TBR News November 6, 2018
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8
Washington, D.C. November 6, 2018:” The Greenland ice sheet — two miles thick and broad enough to blanket an area the size of Mexico — shapes the world’s weather, matched in influence by only Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere.
Should all of the ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world’s coastal cities, home to a billion people. It would cause higher tides, generate more powerful storm surges and, by altering ocean currents, drastically disrupt the global climate.
Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted.
By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica — the world’s largest reservoir of fresh water — also are shrinking, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported.
Researchers have focused their attention on a delicate ribbon — the equilibrium line, which marks the fulcrum of frost and thaw in Greenland’s seasonal balance.
The zone runs around the rim of the ice cap like a drawstring. Summer melting, on average, offsets the annual accumulation of snow.
Across the ice cap, however, the area of seasonal melting was broader last year than in 27 years of record-keeping, University of Colorado climate scientists reported. In early May, temperatures on the ice cap some days were almost 20 degrees above normal, hovering just below freezing.
From cores of ancient Greenland ice extracted by the National Science Foundation, researchers have identified at least 20 sudden climate changes in the last 110,000 years, in which average temperatures fluctuated as much as 15 degrees in a single decade.
The increasingly erratic behavior of the Greenland ice has scientists wondering whether the climate, after thousands of years of relative stability, may again start oscillating.
The ice sheet seemed such a stolid reservoir of cold that many experts had been confident of it taking centuries for higher temperatures to work their way thousands of feet down to the base of the ice cap and undermine its stability.
By and large, computer models supported that view, predicting that as winter temperatures rose, more snow would fall across the dome of the ice cap. Thus, by the seasonal bookkeeping of the ice sheet, Greenland would neatly balance its losses through new snow.
By 2005, Greenland was beginning to lose more ice volume than anyone expected — an annual loss of up to 52 cubic miles a year — according to more recent satellite gravity measurements released by JPL.
The amount of freshwater ice dumped into the Atlantic Ocean has almost tripled in a decade.
Since 2002, Greenland’s three largest outlet glaciers have started moving faster, satellite data show.
On the eastern edge of Greenland, the Kangerlussuaq Glacier, like the Jakobshavn, has surged, doubling its pace. To the west, the Helheim Glacier now appears to be moving about half a football field every day.
In all, 12 major outlet glaciers drain the ice sheet the way rivers drain a watershed, setting the pace of its release to the ocean.
If they all slide too quickly, they could collapse suddenly and release the entire ice sheet into the ocean.
- Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 72
- Even the FBI Thinks Police Have Links to White Supremacists — but Don’t Tell the New York Times
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
- Even the FBI Thinks Police Have Links to White Supremacists — but Don’t Tell the New York Times
- The Coming Attack on Iran: Israel’s Plans for a US Action
Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 72
August 8, 2018
by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief
The Toronto Star, Canada
The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected
If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.
Last updated: Aug 8, 2018
- May 10, 2018
“The (Iran) deal also gave the regime billions of dollars. How about this? $150 billion and $1.8 billion in green — $1.8 billion in cash…”
Source: Campaign rally in Elkhart, Indiana
in fact: The “$150 billion” figure has no basis. Experts said Iran had about $100 billion in worldwide assets at the time; after the nuclear deal unfroze Iranian assets, Iran was able to access a percentage of that $100 billion, but not all of it. PolitiFact reported: “The actual amount available to Iran is about $60 billion, estimates Garbis Iradian, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew pinned it at $56 billion, while Iranian officials say $35 billion, according to Richard Nephew, an expert on economic sanctions at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.”
Trump has repeated this claim 19 times
“But I have a lot of respect for Keith Ellison. You know why? Does everyone know why? So when I announced on June 16th, he was being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC. And in the interview — this was a couple of days after I announced. And Keith Ellison said, ‘You know he’s going to win, don’t you?’ Right, Mike? It’s true. He said, ‘You know he’s going to win.’ And George and somebody else there I won’t mention the name. Go ahead. They smiled a little bit, respectfully. But Keith Ellison, he said, ‘He’s going to win’ and essentially he was sort of indicating and there’s nothing you’re going to be able to do, and that’s what we did.”
Source: Campaign rally in Elkhart, Indiana
in fact: Trump got the essence of the story right, but he exaggerated what Ellison, the Democratic congressman from Minnesota, actually said in the ABC appearance in July 2015 — which happened more than a month almost Trump launched his campaign, not “a couple of days.” Ellison did not declare that Trump was “going to win”; rather, he said Trump “might” win the Republican nomination: “Well, all I want to say is that anybody — well, from the Democratic side of the fence, who thinks — who’s terrified of the possibility of President Trump better vote, better get active, better get involved, because this man has some momentum, and we better be ready for the fact that he might be leading the Republican ticket.” He added: “You know, George, we had Jesse Ventura in Minnesota win the governorship. Nobody thought he was going to win. I’m telling you, stranger things have happened.”
“Here’s a case study. San Diego wants the wall. And I said to my people, ‘Here’s the bad news. If we give them the wall, we don’t have an advocate. If we don’t give them the wall they’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on Governor Moonbeam in California, right?’ But you know what I did? Something I would normally not do, which means in life I’m getting nicer as I get older. I said, ‘Let’s build the wall for San Diego.’ So we’re building them the wall. I shouldn’t have done it. Actually I, sort of, changed my mind after we started. I called my people, I said, ‘How much would it cost to stop building the wall in San Diego so they go out and advocate for us because they’re desperate for their wall. Because they don’t like people running over their front yards and all of the problems, including by the way massive amounts of crime?’ I said, ‘How much would it cost to stop’ — I’m in the construction business it’s what I do best. They got back to me, they said, ‘Sir, it will cost approximately $7 million to stop.’ Now, that’s not big numbers when you hear about the numbers we talk about, $7 million to stop and restart it at a later date. I said, ‘I can’t do that to the American people. Keep building the wall.’ Right? So we’re building the wall but we’re — we’re getting it all done.”
Source: Campaign rally in Elkhart, Indiana
in fact: Every element of this story is fictional. First, San Diego does not support a border wall. Its city council voted 5-3 in September to express opposition, and even the Republican mayor, Kevin Faulconer, has stated that he is opposed: “Mayor Faulconer has been clear in his opposition to a border wall across the entirety of the U.S. southern border,” a spokesperson said in September. (The board of supervisors of San Diego County has voted to endorse a lawsuit against California “sanctuary” laws protecting unauthorized immigrants, but “this county has taken no action with regard to the wall,” county spokesperson Michael Workman told local news outlet KPBS.) Second, the wall is not currently being constructed in San Diego; prototypes of possible wall designs were built there, but no construction of a permanent, extended wall has begun. We cannot definitively declare that Trump’s supposed private conversation is invented, but it is hard to see how anyone could have told Trump that there would be a hefty cost incurred by “stopping” construction that has not started.
Trump has repeated this claim 11 times
“And remember the last time I did this and this started two and a half years ago when I just started. People were not saying Merry Christmas anymore. The big store chains weren’t saying Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. They weren’t doing it. They weren’t saying Merry Christmas. Now they’re saying Merry Christmas again.”
Source: Campaign rally in Elkhart, Indiana
in fact: “People” were still saying Merry Christmas when Obama was president. There is no evidence that “big store chains” that did not say Merry Christmas before Trump was president have started saying Merry Christmas during Trump’s presidency. Even Trump’s own family members continue to say “Happy Holidays”: daughter and aide Ivanka Trump and son Eric Trump both used that phrase instead of “Merry Christmas” on Twitter in December 2017.
Trump has repeated this claim 3 times
“He’s (Sen. Joe Donnelly) never sponsored a bill that has become a law.”
Source: Campaign rally in Elkhart, Indiana
in fact: Donnelly, an Indiana Democrat, was the primary Senate sponsor of the Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act of 2017. Trump ended up signing the “companion bill’ introduced in the House of Representatives by another Indiana member, so by the narrowest technical definition this was not Donnelly’s bill, but analysts such as the legislative tracking website GovTrack count this as a bill Donnelly sponsored that became law. Donnelly’s campaign also points out that Trump’s definition does not count numerous measures Donnelly has introduced that have become law as amendments to an original bill, as part of a broader bill, or where Donnelly was one of the original co-sponsors of the bill.
“For decades American presidents responded to foreign cheating on trade — cheating. There’s no other word for it, cheating — they responded with silence. They didn’t do anything. They were silent. Silencio. ‘Let’s not rock the boat. Oh, that’s fine. We have $100 billion trade deficit with Mexico.’ Think of it: $100 billion trade deficit a year with Mexico.”
Source: Campaign rally in Elkhart, Indiana
in fact: The U.S. does not have a $100 billion trade deficit with Mexico, and it has not for at least the last 33 years (likely far longer). If Trump was referring to 2017, he was off by at least $31 billion, or at least $29 billion if you give him the benefit of the doubt. The U.S. trade deficit with Mexico was $71 billion in 2017 when counting goods alone, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Including trade in services, the net deficit was $69 billion, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis says. (The Bureau of Economic Analysis uses a different method of calculating deficits and surpluses than the Census Bureau.)
Trump has repeated this claim 34 times
“We have a trade deficit with almost every country in the world. We’re changing that around rapidly.”
Source: Campaign rally in Elkhart, Indiana
in fact: The U.S. does not have a trade deficit with “almost every country in the world.” While the U.S. has a substantial overall trade deficit — $566 billion in 2017 — it has surpluses with more than half of its trading partners, according to data from the U.S. government’s own International Trade Commission: in 2017, the U.S. had surpluses with Hong Kong, Brazil, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, Chile, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Kuwait and dozens more countries and territories. And that’s only counting trade in merchandise; when you count trade in services too, the U.S. also has a surplus with Canada. And while Trump is free to claim his actions will eventually reduce deficits, they have not done so yet: the overall 2017 deficit was the largest for any year since 2008.
Trump has repeated this claim 21 times
“We’re expanding our plants. And I put tariffs on steel and I put tariffs on aluminum and United States Steel just announced that they’re expanding their factories, and they’re building plants, and we’re going to start making steel and aluminum again.”
Source: Campaign rally in Elkhart, Indiana
in fact: While U.S. Steel has announced plans to revive and upgrade plants in the wake of Trump’s tariff decision, there have been no news reports of U.S. Steel building any new plants. We have asked U.S. Steel for information and will delete this claim from the list if the company says it is indeed building plants.
“They then went out and bought a terrible piece of land in a lousy (London) location. And they just opened a new embassy in a bad location for $1.2 billion. What a great deal. What a great deal. So, three months ago I was supposed to go over to cut the ribbon on the new embassy, but I couldn’t do it. I’m not doing it. I won’t do it. Does that make sense? I’m not going to do it.”
Source: Campaign rally in Elkhart, Indiana
in fact: After Trump began complaining about the new U.S. embassy in London, an embassy spokesperson issued a highly unusual statement correcting him. The statement pointed out that the new facility cost $1 billion, not $1.2 billion, and was “executed within the established budget.
Trump has repeated this claim 3 times
- May 15, 2018
“The Trump administration has a policy, and it’s very clear: we will protect those who protect us and who do such a great job in protecting us. That is why, as I promised all along, that we are allowing local police to access the surplus military equipment they need to protect our officers and law enforcement agents and save their lives. And they are taking equipment at a record clip.”
Source: Speech at National Peace Officers’ Memorial
in fact: Local police forces are not acquiring surplus military equipment at a record pace. The New York Times reported: “Data provided to The New York Times by the Defense Logistics Agency, which oversees the transfers, shows that so far in the 2018 fiscal year, law enforcement agencies received a monthly average of $14 million worth of military supplies. In the 2017 fiscal year — which included several months of the Obama presidency — that number was about $42 million worth of supplies per month. The monthly average was even higher in the 2016 fiscal year at $43 million, and peaked at $82 million in the 2014 fiscal year.” The month prior to Trump’s remarks, USA Today reported: “The amount of surplus military equipment sent to local police departments across the nation has sharply declined in recent months despite an executive order President Trump signed that was intended to increase those transfers, a USA TODAY analysis has found. Shipments of military gear in the first three months of 2018 fell by half compared with the same period last year, Department of Defense data show. The amount of armored vehicles, high-caliber rifles and other equipment measured by dollar value also slid.”
“Recently, MS-13 gang members called for the assassination of New York City police officers so the gang could, quote, ‘take back the streets.’ They got it wrong. We are the ones who are taking back the streets. We are getting them out of our country by the thousands.”
Source: Speech at National Peace Officers’ Memorial
in fact: “By the thousands” is an exaggeration; it is more like “by the hundreds,” or “by the dozens.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement told PolitiFact that its investigations division arrested 405 MS-13 members in the first quarter of fiscal 2018.The acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Thomas Homan, said in December that “a renewed focus on ID’ing & dismantling the ultra-violent MS-13 gang led to nearly 800 arrests in (fiscal year) 2017, for an 83 per cent increase over last year.” That figure is disputed, as some of the people arrested may not be actual members of the gang. Even if they are, though, that too is far from “thousands.”
Trump has repeated this claim 15 timea.
- May 16, 2018
“And our numbers are much better than in the past, but they’re not nearly acceptable and not nearly as good as what we could have. We’re down 40 per cent from those other standards, so that’s really good — meaning 40 per cent crossings. So that’s good. But we can do — we can do much better.”
Source: Roundtable on California’s sanctuary policies
in fact: Trump was speaking vaguely, but we agree with the Associated Press and others that he was referring, as he has repeatedly in the past, to the decline, during his presidency, in the number of people apprehended for crossing the southwest border illegally. (Trump and others use this number as a proxy for how many people are actually crossing illegally; a lower number of apprehensions, in his view, means illegal immigration is declining.) The “40 per cent” claim is now incorrect. While apprehensions plummeted by more than 40 per cent in Trump’s first year in office, they have spiked early in his second year. For example, just 15,766 people were apprehended in April 2017, Trump’s first April in office; that was way down from 48,502 in April 2016, Obama’s last April in office. But in April 2018, there was a massive increase to 50,924 people apprehended. For the first four months of 2018, apprehensions were up 4 per cent from the first four months of 2016 — and up 77 per cent from the first four months of 2017.
Trump has repeated this claim 3 times
“We’re getting it (the border wall) built, right?…They wanted it so badly — San Diego. They wanted it so badly. And I said, you know, if we build it, we will lose a big constituency, because there won’t be anybody saying, ‘We want the wall.’ But we had to build it. So I know they’re very happy about it.”
Source: Roundtable on California’s sanctuary policies
in fact: Trump was speaking to a San Diego County Republican politician who does support his wall. But there is no evidence that the city or county more broadly wanted the wall at all, let alone “so badly.” San Diego city council voted 5-3 in September to express opposition, and even the Republican mayor, Kevin Faulconer, has stated that he is opposed: “Mayor Faulconer has been clear in his opposition to a border wall across the entirety of the U.S. southern border,” a spokesperson said in September. (The board of supervisors of San Diego County has voted to endorse a lawsuit against California “sanctuary” laws protecting unauthorized immigrants, but “this county has taken no action with regard to the wall,” county spokesperson Michael Workman told local news outlet KPBS.) While there has not been recent polling on the views of the residents of San Diego in particular, Californians overall do not favour the wall; a September 2017 poll from the Public Policy Institute of California, for example, found that 73 per cent of California adults were opposed.
Trump has repeated this claim 11 times
“Thank you. And you’re doing a good job, and it’s not an easy job. I know what you’re going through right now with families is very tough. But those are the bad laws that the Democrats gave us. We have to break up families. The Democrats gave us that law. It’s a horrible thing. We have to break up families. The Democrats gave us that law and they don’t want to do anything about it. They’ll leave it like that because they don’t want to make any changes. And now you’re breaking up families because of the Democrats. It’s terrible.”
Source: Roundtable on California’s sanctuary policies
in fact: As the Associated Press noted: “Not so. No law that ‘the Democrats gave us’ mandates the separation of children from their parents at the border.”
“Now, we have started the wall. We’re spending $1.6 billion between fixing and starting. You know, Melissa, what’s been going on. We’re getting it up. We have a lot of folks in California, they don’t talk about it, but they want the wall up, and they’re very happy. That’s one of the reasons we started in California.”
Source: Roundtable on California’s sanctuary policies
in fact: Construction on Trump’s border wall has not started. Trump appeared to be referring to a project in which a 2.25-mile stretch of existing wall in California is being replaced by a taller wall. That project was proposed in 2009, and the Los Angeles Times reported that Border Patrol spokesperson Jonathan Pacheco told reporters in March: “First and foremost, this isn’t Trump’s wall. This isn’t the infrastructure that Trump is trying to bring in. … This new wall replacement has absolutely nothing to do with the prototypes that were shown over in the San Diego area.” The $1.6 billion Congress allocated to border projects in 2018 is not for the type of giant concrete wall Trump has proposed: spending on that kind of wall is expressly prohibited in the legislation, and much of the congressional allocation is for replacement and reinforcement projects rather than new construction. The Washington Post reported: “Of the total, $251 million is earmarked specifically for ‘secondary fencing’ near San Diego, where fencing is already in place; $445 million is for no more than 25 miles of ‘levee fencing’; $196 million is for ‘primary pedestrian fencing’ in the Rio Grande Valley; $445 million is for the replacement of existing fencing in that area; and the rest is for planning, design and technology — not for wall construction.”
Trump has repeated this claim 20 times
“California’s law provides safe harbor to some of the most vicious and violent offenders on Earth, like MS-13 gang members putting innocent men, women, and children at the mercy of these sadistic criminals. But we’re moving them out of this country by the thousands. MS-13, we’re grabbing them by the thousands and we’re getting them out.”
Source: Roundtable on California’s sanctuary policies
in fact: “By the thousands” is an exaggeration; it is more like “by the hundreds,” or “by the dozens.” ICE told PolitiFact that its investigations division arrested 405 MS-13 members in the first quarter of fiscal 2018.The acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Thomas Homan, said in December that “a renewed focus on ID’ing & dismantling the ultra-violent MS-13 gang led to nearly 800 arrests in (fiscal year) 2017, for an 83 per cent increase over last year.” That figure is disputed, as some of the people arrested may not be actual members of the gang. Even if they are, though, that too is far from “thousands.”
Trump has repeated this claim 15 times
“Our country has been losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year with China…We have not seen China’s demands yet, which should be few in that previous U.S. Administrations have done so poorly in negotiating. China has seen our demands.”
Source: Twitter
in fact: Trump’s top officials had indeed seen China’s trade demands, according to two prominent journalists. One of them, Jonathan Swan of Axios, wrote on Twitter: “China presented (Trump’s) team with a list of demands in their meeting two weeks ago. Mnuchin, Navarro, Kudlow and Lighthizer were all in the team. (Trump) thinks meetings aren’t real unless he’s in them.” The second, Josh Rogin of the Washington Post, wrote on Twitter: “I have the list of China’s demands and have confirmed with multiple Trump administration officials that it was received by the U.S. side. Facts are stubborn things.”
Even the FBI Thinks Police Have Links to White Supremacists — but Don’t Tell the New York Times
November 5, 2018
by Natasha Lennard
The Intercept
Over the weekend, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy and in-depth piece on how U.S. law enforcement has willfully ignored the threat of white supremacist extremism for decades. The author, Janet Reitman, takes an ostensibly deep dive into how law enforcement — particularly federal agencies — has neglected the growth of the violent far right, in part owing to Republican political agenda setting. For a story framed around a “blind spot,” though, the piece itself is hobbled by an egregious case of sightlessness.
The Times tells a story about law enforcement failing and struggling to deal with white supremacy. The elephant in the room, unmentioned by Reitman or any of the sources she chose to cite, is that U.S. law enforcement doesn’t do enough about violent racists because as an institution, U.S. law enforcement is violently racist and contains explicit white supremacists in its ranks.
It is not that the Times story doesn’t contain some bits of information that point to this obvious conclusion. Reitman goes as far as to call law enforcement’s indifference to white supremacist extremism “willful”; an entire section of the piece reports on how police regularly permit neo-Nazi violence at rallies, while instead targeting left-wing, anti-racist protesters. She notes how police have been seen posing for photos with the so-called alt-right, and briefly highlights an incident, first reported by Arun Gupta for The Intercept, in which a right-wing militia member aided officers from the Department of Homeland Security in arresting an anti-fascist protester.
Rather, the problem is that the larger framing of the piece ignores the deep and historic links between policing and racism. Throughout the Times Magazine article, a sharp line is drawn between police officers and the white supremacists they interact with — it’s a profound category mistake.
The opening paragraph of Reitman’s piece contains this anecdote about last year’s far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia: “A black man held an aerosol can, igniting the spray, and in retaliation, a white man picked up his gun, pointed it toward the black man and fired it at the ground. The Virginia state troopers, inexplicably, stood by and watched.” The main character of the piece, a Florida police officer, is then said to have “fixated on this image, wondering what kind of organizational failure had led to the debacle.” The fact that Reitman opens with a story that frames a black counterprotester as the instigator of violence is questionable enough. The broader problem with the article is that the Virginia state troopers’ inaction was far from inexplicable, and the organizational failures do not merit a sense of bewilderment.
It has been well-reported that not only is racism endemic to American police culture, but that, in the exact decades Reitman looks at, white supremacist groups infiltrated law enforcement agencies around the country. Somehow, in Reitman’s interrogation of the FBI dealing with far-right extremism, she fails to mention that the agency itself was internally investigating white supremacist infiltration in law enforcement.
“Although these right-wing extremists have posed a growing threat for years,” The Intercept’s Alice Speri reported last year, “federal investigators have been reluctant to publicly address that threat or to point out the movement’s longstanding strategy of infiltrating the law enforcement community.” Speri’s story was based, in part, on a classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide from 2015, which noted that “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.” (I reached out to Reitman to see if she was aware of The Intercept story, and if so, why she declined to include the information. This story will be updated if I hear back.)
Speri’s report cited numerous examples from the past decade of white supremacist police activity, including the case of a local sheriff’s department in Los Angeles that was found to have formed a neo-Nazi gang in 1991; a Chicago detective and rumored Ku Klux Klan member who was found to have tortured 120 black men while on duty (before eventually being fired and prosecuted); and cops in Cleveland who scrawled neo-Nazi graffiti in their locker rooms.
The Times piece has a passage on a joint 2009 assessment by DHS and the FBI, which warned of the growing white supremacist threat. The assessment caused outrage among adherents of the growing right-wing political movement known as the tea party, as well as conservatives in general; among other complaints, they took umbrage at the report’s claim that veterans were at high risk of right-wing radicalization. Then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano bowed to the pressure, disavowed the document, and apologized to veterans. But as the report’s lead researcher, Daryl Johnson, told Speri last year, “Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives] — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups.”
The Times piece has a passage on a joint 2009 assessment by DHS and the FBI, which warned of the growing white supremacist threat. The assessment caused outrage among adherents of the growing right-wing political movement known as the tea party, as well as conservatives in general; among other complaints, they took umbrage at the report’s claim that veterans were at high risk of right-wing radicalization. Then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano bowed to the pressure, disavowed the document, and apologized to veterans. But as the report’s lead researcher, Daryl Johnson, told Speri last year, “Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives] — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups.”
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
November 6, 2018
by Dr. Peter Janney
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.
Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.
After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.
The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.
When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..
A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.
The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.
Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.
Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.
Conversation No. 21
Date: Tuesday, July 2,, 1996
Commenced: 2:34 PM CST
Concluded: 2:50 PM CST
RTC: Good afternoon, Gregory. How is it with you?
GD: Well enough. And with you?
RTC: Getting feeble, Gregory, and I forget names as you know but other than that, fine. GD: How is your death ray working against the Swiss?
RTC: Well, there haven’t been any ambulances out there so I assume it doesn’t kill them. And no one running naked down the street, screaming, either.
GD: Pity. Or perhaps not. Most humans look much better with clothes. Maybe about sixteen they peak and from then, it’s down hill all the way. Gravity takes over in women and the tits and the food bags sag a bit.
RTC: Unkind. Gregory, what do you know about bubonic plague?
GD: A bit. I worked in pathology once and read several papers on it. Why? Do you think you have it?
RTC: No, I was talking with an old friend I used to work with occasionally yesterday and the subject came up. I don’t like to appear ignorant so I listened appreciatively while we had coffee and cakes. What do you know about it?
GD: Now it’s called Yersi nia pestis. Changed the name a few years back, I think. Caused by the bite of infected fleas which, in turn infect people. Get it from squirrels, rabbits and often from cats. Dogs too, for that matter. Is that what you wanted to know?
RTC: Is it easy to spread?
GD: Depends.
RTC: If they put it into an aerosol?
GD: Pneumonic plague. Yes, I’m sure it could be done.
RTC: Oh, it has, it has. Up at Detrick.[1] Uses aerosol. So I’m told. What’s the fatality rate, if you know.
GD: As I recall over 50%. It takes about a week to develop. If the weather conditions are just right, pneumonic plague can be very deadly. That spreads in the air. I mean, if someone infected with it got on a commercial aircraft, they circulate the air in those germ hostels and as I said, if an infected person was on a flight, I think everyone on that flight would be at serious risk. And, naturally, they would spread it in public transportation, at home or at work. Nasty stuff. What are they up to at Detrick?
RTC: Ah well, these people are always making up batches of death just like the Army is always drawing up plans to invade Canada. Their idea is to have it ready just in case.
GD: Yes. I have found that if some new and deadly weapon is developed, the general staffs of various countries having it just can’t wait to use it Müller said the German Army used plague in their Russian POW camps to thin them out but that he effectively blocked it by telling Hitler that there are no customs posts around to stop the disease from spreading to the rest of the country. They felt the camps were far enough east to keep that under control but Hitler put a stop to it.
RTC: Interesting.
GD: Dr. Schreiber was their man. And yours, too. We got him in ’48 and he went to San Antonio.
RTC: Well nothing happened
GD: That was then. I doubt if Clinton would approve that sort of thing but who know about someone else?
RTC: If they did do that, they would have to send the clean-up squad around to off the ones who were in the know.
GD: Something like that would work in an overcrowded and poor country. Here, yes, it would kill a lot but there are medical means to stop it pretty well if they can get a handle on it.
RTC: Well, it isn’t on the agenda for domestic use.
GD: Any place in mind? I mean, I do travel and you know if there was some target area……
RTC: Russia has been mentioned but mostly China. It is coming up but basically poor and heavy population density. And there has been talk about letting a rice plague loose down there. All of them gobble up rice…they live on it…and if we killed of the crops there for, oh let’s say about two-three years running, they would starve.
GD: True and their resistance would be greatly lowered. A one-two punch, Robert? First the rice crops are ruined and then the plague? I’m sure there are plenty of rats in China and plenty of unsanitary living conditions.
RTC: Well, right now, we do a lot of business with them so the word is out they are off the table but if they ever turn out to be a threat to us…you know what I mean of course.
GD: Flaming pragmatism, Robert.
RTC: Let’s call it defending the nation.
GD: Well, the civilized British put out smallpox infected blankets and killed off many Indians. I notice the even more civilized French preferred to work with the Indians rather that slaughter them. Still, that is over and done with, isn’t it?
RTC: Don’t be too sure, Gregory.
GD: Yes, but they could do it to us first, couldn’t they. I know the Chinese and they are a cold-blooded lot.
RTC: Mutual destruction thesis? Yes, of course. But then this is just talk.
GD: They must be working on it…
RTC: No, lad, they have it. It isn’t making it and putting in the bug cans but deciding to use it I was thinking of.
GD: I really wouldn’t want to live in DC at all. Reasons like this.
RTC: I’m too old and too set to move and I suppose I will die soon enough.
GD: We grow rice here in California and Louisiana but rice isn’t a real staple. I think that’s a Pandora’s Box. Leave it closed.
RTC: Nothing I would recommend but just wondered what you knew.
GD: Well, if your chum tips you that they are about to do something like that, please let me know. I could send my mother-in-law to ground zero. No, actually, the old pig exploded some time ago. God, the bitch was fat. My wife told me that her mother was dead and do you know what I said?
RTC: Something meaningful and sympathetic?
GD: No, not actually. I said ‘How can they tell?’ No sex for a week, Robert. Too bad we didn’t have a cat or I wouldn’t have had to make up with her.
RTC: (Laughter) Did you say that?
GD: Yes, and I meant it. It was hard for Tubs to get into a shower so she just doused herself with cheap perfume. My God, it stank like a Mexican whorehouse. Did you know, Robert, that someone once asked me if I played the piano and I told them that I did and that I had learned to play in my aunt’s whorehouse in Juarez.
RTC: Your aunt….
GD: Do not let us speak of my aunt. I have said before, Robert, that one of the dreams of my life was to watch her do the breaststroke in a septic tank.
(Concluded at 2:50 PM CST)
[1] Fort Detrick a 1,200 acre secure U.S. Army Medical Command installation located in Frederick, Maryland, Historically, Fort Detrick was the center for the United States’ biological weapons program (1943-69).
And while officially no longer engaged in preparations for biological warfare against external enemies, is is still involved in research on such diseases as smallpox and various forms of other entities. Oft-heard ruimors circulating in intelligence circles, both in the U.S. and abroad, suggest that the anthrax attacks following the 9/11 attacks had a connection with a strain developed at Detrick.
Even the FBI Thinks Police Have Links to White Supremacists — but Don’t Tell the New York Times
November 5, 2018
by Natasha Lennard
The Intercept
Over the weekend, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy and in-depth piece on how U.S. law enforcement has willfully ignored the threat of white supremacist extremism for decades. The author, Janet Reitman, takes an ostensibly deep dive into how law enforcement — particularly federal agencies — has neglected the growth of the violent far right, in part owing to Republican political agenda setting. For a story framed around a “blind spot,” though, the piece itself is hobbled by an egregious case of sightlessness.
The Times tells a story about law enforcement failing and struggling to deal with white supremacy. The elephant in the room, unmentioned by Reitman or any of the sources she chose to cite, is that U.S. law enforcement doesn’t do enough about violent racists because as an institution, U.S. law enforcement is violently racist and contains explicit white supremacists in its ranks.
It is not that the Times story doesn’t contain some bits of information that point to this obvious conclusion. Reitman goes as far as to call law enforcement’s indifference to white supremacist extremism “willful”; an entire section of the piece reports on how police regularly permit neo-Nazi violence at rallies, while instead targeting left-wing, anti-racist protesters. She notes how police have been seen posing for photos with the so-called alt-right, and briefly highlights an incident, first reported by Arun Gupta for The Intercept, in which a right-wing militia member aided officers from the Department of Homeland Security in arresting an anti-fascist protester.
Rather, the problem is that the larger framing of the piece ignores the deep and historic links between policing and racism. Throughout the Times Magazine article, a sharp line is drawn between police officers and the white supremacists they interact with — it’s a profound category mistake.
The opening paragraph of Reitman’s piece contains this anecdote about last year’s far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia: “A black man held an aerosol can, igniting the spray, and in retaliation, a white man picked up his gun, pointed it toward the black man and fired it at the ground. The Virginia state troopers, inexplicably, stood by and watched.” The main character of the piece, a Florida police officer, is then said to have “fixated on this image, wondering what kind of organizational failure had led to the debacle.” The fact that Reitman opens with a story that frames a black counterprotester as the instigator of violence is questionable enough. The broader problem with the article is that the Virginia state troopers’ inaction was far from inexplicable, and the organizational failures do not merit a sense of bewilderment.
It has been well-reported that not only is racism endemic to American police culture, but that, in the exact decades Reitman looks at, white supremacist groups infiltrated law enforcement agencies around the country. Somehow, in Reitman’s interrogation of the FBI dealing with far-right extremism, she fails to mention that the agency itself was internally investigating white supremacist infiltration in law enforcement.
“Although these right-wing extremists have posed a growing threat for years,” The Intercept’s Alice Speri reported last year, “federal investigators have been reluctant to publicly address that threat or to point out the movement’s longstanding strategy of infiltrating the law enforcement community.” Speri’s story was based, in part, on a classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide from 2015, which noted that “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.” (I reached out to Reitman to see if she was aware of The Intercept story, and if so, why she declined to include the information. This story will be updated if I hear back.)
Speri’s report cited numerous examples from the past decade of white supremacist police activity, including the case of a local sheriff’s department in Los Angeles that was found to have formed a neo-Nazi gang in 1991; a Chicago detective and rumored Ku Klux Klan member who was found to have tortured 120 black men while on duty (before eventually being fired and prosecuted); and cops in Cleveland who scrawled neo-Nazi graffiti in their locker rooms.
The Times piece has a passage on a joint 2009 assessment by DHS and the FBI, which warned of the growing white supremacist threat. The assessment caused outrage among adherents of the growing right-wing political movement known as the tea party, as well as conservatives in general; among other complaints, they took umbrage at the report’s claim that veterans were at high risk of right-wing radicalization. Then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano bowed to the pressure, disavowed the document, and apologized to veterans. But as the report’s lead researcher, Daryl Johnson, told Speri last year, “Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives] — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups.”
The Times piece has a passage on a joint 2009 assessment by DHS and the FBI, which warned of the growing white supremacist threat. The assessment caused outrage among adherents of the growing right-wing political movement known as the tea party, as well as conservatives in general; among other complaints, they took umbrage at the report’s claim that veterans were at high risk of right-wing radicalization. Then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano bowed to the pressure, disavowed the document, and apologized to veterans. But as the report’s lead researcher, Daryl Johnson, told Speri last year, “Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives] — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups.”
The Coming Attack on Iran: Israel’s Plans for a US Action
November 6, 2018
by Christian Jürs
1.The problem under consideration here is that Iran has, or will have, a nuclear weapon within a two year time span. If Iran gets a nuclear bomb, Israelis are afraid Iran will use it on them.
2.Israel would have logistical problems attacking Iran. Any attack would have to be an aerial attack, using fighter-bombers to pin-point known Iranian nuclear facilities.
The current opinion in some circles, mostly in the United States, is that at some point in the near future, the growing threat or re-imposition of devastating economic sanctions on Iran will convince its radical religious leaders to terminate their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Also, there is the growing hope that the CIA’s funded Iran’s Green Movement will overthrow, a la the Ukrainian Orange Revolution and replace the Muslim fundamentalist regime, or at the very least find the means to modify and secularize the regime’s ideological extremism. It is also possible that disrupting operations now being implemented by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers—programs designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through physical sabotage and, upon occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientists—will have derailed Iran’s progress towards achieving the capacity to produce nuclear weapons.
It is now planned in Tel Aviv that senior Israeli officials, representing both their political and military establishments, will come to Washington for conferences both with their American counterparts and, eventually, with President Trmup. These conversations, which have been carefully planned and scripted, will have the Israelis advising their American counterparts that they are planning an attack, nuclear or non-nuclear as the situation develops, on Iran because a nuclear Iran poses the ‘gravest threat since Hitler’ to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe that by launching a preemptive strike at all possible Iranian sites suspected of participation in their nuclear program they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years,. Further, talking-point secret Israeli memos state: Israel will inform their American counterparts that Israel has no other choice than to launch this attack. They will not ask for permission for this attack, because it will soon be too late to ask for permission.
Insofar as President Trump is concerned, the Israelis are considering the most important point of these interviews would be to discover as to what would be the circumstances under which President Trump would move to halt the Iranian projects. The primary point, then, is to convince the Americans that only military force, i.e., heavy bombing raids, would be able to “totally obliterate Iran’s attempts to get a nuclear weapon and, further, to prevent them from rebuilding their infrastructure in the foreseeable future.” From the Israeli point of view, all of their future actions, which also include the use of their own nuclear weapons on Tehran depends entirely upon the answers, primarily of the President but also of the American military leadership..
Also, in the possible event that the American President were to agree fully with Israeli wishes, i.e., to use American aircraft to obliterate the perceived Iranian threat by bombing specific, and even general, Iranian targets, could an Israeli-sponsored domestic American propaganda campaign to encourage sections of the American public, outside of the fully-cooperative Jewish community, to support such an American attack.
At the present time, it is well-established that Israeli agents, Mossad and others, have inserted themselves into all the instruments of power and propaganda in the United States where they have sent any pertinent information to Israel and kept up a steady offensive against the minds, and wills, of the American people. Also, many of the more prominent American newspapers, such as the New York Times is entirely Jewish-owned, this is stated to be the most receptive to the needs of both Washington and Tel Aviv.
Israel is fully prepared to take a chance on permanently alienating American affection in order to make a high-risk attempt at stopping Iran. If Iran retaliates against American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, the consequences for Israel’s relationship with America’s military leadership could be catastrophic.
It has been seriously discussed in Tel Aviv and in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, that probably the best way to compel the American public and through them, the President, to unilateral action, would not be to launch an attack on Tehran but instead, attack America through a false-flag operation. This would consist of a believable attack, or attempted attack, on a major American target a la the 9/11 Saudi-supported attacks.
The most current plan would be for a known militant Arab anti-Israel group, Hezbollah, to actually deliver an atomic device to the city of New York, or, alternatively, to Washington.
The American Central Intelligence Agency, now seeking to reshape its negative image, would report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation the exact details of the arrival and placement of the bomb.
The actual bomb would be genuine but would have a part that was malfunctioning, thus rendering the weapon impossible to detonate. The Arabs involved in this delivery would have in their number, a Yemeni Jew, such as the ones that instigated the 9/11 Saudi attacks, and this sleeper would carry numerous forged documents “proving” that Tehran was directly behind this planned attack.
Revelation of these documents by the fully-supportive New York Times and Washington Post would immediately swing a significant bulk of the American public behind an immediate attack on Tehran with the purpose of neutralizing its atomic weapons capacity.
This program is now on the table and undercover Israeli agents, posing as top-level Iranian operatives, have located a small group of Hizbollah in Lebanon who would be willing to deliver and prepare this device in New York or, as an alternative, Washington itself. Israeli intelligence feels that the use of Hizbollah personnel would entirely justify their obliterating Hizbollah-controlled territory in southern Lebanon that now house many thousands of long-range surface to surface missiles that could easily reach Tel Aviv and other vital Israeli targets.
This action, which has already been planned in detail, would be conducted by Israel alone and would compliment the projected American attack on Tehran. Israel stresses the fact that both attacks must be simultaneous lest a forewarned Hezbollah launch rocket attacks on Israel upon hearing of the American attack. Timing here is considered to be absolutely vital.
Both Israel and Hezbollah have accused UNIFIL of bias. Israel again accused them of failing to prevent, and even collaborating with, Hezbollah in its replenishment of military power. Hezbollah, in turn, said “certain contingents” of UNIFIL are spying for, if not assisting, Israel.
Israel has long been a serious planning for a future invasion of Lebanon and such an assault would continue attacking until both Hezbollah’s membership and their system of tunnels and bunkers was completely destroyed, because Israel will never tolerate a “zone of invulnerability” occupied by a sworn enemy, or a double threat posed by Hezbollah’s rockets.
In the event that Israeli military aircraft attack Tehran, there is the vital necessity that these Israeli military aircraft would be under great pressure to return to base at once because Israeli intelligence believes that Iran would immediately order Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israeli cities, and Israeli air-force resources would be needed to hunt Hezbollah rocket teams.
Israel’s Northern Command, at its headquarters near the Lebanese border, is ordered that in the event of a unilateral Israeli or American strike on Iran, their mission would be to attack and completely destroy any and all identified Hezbollah rocket forces, by any and all means necessary, to include small nuclear devices that could destroy a number of square miles of what is called ‘terrorist territory’ and render it useless as any future base of attack against Israel. At the present time the Iranians are keeping their Hezbollah firm ally in reserve until Iran can cross the nuclear threshold.
During the years since the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon Hezbollah has greatly increased its surface-to-surface missile capability, and an American/Israeli strike on Iran, would immediately provoke all-out retaliation by Iran’s Lebanese subsidiary, Hezbollah, which now possesses, by most Israeli/American intelligence estimates, as many as 45,000 surface-to-surface rockets—at least three times as many as it had in the summer of 2006, during the last round of fighting between the group and Israel. It is further known that Russia has sent large numbers of longer range surface-to-surface missiles to Syria which has, in turn, shipped them to Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon. These missiles have the capacity to easily reach Tel Aviv and Israelis are very concerned that a massive rocket barrage deep into Israel could not only do serious damage to their infrastructure but could easily provoke a mass immigration of Israelis to other areas, thus depriving Israel of both civilian and military personnel it would certainly need in the event of increased Arab military actions against Israel.
Even if Israel’s Northern Command successfully combated Hezbollah rocket attacks in the wake of an Israeli strike, which American experts have deemed to be “nearly impossible” political limitations would not allow Israel to make repeated sorties over Iran. “America, too, would look complicit in an Israeli attack, even if it had not been forewarned. The assumption—that Israel acts only with the full approval of the United States is a feature of life in the Middle East, and it is one the Israelis are taking into account. A serious danger here to Israeli attack plans would be if the United States got wind of the imminence of such an attack and demanded that Israel cease and desist in its actions. Would Israel then stop? Though highly unlikely, this is an unpleasant and unacceptable
At this time, the Israelis have drawn up specific plans to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and the Bushehr reactor, along with four other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program that have been identified by joint past and present Israeli-American aerial surveillance.
If Israeli aircraft succeed in destroying Iran’s centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, all well and good but even if they fail to damage or destroy these targets ,such an attack is feared by American and other nations as risking a devastating change in the Middle East. Such an attack could initiate immediate reprisals such as a massed rocket attack by Hezbollah from southern Lebanon as well as other actions from neighboring Muslim states.
This could become a major diplomatic crisis for President Trump that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally; of inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran; of causing the international price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973; of seriously endangering Jewish groups around the world, and especially in the United States by making them the targets of Muslim-originated terror attacks and most certainly accelerating the growing immigration of many Israelis to what they felt might be much safer areas.
An Israeli political and military consensus has now emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by December of 2010. (Of course, it is in the Israeli interest to let it be known that the country is considering military action, if for no other reason than to concentrate the attention of the Trump administration. The Netanyahu government is already intensifying its analytic efforts not just on Iran, but on a subject many Israelis have difficulty understanding: President Trump.
The Israelis argue that Iran demands the urgent attention of the entire international community, and in particular the United States, with its unparalleled ability to project military force. This is the position of many moderate Arab leaders as well that if America allowed Iran to cross the nuclear threshold, the small Arab countries of the Gulf would have no choice but to leave the American orbit and ally themselves with Iran, out of self-protection. Several Arab leaders have suggested that America’s standing in the Middle East depends on its willingness to confront Iran. They argue, self-interestedly, that an aerial attack on a handful of Iranian facilities would not be as complicated or as messy as, say, invading Iraq. The basic question then is why the Jewish state should trust the non-Jewish president of the United States to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold.
For more than a year, these White House officials have parried the charge that their president is unwilling to face the potential consequences of a nuclear Iran, and they are frustrated by what they believe to be a caricature of his position. It is undeniably true, however, that the administration has appeared on occasion less than stalwart on the issue.
One question no administration official seems eager to answer is this: what will the United States do if sanctions fail?
In Israel, of course, officials expend enormous amounts of energy to understand President Trump, despite the assurances they have received from others. Delegations from Netanyahu’s bureau, from the defense and foreign ministries, and from the Israeli intelligence community have been arriving in Washington lately with great regularity. As an alternative to cooperation by Trump, Israel, through her supporters and lobbyists in the United States are preparing to offer extensive financial and other incentives to political opponents of Trump, mostly the right-wing Republicans and American Christian groups and cults. Both of these groups are being cultivated currently with the idea that if Trump will not cooperate, the Republicans will in the future as they always have before. Also to consider is the current antipathy of American Jews for Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and these American Jews, who are, like the president they voted for in overwhelming numbers, generally supportive of a two-state solution, and dubious about Jewish settlement of the West Bank.
Both Israeli and American intelligence agencies are of the firm belief that Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability, which is the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device.. The Iranian regime, by its own statements and actions, has made itself Israel’s most zealous foe; and the most crucial component of Israeli national-security doctrine, a tenet that dates back to the 1960s, when Israel developed its own nuclear capability as a response to the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, is that no regional adversary should be allowed to achieve nuclear parity with the reborn and still-besieged Jewish state, the Iranian desire for nuclear weapons and the regime’s theologically motivated desire to see the Jewish state purged from the Middle East
Patriotism in Israel runs very high, according to numerous polls, and it seemed unlikely that mere fear of Iran could drive Israel’s Jews to seek shelter elsewhere. But one leading proponent of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, If Iran crossed the nuclear threshold, the very idea of Israel as a Zionist entity would be endangered. “These people are good citizens, and brave citizens, but the dynamics of life are such that if someone has a scholarship for two years at an American university and the university offers him a third year, the parents will say, ‘Go ahead, remain there,’ If someone finishes a Ph.D. and they are offered a job in America, they might stay there. It will not be that people are running to the airport, but slowly, slowly, the decision-making on the family level will be in favor of staying abroad. The bottom line is that we would have an accelerated brain drain. And an Israel that is not based on entrepreneurship that is not based on excellence will not be the Israel of today.”
Most critically if a Zionist Israel is no longer seen by its 6 million Jewish inhabitants and also by the approximately 7 millions of Jews resident outside of Israel that because of continuing threats from outside the country as no longer a natural safe haven for Jews then the entire concept of a Zionist haven/state is destroyed
To understand why Israelis of different political dispositions see Iran as quite possibly the most crucial challenge they have faced in their 62-year history, one must keep in mind the near-sanctity, in the public’s mind, of Israel’s nuclear monopoly. The Israeli national narrative, in shorthand, begins with shoah, which is Hebrew for “calamity,” and ends with tkumah, “rebirth.” Israel’s nuclear arsenal symbolizes national rebirth, and something else as well: that Jews emerged from World War II having learned at least one lesson, about the price of powerlessness.
If Israel is unable to change Trump’s mind, they will continue to threaten to take unilateral action against Iran by sending approximately one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—by crossing Saudi Arabia, and along the border between Syria and Turkey, and, without consulting the Americans or in any way announcing their missions by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It’s so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)
The first belief by Israeli military planners is that Israel would get only one try. Israeli planes would fly low over Saudi Arabia, bomb their targets in Iran, and return to Israel by flying again over Saudi territory, possibly even landing in the Saudi desert for refueling—perhaps, if speculation rife in intelligence circles is to be believed, with secret Saudi cooperation.
Israel has been working through the United States to procure Saudi cooperation with an Israeli air strike against Tehran and other targets inside Iran.. The Saudis are treating this subject with great caution lest other Arab states learn of their putative cooperation in an Iranian attack with over flights of Saudi territory by Israeli military aircraft.
The current American/Israeli military plans are for the Saudis to turn off their radar after they have been noticed by the American embassy that an Israeli attack is imminent and also to permit the Israeli aircraft to land in their country for refueling The Israelis are not concerned with any kind of Iranian aircraft resistance because their airfields have been pinpointed by American satellites and one of the attacking groups would use low-yield atomic rocketry on all the identified Iranian bases. It is obvious that when, not if, the Saudis part in this becomes public, it will create immense ill-will in neighboring Muslim states, an impression the Saudi government is most anxious not to deal with.
Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.
The reasoning offered by Israeli decision makers was uncomplicated: At the present moment, Israel possesses 135 nuclear weapons, most of them mainly two-stage thermonuclear devices, capable of being delivered by missile, fighter-bomber, or submarine (two of which are currently positioned in the Persian Gulf). Netanyahu is worried about an entire complex of problems, not only that Iran, or one of its proxies, would, in all probability, destroy or severely damage Tel Aviv; like most Israeli leaders, he believes that if Iran gains possession of a nuclear weapon, it will use its new leverage to buttress its terrorist proxies in their attempts to make life difficult and dangerous; and that Israel’s status as a haven for Jews would be forever undermined, and with it, the entire raison d’être of the 100-year-old Zionist experiment.
Another question Israeli planners struggle with: how will they know if their attacks have actually destroyed a significant number of centrifuges and other hard-to-replace parts of the clandestine Iranian program? Two strategists told me that Israel will have to dispatch commandos to finish the job, if necessary, and bring back proof of the destruction. The commandos—who, according to intelligence sources, may be launched from the autonomous Kurdish territory in northern Iraq—would be facing a treacherous challenge, but one military planner I spoke with said the army would have no choice but to send them.
Netanyahu’s obvious course is to convince the United States that Iran is not Israel’s problem alone; it is the world’s problem, and the world, led by the United States, is obligated to grapple with it, not Israel alone. It is well-known that Israel by itself could not hope to deal with a retaliation against it by Iran and other Arab states but that a confederation of other nations, led, of course, by the United States could defend Israel against her enemies. The Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, does not place and credence in the current sanctions against Iran, even the ones initiated by the United States at Israel’s urgent request. Is it known that Netanayahu is not happy with President Trumps’s reluctance to support an Israeli attack on Iran and has brought a great deal of political pressure to bear on the President by American Jewish political and business groups.
Netanyahu understands, however, that President Trump, with whom he has had a difficult and intermittently frigid relationship, believes that stringent sanctions, combined with various enticements to engage with the West, might still provide Iran with a face-saving method of standing down.
Israel’s current period of forbearance, in which Israel’s leadership waits to see if the West’s nonmilitary methods can stop Iran, will come to an end this December. The American defense secretary, said at a meeting of NATO defense ministers that most intelligence estimates predict that Iran is one to three years away from building a nuclear weapon. “
One of the consistent aims of Israel is to pressure President Trump, who has said on a number of occasions that he finds the prospect of a nuclear Iran “unacceptable,” into executing a military strike against Iran’s known main weapons and uranium-enrichment facilities.
Donald Trump is steadfastly opposed to initiating new wars in the Middle East and an attack by U.S. forces on Iran is not a foreign-policy goal for him or his administration. The Israeli goal is to compel him by public, and private, pressure to order the American military into action against Iran
President Trump has said any number of times that he would find a nuclear Iran “unacceptable.” His most stalwart comments on the subject have been discounted by some Israeli officials
If the Israelis reach the firm conclusion that Trump will not, under any circumstances, launch a strike on Iran, then the countdown will begin for a unilateral Israeli attack.
Should this happen, the Shiite militia, Hezbollah, heavily armed with rockets from Russia, would launch a massive attack on Israel that its defenses would be unable to deflect. Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ defense system has a number of holes in it that are known to Russian experts in the field and if Russia knows the flaws, so also does Hezbollah.