence.” When the topic came up again, Comey responded by offering his “honest loyalty.”

“It is possible,” he wrote, “that we understood the phrase ‘honest loyalty’ differently, but I decided it wouldn’t be productive to push it further.”

Indeed, their understanding appears to have been different. On April 11, the last time Comey and Trump spoke, Comey wrote that Trump agreed to go through more traditional channels — the White House counsel and the Department of Justice — with his concerns about the Russian investigation. Trump said, “Because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing you know.” There was no thing, and no deal. Three weeks later, Trump fired Comey.

Tomorrow, at his much-anticipated congressional testimony, Comey will tell more of his side.