TBR News October 18, 2018

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8
Washington, D.C. October 18, 2018: “It is becoming very obvious that President Trump has no intentions of expressing negative comments about the brutal Mohammed bin Salmim, Saudi Crown Prince for his savage assaults on the civilian population of Yemin nor the murder of Khashoggi. The reasons for this silence are based entirely on the fact that the Saudi banks have loaned large sums of money to Trump. Trump is notorious for non payment of his debts (he owes the German banks over 3 million dollars which he has no intention of repaying) so in the end, no doubt both sides will have ripped each other off.
Like cleaves unto like, after all. On the one hand, we have a thoroughly corrupt president who never tells the truth when a lie will suffice while on the other, the Saudis are stuck with a modern Caligula as a leader.
America is fortunate to have mid term elections, which the Saudis do not but on the other hand, the Saudis have oil which the US does not.”

The Table of Contents
• Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 54
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• As Trump cozies up to Saudi Arabia, the rule of law collapses further
• Jobs Are No Excuse for Arming a Murderous Regime
• Mohammed bin Salman never was a reformer. This has proved it
• Suspected member of Khashoggi ‘hit-team’ dies in mysterious ‘traffic accident’ in Saudi Arabia
• Jamal Khashoggi case: Liam Fox pulls out of Saudi summit

Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 54
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
• Feb 13, 2018

“Because of what we’ve done, our energy prices are going so low, our electric costs are going so low, that other countries aren’t going to be able to compete with us. We’re really doing a great job of bringing them down. And a lot of that had to do with the tax cuts, but it has to do with lots of other things, too.”
Source: Remarks at meeting on trade with members of Cabinet and other officials
in fact: U.S. energy costs are rising. The U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration announced in September: “First half of 2017 average electricity prices are higher than last year in most areas of the country, with only six states experiencing lower prices.” The day after Trump spoke, the government issued Consumer Price Index data that showed a 3 per cent increase in energy prices in January and a 5.5 per cent increase over the past year.
Trump has repeated this claim 2 times

“I do want to tell you, we just got this notice. ‘General Motors in Korea announces the first step in necessary restructuring.’ They’re going to — GM Korea company announced today that it will cease production and close its Gunsan plant in May of 2018, and they’re going to move back to Detroit. You don’t hear these things, except for the fact that Trump became president. Believe me, you wouldn’t be hearing that. So they’re moving back from Korea to Detroit. They’re moving…Already General Motors is coming back into Detroit. That is a really significant statement. Many others to follow from many other countries.”
Source: Remarks at meeting on trade with members of Cabinet and other officials
in fact: GM did announce it was shutting down its Gunsan plant. However, Trump simply lied in claiming the company had also announced it was moving “back to Detroit.” The announcement press release said nothing of the sort, and a company spokesperson, Patrick Morrissey, confirmed to the Star that there were no current plans to move any jobs or production from Gunsan to Detroit.

“The Korean Agreement — as you know, Mike, and most of the people at this table — that was done by the last administration. It was supposed to produce 150,000 to 200,000 jobs. And it did — for Korea.”
Source: Remarks at meeting on trade with members of Cabinet and other officials
in fact: Nobody — or nobody important, at least — claimed that the trade deal with South Korea would create 200,000 jobs; Obama said that deal would “support at least 70,000 American jobs.” (It is also a bit of a stretch to say the deal was “done by the last administration.” George W. Bush’s administration initially negotiated the deal, announcing in 2007 that a pact had been reached; it was then amended by the Obama administration and signed again in 2010.)
Trump has repeated this claim 7 times

“We have a trade deficit with China — that I inherited, by the way — but we have a trade deficit of $504 billion, OK?”
Source: Remarks at meeting on trade with members of Cabinet and other officials
in fact: Trump was off by $129 billion even if you only count trade in goods, let alone the services trade where the U.S. excels. Specifically: the U.S. trade deficit with China in goods alone was $375 billion in 2017, not $504 billion. When services trade with China is included, the overall deficit is usually reduced by tens of billions. The 2017 data on services was not yet available at the time of this check, but in 2016, the U.S. had a services surplus with China of $38 billion.
Trump has repeated this claim 51 times

“And yet they sell thousands and thousands of motorcycles, which a lot of people don’t know, from India into the United States.”
Source: Remarks at meeting on trade with members of Cabinet and other officials
in fact: As the Washington Post notes, “thousands and thousands” is an exaggeration. Indian automotive website Cartoq reported: “India exports very few motorcycles to the U.S., which is predominantly a market that prefers high-end, high-performance motorcycles, not the commuter bikes that India generally exports around the world. The only notable Indian brand selling motorcycles in the U.S. is Royal Enfield, which exports less than 1,000 bikes every year to that country.” India’s Car and Bike website, run by NDTV, reported: “Among the Indian manufacturers, Royal Enfield has some presence in the U.S., but the brand is still trying to find its feet in the American market and only account for a few hundred unit sales. When contacted, Royal Enfield refused to comment on the issue.” In a September story on Royal Enfield’s U.S. operation, Milwaukee’s Journal-Sentinel reported, “Its North American sales are still minuscule.”

“We made solar panels, but every one of our companies was wiped out. And I have to say this, and this is agreed to by — we made a much higher quality, a much better solar panel. We make them better, but we couldn’t compete. Now — and we’ve had a lot of good — a lot of places are opening up. They’re starting to make solar panels again.”
Source: Remarks at meeting on trade with members of Cabinet and other officials
in fact: There was no evidence that “a lot of places are opening up” to make solar panels as a result of Trump’s new tariff, announced just three weeks prior. While at least three companies were planning to establish or expand U.S. operations in 2018, all three of them announced these moves before Trump made his tariff decision. For example, just after Trump announced the tariff, the city of Jacksonville approved a package of about $25 million in incentives for Chinese manufacturer JinkoSolar to open a plant there, leading to Trump-crediting headlines like CNN’s “After Trump tariffs, Chinese solar company says it will build U.S. factory.” But the timing was coincidence: the company had been pursuing the Jacksonville project well before the tariff announcement; local media reported on the company’s incentive request two weeks prior to Trump’s announcement. Similarly, in an article titled “Trump’s Tariffs Are Driving a US Solar Panel Resurgence,” the pro-Trump website LifeZette credited him for a planned expansion by Solaria — but the company announced that expansion a week and a half prior to Trump’s decision.
Trump has repeated this claim 7 times

“That’s a different product, that’s a much simpler — you know, we did it with the washing machines, as you saw a couple of weeks ago. It’s had a huge impact on that industry. A huge impact. And, by the way, you know what’s happening? The people that made the washing machines outside of this country are now expanding their factories in the United States so they don’t have to pay the 25 and 30 per cent tax.”
Source: Remarks at meeting on trade with members of Cabinet and other officials
in fact: Trump’s new tariff on washing machines is 20 per cent on the first 1.2 million imports, then 50 per cent after that; there is no tariff of 25 per cent or 30 per cent. Whirlpool Corp. has announced it is adding 200 jobs at an Ohio factory in part because of the tariff, so this Trump claim about factory expansions isn’t entirely invented, but there is no evidence of a widespread industry expansion. Ten days before Trump announced the tariff, Whirlpool’s South Korean competitor Samsung opened a plant building washing machines in South Carolina in January, and fellow South Korean competitor LG already had a plant under construction in Tennessee.
Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“I will tell you, when I approved the two pipelines — the Keystone and — you know, we did the two big ones. And when I approved them, I said, ‘Where’s the steel being made?’ And they told me a location that did not make me happy. And I wrote down that from now on steel is being made for pipelines — as you know, it’s got to be made in the United States. And it’s got to be fabricated in the United States. ”
Source: Remarks at meeting on trade with members of Cabinet and other officials
in fact: This provision in Trump’s executive order was significantly softer than Trump said it was. It did not mandate that pipeline steel must be made and fabricated in the United States; it said merely that the government should develop a plan to require pipelines to use American materials, “to the maximum extent possible and to the extent permitted by law.”
Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

“You know, I said yesterday, we’ve spent $7 trillion. When I say ‘spent,’ and I mean wasted, not to mention all of the lives — most importantly — and everything else. But we’ve spent $7 trillion, as of about two months ago, in the Middle East — $7 trillion. And if you want to borrow two dollars to build a road someplace, including your state, the great state of Ohio — if you want to build a road, if you want to build a tunnel or a bridge, or fix a bridge, because so many of them are in bad shape, you can’t do it. And yet, we spent $7 trillion in the Middle East. Explain that one.”
Source: Remarks at meeting on trade with members of Cabinet and other officials
in fact: There is no basis for the “$7 trillion” figure. During the 2016 campaign, Trump cited a $6 trillion estimate that appeared to be taken from a 2013 report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. (That report estimated $2 trillion in costs up to that point but said the total could rise an additional $4 trillion by 2053.) Trump, however, used the $6 trillion as if it was a current 2016 figure. He later explained that since additional time has elapsed since the campaign, he believes the total is now $7 trillion. That is incorrect. The latest Brown report, issued in late 2017, put the current total at $4.3 trillion, and the total including estimated future costs at $5.6 trillion.
Trump has repeated this claim 17 times

“And with Mexico, we have an imbalance, we have a trade deficit of $71 billion, and I believe that number is really much higher than that.”
Source: Remarks at meeting on trade with members of Cabinet and other officials
in fact: This frequent Trump claim, about a “$71 billion” deficit, has become more correct in recent weeks: the U.S.’s trade deficit in goods specifically was $71 billion in 2017, we have learned, up from $64 billion in 2016. However, Trump did not specify here that he was talking about goods alone. The trade balance includes trade in services as well as goods. Services trade, for which 2017 data was not immediately available, always brings down the U.S. deficit with Mexico by billions. In 2016, the U.S. had a services surplus of $8 billion with Mexico. Further, there is no reason to think the true deficit is “really much higher” than the figure calculated by Trump’s own government.
Trump has repeated this claim 34 times

“Just to address the one other point — we have a trade deficit with Canada. We have a big imbalance of at least $17 billion.”
Source: Remarks at meeting on trade with members of Cabinet and other officials
in fact: When services trade is included, the U.S. has a substantial trade surplus with Canada. In 2016, according to the U.S. government’s Office of the Trade Representative, “the U.S. goods and services trade surplus with Canada was $12.5 billion in 2016.” While the U.S. trade deficit with Canada in goods alone grew larger in 2017, going from $11 billion to $17.6 billion, services trade, for which 2017 data was not immediately available, almost certainly continued to give the U.S. a substantial positive sum.
Trump has repeated this claim 15 times

“It was just announced — and perhaps you heard me say it — we had the lowest African-American unemployment rate in the history of our country.”
Source: Speech at Black History Month reception
in fact: This was not “just announced”; in fact, it was announced so long before Trump spoke that it was no longer true. The African-American unemployment rate did hit an all-time low (for the period since the government began tracking Black unemployment separately in the early 1970s), 6.8 per cent, for December. But then, in January, it spiked to 7.7 per cent, a non-record. Trump was speaking a week and a half after the new rate was announced, five weeks after the record was announced.
Trump has repeated this claim 7 times

“But we want securing the border and a wall, ending chain migration, and canceling the visa lottery. I think you all agree. Anybody in favor of the lottery, where you pick it out and you say, ‘Good, we have a new United States citizen’? Doesn’t work.”
Source: Remarks at roundtable with National Sheriffs’ Association
in fact: Trump’s description of the diversity visa lottery is false. First, lottery winners do not receive citizenship: they receive green cards for permanent residence. (The program is informally known as the “green card lottery.”) Green card recipients can only apply for citizenship after five years, and they can only get citizenship if they can demonstrate they are of “good moral character,” can speak, read and write English, and can pass a basic exam on U.S. history and government. Second, people picked in the green card lottery are not even immediately given green cards. After their names are picked, they go through a vetting process that includes an interview and a background check.

“The Schumer-Rounds-Collins immigration bill would be a total catastrophe. @DHSgov says it would be ‘the end of immigration enforcement in America.’ It creates a giant amnesty (including for dangerous criminals)…”
Source: Twitter
in fact: This bill does not offer amnesty to dangerous criminals. It says that people who have committed a felony, “significant misdemeanor” (such as domestic violence, burglary and drug trafficking) or three or more misdemeanors are not eligible for the path to citizenship the bill offers to other young unauthorized immigrants, known as “DREAMers.” Trump inaccurately twisted what the Department of Homeland Security actually said: that the bill “fails to address” a current issue related to dangerous criminals, not that it creates a new amnesty for dangerous criminals. Specifically, the department said that the bill would not close a loophole that, under a Supreme Court decision, requires the government to release unauthorized immigrants from prison, even if they are dangerous criminals, if they have a final deportation order against them and their home country refuses to take them back within 180 days. This problem is not an “amnesty” — the loophole does not give these people any kind of legal status — and the department did not describe it as such.

“Our infrastructure plan has been put forward and has received great reviews by everyone except, of course, the Democrats.”
Source: Twitter
in fact: Trump’s infrastructure plan received not only a negative response from many policy experts, many of whom questioned the formula it proposes to use to decide which projects get federal funds, but a tepid-at-best response from many Republicans were uneasy with his proposed $200 billion in spending. As a reporter for the conservative Weekly Standard noted: “If there was any enthusiasm for President Trump’s infrastructure proposal on Capitol Hill on Monday, it was hard to find. Republican Bill Shuster, the chairman of the House Transportation committee, gave a perfunctory statement noting the White House’s framework while hardly endorsing it.” Some Republican state and local officials were also cool to the proposal, complaining that the federal government was proposing to put up just $200 billion of what it had long described as a $1.5 trillion plan. “They kept talking $1.5 trillion, and now it’s down to $200 billion,” Republican Robert Nichols, chairman of the Texas State Senate Transportation Committee, told the Austin American-Statesman. “We also don’t know how it’s going to be allocated (between transportation and other infrastructure). Until we know that, there’s not much really concrete we can do with it.”
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• Feb 14, 2018

“After spending trillions of dollars overseas rebuilding other countries, it is time to rebuild our own country and to take care of our citizens. The money that we’ve spent overseas, not to mention in the Middle East, where, as of two months ago, we had spent $7 trillion. And yet, if we have to fix a road, we can’t fix it. If we have to fix a tunnel, we don’t do it because we don’t have the money. We spent $7 trillion in the Middle East. It’s ridiculous.”
Source: Remarks at meeting with members of Congress on infrastructure
in fact: There is no basis for the “$7 trillion” figure. During the 2016 campaign, Trump cited a $6 trillion estimate that appeared to be taken from a 2013 report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. (That report estimated $2 trillion in costs up to that point but said the total could rise an additional $4 trillion by 2053.) Trump, however, used the $6 trillion as if it was a current 2016 figure. He later explained that since additional time has elapsed since the campaign, he believes the total is now $7 trillion. That is incorrect. The latest Brown report, issued in late 2017, put the current total at $4.3 trillion, and the total including estimated future costs at $5.6 trillion.

• Feb 16, 2018

“Cannot believe how BADLY DACA recipients have been treated by the Democrats…totally abandoned! Republicans are still working hard.”
Source: Twitter
in fact: This is transparently inaccurate. DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, was created by a Democrat, Obama, to provide work authorization and protection from deportation for “DREAMers,” unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. Trump, a Republican, cancelled the program. Democrats are now urging him to simply re-protect DACA enrollees without conditions. Conversely, Trump and other Republicans are demanding steep concessions — billions of dollars for a border wall, a reduction of one third or more in legal immigration — in exchange for protecting DACA enrollees, and some conservative Republicans continue to deride any permanent protection for enrollees as “amnesty.” In short: Trump is free to argue, as some DREAMers are, that Democrats are not fighting hard enough for DACA enrollees, but there is no reasonable argument that Republicans are trying harder than Democrats.
Trump has repeated this claim 13 times

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
October 18, 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. 24

Date: Wednesday, July 17, 1996
Commenced: 9:20 AM CST
Concluded: !0:11 AM CST

RTC: Good day, Gregory.
GD: And a good day to you, too. How are you doing?
RTC: A decent day today. And you?
GD: Busy with the new Mueller book.
RTC: Anything of interest to me?
GD: No, probably not at this point. I am working on the real origins of the Second World War at this point. Not the he-said or they-said fictional crap and pap but the real meat. Taylor covered much of this in his book on the subject but there is more. I discuss the threat of Poland in 1932 to physically invade Germany if Hitler were not silenced. They moved troops to the borders but the threats gradually subsided. Hitler, on the other hand, did not forget this. And Beck, their foreign minister, was an idiot and could easily have diverted the German threat of aggression. But I look more into the economic aspect of the war. Germany lost all her gold reserves after the war because she had to pay everyone in sight for a war she did not start. Then the western states kept the corrupt Weimar government afloat with short-term and high-interest loans. Weimar was corrupt and degenerate but Germany was a great producer of saleable goods so she was encouraged to work more. All of this post-Wilsonian manipulation was directly responsible for the conditions that allowed Hitler to assume power. There were two things he did that assured eventual war with England and the United States. One, he instituted the barter system whereby Germany would trade, let us say, new locomotives to the Argentine in exchange for their beef and wheat. Normally, Germany would have gone to the London banking houses for a loan, high interest of course. Or the Argentine people would have done the same. The barter system completely bypassed them and they stood to lose billions of pounds thereby. And, do not forget, that the British bankers were almost all Jewish and there was on-gong anti-Semitism in Germany. It wasn’t Hitler’s aim, postwar bullshit pseudo-historians to the contrary, to kill off all the Jews. He only wanted to root them out of German society and force them to emigrate.
RTC: But to where? No one wanted any of them. Jews are not liked, you know.
GD: Nor trusted. Müller set up training schools so that Jews could learn farming and go to Palestine. Wonderful! The Arabs howled and so did the British. They did not want Jews there at all. Diplomatic representations were made and Ribbentrop ran to Hitler so the useful project was stopped. Then, Mueller told me he chartered the SS. St. Louis to take 900 Jews to Havana. Everything OK except that when Roosevelt found out about this, he forced the Cubans to cancel their landing permits. Isn’t that wonderful of him? And Roosevelt and Breckenridge Long did everything they could to keep Jewish Germans out of the country. Even little children. And parenthetically, note that in 1941, Roosevelt seized over two hundred million dollars in Jewish assets in this country and kept them. Never gave a penny back either. His son got some of it. Oh, all in the archives but believe me, Robert, not a word then, now or ever in our press. Can’t do that. It was all the evil Hitler, not Roosevelt.
RTC: You say that if Hitler were not such an anti-Semite, there might not have been a war?
GD: Hitler was institutionally anti-Semitic, Robert. You see, the Germans had always gotten along with their Jews who had been in the country for a long time. No, after Pilsudski, the same one who threatened to invade Germany in ’32, came to power in Poland, he forced out huge numbers of Polish Jews, most of whom fled either to Germany or the United States. The German Jews were Sephardic, Semitic and cultured but the Polish Jews were Khazars, Mongoloid Turks, brutal, nasty and detested by both the Polish and the Imperial Russians. I have met a few in situ and believe me, they are all vicious swine. So, they flooded into a prostrate Germany in the early ‘20s and stole everything they could. By the way, these so called eastern Jews were detested by the German ones. But these were the Jews that enraged their German hosts and brought down the active persecutions and expulsions. Interesting to note that after the war when many of the Polish Jews were released from the detention camps, they tried to go back to Poland where they were promptly subjected to pogroms and wholesale death. No, they then went to Israel where they make up most of the population and now practice their filthiness on the defenseless Arabs. But that’s off the topic here. It was Hitler’s attitude towards the Jews coupled with the potentially lethal barter system that spelled his doom. The Jewish bankers both in Britain and here got together and started a huge propaganda campaign against the Germans and egged both Roosevelt and Churchill into making trouble.
RTC: But Churchill was not in power in the late ‘30s.
GD: I know but he had influence and wrote for the press. These bankers hired Winnie to front for them and whore that he was, he went right along with them. You can find some of this in Fuller and the rest in other unnoticed publications but it’s all there. Marx was right when he discussed the economic backgrounds to major wars. Yes, Robert, make room for General Fuller in your library and you will have a much clearer view. Of course none of this will ever get into the American press because guess who owns it?
RTC: I well know, Gregory. But they work with us and I see no Don Quixote-like necessity to cut my own throat or that of the Company. The Jews have a great power in this country now and one does not attack them; one works with them if you take my drift.
GD: Oh, I understand fully. Do you like them, Robert?
RTC: Evil little rats, Gregory, treacherous, envious and dangerous in the extreme. I know this sounds terrible but even though I am well aware that Hitler never gassed them, he should have. All of them and then there would be peace. There will never be peace in the Middle East unless and until Israel grabs up all the useful Arab lands and expels them from the area the way they were expelled from Poland and Germany. Remember, Gregory, that the abused child becomes the abusing parent. Send me the references on Fuller and I will send you a stack of papers on this subject. And if you choose to use them, for the Lord God’s sake, keep me out of it. The Jews would make my life miserable here.
GD: I know. They would insert a newly discovered chapter into the fake Ann Frank diaries all about you visiting Holland during the war and shoving plump Jewish babies into bonfires. By the way, all seriousness aside, I have discovered rare documents that at least partially supports the silly Holocaust stories. Would I bore you?
RTC: No, certainly not.
GD: In April of 1943, all the Jews of Europe were transported to Berlin and when there, were jammed into the Alexander Platz in Berlin. At the stroke of noon on April 20th, his birthday, Hitler came out onto his balcony and addressed an immense crowd of German Girl Scouts and school children. A cannon was fired and this huge army of girls, all armed with weenie forks, charged into the Alexander Platz and butchered at least thirty million screaming Jews. My God, the Swedish Ambassador wrote that huge raging rivers of blood roared down the Berlin streets, swamping cars and drowning thousands of Berliners before running into the Spee and Havel rivers. Ah, Robert, the truth is worse than the fictions. And the SS and Postal Employees barbecued the remains, after removing interesting tattoos for the lampshade makers, and Berlin feasted for weeks afterwards.
RTC: (Loud and prolonged laughter) Gregory, you are really a terrible person. You will kill me with these stories. No, I know it isn’t true. I mean I knew that when you mentioned the Postal employees. If you ever told that story to a Jew, he would either beat you to death with his purse or literally explode with anger. Do tell that to Tom Kimmel, why don’t you? I would love to hear him when he rang me up, babbling about how psychotic you are. Or, better still, why not tell it to Wolfe?
GD: Oh, I think not. Bob is very old and getting senile and he might just melt down like the Wicked Witch of the West, leaving only a pair of sodden dignity pants and a beanie behind. No, I just thought you would like to hear what that nut Irving calls the Real Truth for once.
RTC: Well, such a nice history, lesson Gregory. The Hebrews should be happy you have a limited audience or they might get agitated.
GD: Pascal once said that to destroy a man, make a fool out of him. Humor is a great weapon and as I have said before when I tell my little stories, always look for the truth in the jest!

(Concluded at 10 :11 AM CST)

As Trump cozies up to Saudi Arabia, the rule of law collapses further
The president is right where he wants to be as he defends fellow corrupt rulers in Jamal Khashoggi’s death
October 18, 2018
by Richard Wolffe
The Guardian
From the moment he laid his stubby hands on that glowing orb in Riyadh, Donald Trump signaled to the world what kind of leader he aspired to be. Bathed in a spectral light, standing alongside the Saudi King Salman and the Egyptian dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the man formerly known as the leader of the free world smiled with self-satisfaction that he had arrived at his chosen destination.
Despite the object’s likeness to the orb of Saruman, this was no secret society of evil wizards. Instead, it was a brazenly open society of corrupt old men with a clear disregard for the rule of law, if not a cruel desire to brutalize their opponents.
The fact that they were standing in the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology was either an exercise in paper-thin deception or some kind of sick joke. It’s hard to express your disgust at Isis beheadings, as Trump has done, but feel nothing about the Saudi beheadings of 48 people in just four months this year.
Then again, we’re talking about Donald Trump’s feelings and his limitless capacity to lie. Of course it’s possible to condemn the “bloodthirsty killers” of Isis at the UN, and praise the “unbelievable job” of the death squads of President Duterte in the Philippines. He’s Donald Trump, a bear of very little brain who convinced himself that someone in China thinks he has a “very, very large brain”.
As a self-certified genius, Trump now finds himself in something of a Saudi pickle. The supposedly reformist crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was supposed to help him clean up the world by taking on Tehran. But Saudi Arabia can’t even clean up an Istanbul consulate after their own goons are alleged to have hacked to death a single troublesome journali
First Trump promised “severe punishment” for those responsible for Jamal Khashoggi’s death, albeit punishment that didn’t harm any arms contracts the Saudis were interested in. No matter that the Saudis can’t easily substitute another country’s weapons after spending gazillions of dollars on US ones. This commander-in-chief obviously knows his arms from his elbows.
Then Trump spoke to the crown prince, who pinky-promised he had nothing to do with the 15 men identified by the Turkish media as belonging to a grisly hit-squad, which reportedly included an autopsy specialist carrying his own bone saw. So the 45th president of the United States gullibly and dutifully bleated something about “rogue killers” and “very, very strong” denials. In what is surely a remarkable coincidence, Saudi sources leaked word that they were preparing to admit the killing, but insisted it was an interrogation that went wrong.
Interrogations tend go wrong when they include someone armed with a bone saw.
To clear up this most unfortunate dismemberment, Trump sent his trusted former CIA chief, now the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on a fact-finding mission to Riyadh and Ankara. Pompeo’s approach to the facts was hardly inspiring. “I don’t want to talk about any of the facts,” he said. “They didn’t want to either, in that they want to have the opportunity to complete this investigation in a thorough way.”
That would be an investigation by the crown prince into his own security detail inside his own consulate. Naturally, these things can take time. People are busy. Consulates are hard to find. Word from the palace takes time to write down on parchment scrolls.
Oh yes, and there’s this other thing we need to remember, Pompeo explained: money.
“I do think it’s important that everyone keeps in mind that we have a lot of important relationships – financial relationships between US and Saudi companies, governmental relationships – things we work on together all across the world. The efforts to reduce the risk to the United States of America from the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, Iran.”
If you’re thinking Trump himself is compromised by Saudi money, why, that’s no more true than the notion that he’s compromised by Russian money. But don’t take my word for it, take his.
“For the record, I have no financial interests in Saudi Arabia (or Russia, for that matter),” he tweeted, dismissing anything to the contrary as so much fake news. This is a touch embarrassing for the Donald Trump who told an Alabama rally in 2015 that he loved doing business with the Saudis. “They buy apartments from me,” he said. “They spend $40m, $50m. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much!”
Of course, you’re only supposed to dislike the ones carrying the bone saws.
The Trump administration is not the first to bow and scrape to the Saudi power of oil and cash. But it is the first to surrender all pretense of upholding democracy and human rights – commonly known as American values – while making pathetic excuses for what is widely accepted to have been a barbaric murder. What is the moral difference between Iran sponsoring Hezbollah and the humanitarian disaster triggered by the Saudi attacks and blockade in Yemen?
They deserve one another, the house of Saud and the house of Trump. One is hotheaded enough to bomb Yemen into oblivion and blockade Qatar. The other is hotheaded enough to blow up historic alliances and international trade. Both have managed to look weaker by straining to look stronger.
Their incompetence is only matched their greed; their grand visions of global leadership look as genuine as Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan, or the official Saudi investigation into what happened to Khashoggi.
Like all pathological liars, they now find themselves caught in their own web of deceit and delusion. The crown prince was never a reformist, just as the reality TV star was never going to drain the swamp.
No number of expensive Saudi lobbying contracts will wash away the bloodstains. And no amount of Trump’s crazy-sounding tweets – about porn stars or Pocahontas – will distract from his disastrous undermining of American values. Like the catchphrases of an old standup comedian, Donald Trump’s stage act is losing its power to shock and awe.
After a couple of days of pesky questions about whether his friends decapitated a journalist, Trump had reached the limit of his very, very large brain. “Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent,” he told the Associated Press. “I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh and he was innocent all the way as far as I’m concerned.”
If you’re still looking for an illustration of how the rule of law collapses, here’s one straight from the horses mouth. The bone-saw-wielding Saudis are as innocent as our own Supreme Court justice. At this point, a good lawyer might rest her case because this sucker just can’t stop talking.

Jobs Are No Excuse for Arming a Murderous Regime
October 18, 2018
by William D. Hartung
AntiWar
If the Saudi government is indeed behind the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi there should be consequences – political, military, economic, and reputational.
Unfortunately, President Trump begs to differ. His reaction to questions about whether the United States would cut off arms sales to Saudi Arabia if Riyadh is proven to be behind the killing of Khashoggi has been to say that he does not want to jeopardize the alleged $110 billion in arms deals his administration has struck with the Saudi regime, and the U.S. jobs that come with them.
In his recent interview with CBS 60 Minutes, Trump specifically cites the needs of US weapons manufacturers as reasons to keep US arms flowing to the Saudi regime, even if it ends up being responsible for the murder of Khashoggi:
They are ordering military equipment. Everybody in the world wanted that order. Russia wanted it, China wanted it, we wanted it…I tell you what I don’t wanna do. Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, all these [companies]…I don’t wanna hurt jobs. I don’t wanna lose an order like that.
Trump tells CBS’s Leslie Stahl that “there are other ways of punishing” Saudi Arabia without cutting of US arms sales, but he fails to specify what those might be.
Regardless of what ultimately happened to Khashoggi, continuing US arms sales and military support to Saudi Arabia under current circumstances is immoral. Jobs should not be an excuse to arm a murderous regime that not only may be behind the assassination of a US resident and respected commentator but is responsible for thousands of civilian casualties in its three-and-one-half-year military intervention in Yemen – the majority killed with U.S-supplied bombs and combat aircraft and US refueling and targeting assistance.
The Khashoggi case merely underscores the approach of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the power behind the throne in Riyadh who is the most ruthless and reckless leader in Saudi history. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), one of a growing list of congressional critics of the regime, has asserted that the actions of the Saudi/UAE coalition in Yemen “look like war crimes.” And the impacts go well beyond the indiscriminate air strikes that have targeted hospitals, civilian market places, funerals, a wedding, and most recently a school bus carrying 40 children. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are also spearheading a partial blockade that has made it extremely difficult to get urgently need humanitarian assistance to Yemenis who desperately need it, putting millions of people on the brink of starvation. And their bombings of water treatment plants and other civilian infrastructure are responsible for the most serious outbreak of cholera in recent memory, a totally preventable consequence of the war.
Even if it were acceptable to favor jobs over human rights in this case, the economic benefits are in fact marginal. Trump strongly implies that if the United States were to cut off arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the $110 billion arms “deal” he has made with Riyadh would be in jeopardy. But as the fact checker for The Washington Post has pointed out, the idea that there ever was a $110 billion arms deal is “fake news.” It is a public relations figure cooked up by the Trump administration that combines offers made under the Obama administration, a few new deals, and a long wish list of sales that may never materialize.
In reality, since Trump took office, Saudi Arabia has signed commitments for about $14.5 billion in US weaponry, only slightly more than 10% of the $110 billion figure Trump boasts about at every opportunity.
To cite one pertinent example, the precision-guided bomb sale to Saudi Arabia that the Trump administration green-lighted last year will support at most a few thousand jobs in an economy that employs over 125 million people.
Military procurement generates fewer jobs than virtually any other form of economic activity, and many of the jobs associated with US arms sales are created overseas in the purchasing nation as a condition of the sale. For example, as part of Mohammed bin Salman’s much-touted economic plan, the goal is to have a full 50% of the work generated by Saudi arms imports done in the kingdom by 2030. US firms are already jumping to comply with this mandate by setting up subsidiaries in Saudi Arabia and signing off on the assembly of U.S.-supplied weapons there.
Trump’s claim that Russia or China will quickly swoop in to grab any arms deal the United States declines to conclude with the Saudi regime is also suspect. The Saudi arsenal is heavily dependent on US and UK-supplied weaponry. It would take many years and tens of billions of dollars to change course in any meaningful way – money that Riyadh can ill afford as it hemorrhages money for its brutal war in Yemen and tries to cope with unstable oil prices. It’s always possible that the Saudi military would make a token purchase from Russia or China to send a signal, but the idea that the United States would lose out on a huge volume of arms sales as a result is unlikely in the extreme.
There are other ways to promote jobs in the United States that do not involve accepting blood money from the Saudi regime. Congress should not be dissuaded from doing the right thing due to false claims about the economic benefits of the U.S.-Saudi arms trade.
The ball is now in the congressional court, where bipartisan opposition to the Trump administration’s cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia is growing. Most recently the House is seeking to end US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen under the War Powers Resolution, an effort led by Mark Pocan (D-WI), Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Adam Smith (D-WA) and co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of dozens of their colleagues. There will also be strong opposition to a long-discussed sale of precision-guided US bombs to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates once it comes up for formal consideration.
The case of Jamal Khashoggi is just one of many reasons for the United States to distance itself from the Saudi regime. The time to act is now.

Mohammed bin Salman never was a reformer. This has proved it
The Saudi crown prince allowed women to drive, but the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi reveals his true nature
October 18, 2018
by Dilip Hiro
The Guardian
In June, when the ban on Saudi women driving ended, it was portrayed around the world as part of a modernising, liberalising agenda by the new crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Yet the authorities ordered female activists not to speak out in its favour. Their blunt message was that what was being offered was the gift of King Salman and his crown prince son, and not a result of the campaign by female activists. In fact, the government had arrested 11 of these activists a month beforehand. Though four were released, the remaining seven had led a petition demanding that the female guardianship system – which treats adult women as legal minors – be abolished. They remain in detention without charge, but could face up to 25 years in jail.
In this way, what happened was nothing to do with reform but more like business as usual. In many ways the crown prince has already been more despotic than previous rulers, so the murky events in Istanbul surrounding the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate should not be quite as shocking as they may have first appeared.
In the summer of 2017, 30 Saudi clerics, writers and intellectuals were jailed for expressing their opposition to the policies of the Royal Palace driven by Bin Salman. It was then that, sensing his arrest was imminent, Khashoggi fled to Washington. An eminent journalist and editor for 30 years, he had been banned from publishing articles or appearing on TV in December 2016 after his criticism of US president-elect Donald Trump.
In his opinion articles in the Washington Post, he lambasted Riyadh’s diplomatic and commercial blockade of Qatar, its forcing of Lebanon’s prime minister Saad Hariri to resign (later revoked), and the crackdown on dissent and the media.
Before the ascension to the throne by Crown Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz in January 2015, the Saudi monarchy allowed space, however reluctantly, for non-establishment Wahhabi clerics, and silenced dissenters by intimidation, co-option through cash handouts, and in the case of foreign-based opponents, periodic kidnaps. With the swift ascendancy of the headstrong Bin Salman, this changed.
He has grabbed all centres of power, not only in the government – defence, the National Guard, interior ministry and its intelligence agencies – but also in the form of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil corporation, as well as in construction and broadcasting. Bin Salman achieved this under the guise of launching a seemingly popular anti-corruption campaign, sanctioned by his father, in November 2017 – detaining 326 businessmen and princes in the swanky Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh. Royal court officials said the detainees had stolen assets from the government.
It was thus that the kingdom’s topmost duo eliminated their rival powers, including descendants of former King Abdullah. His son, Prince Mutaib, was removed as commander of the powerful National Guard.
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the richest Saudi, with a net worth of $17.4bn, was confined to the Ritz-Carlton for almost 12 weeks. Eventually, after reaching an undisclosed deal and telling a TV interviewer that “everything’s fine”, he was released. His vast mansion was placed under armed guard. Like all other freed detainees, he had to wear ankle bracelets so that his movements could be traced.
In January, security services arrested 11 princes after their refusal to leave the historic Qasr al-Hokm palace in old Riyadh. They were held at al-Hair maximum-security prison. They had gathered there merely to frame an objection to a decree in which the government would stop paying the princes’ utility bills.
The detained women’s rights activists have been smeared in the state-guided newspapers, which have accused their campaign of treason and implied it is funded by the much maligned Qatar.
Thanks to their sympathisers, and international human rights organisations, the women’s rights activists remain in the public eye. In sharp contrast, the fate of the dissenting clerics, writers and intellectuals held without trial remains unknown. Equally unknown is the fate of the 56 Ritz-Carlton detainees who were brave enough to resist official coercion and threats, and were then transferred to traditional jails. These persecuted groups have become non-persons, the early victims of a totalitarian regime in the making under the 33-year-old Bin Salman.
Yet history shows that the brutal suppression of dissent leads to a build-up of popular discontent to a boiling point, with disastrous consequences. King Salman is old enough to remember what happened to the shah of Iran. He should share his memory with his most favoured son.

Suspected member of Khashoggi ‘hit-team’ dies in mysterious ‘traffic accident’ in Saudi Arabia
October 18, 2018
RT
A member of the 15-man team suspected in the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has died in an accident back in Saudi Arabia, according to Turkish media, prompting suspicion of a cover up.
Meshal Saad al-Bostani, a 31-year-old lieutenant in the Saudi Royal Air Force, is believed to have died in a ‘suspicious car accident’ in the Saudi capital Riyadh, sources told the Turkish Yeni Safak – the one that earlier covered the shocking details of the murder.
A still taken from a Turkish police CCTV video, released by the Sabah newspaper, identified Bostani as he passed through Istanbul’s Ataturk airport on October 2.
He, along 14 other Saudi citizens allegedly arrived and left Turkey on the same day and are alleged by Turkish police to have tortured and murdered Khashoggi after he entered the Saudi consulate.
The unconfirmed death of Bostani has already prompted accusations on social media that a cover up was underway by those who orchestrated Khashoggi’s disappearance.
These fears have also been voiced in Turkish media, with Daily Hürriyet columnist writing Thursday that Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consul-general Mohammad al Otaibi could be “the next execution.”
On Wednesday, it was reported that the consul-general returned to Saudi Arabia on October 16, before authorities searched his residence as part of their investigations.
In reports of an unreleased recording documenting Khashoggi’s alleged murder and dismemberment, Otaibi is believed to have said “do it somewhere else outside or I will be in trouble,” to Khashoggi’s interrogators.
He was reportedly told to “shut up if you want to live when you are back in Saudi Arabia.”

Jamal Khashoggi case: Liam Fox pulls out of Saudi summit
October 18, 2018
BBC News
The UK’s International Trade Secretary Liam Fox has pulled out of attending an investment conference in Saudi Arabia next week.
It comes amid allegations the country was behind the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Mr Khashoggi has not been seen since entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October, where Turkish officials allege he was killed.
Saudi Arabia, which denies the killing, allowed investigators inside overnight.
The Dutch and French finance ministers, as well as several other politicians and business leaders, have said they are pulling out of the event.
However, a number of major businesses – including Goldman Sachs, Pepsi and EDF – are still intending to go despite growing pressure for a boycott.
A spokesman for Dr Fox said “the time is not right for him to attend” the conference in Riyadh.
“The UK remains very concerned about Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance… those bearing responsibility for his disappearance must be held to account.”
On Thursday, the Washington Post published Mr Khashoggi’s last column – a call for press freedom across the Arab world.
The newspaper said the column had been submitted by Mr Khashoggi’s translator the day after he was reported missing.
It had initially held off from publishing the column, but decided to go ahead after accepting Mr Khashoggi was not going to return safely.
In his column, Mr Khashoggi criticised the state of press freedom in the Arab world, saying it left Saudis “either uninformed or misinformed”.
He mentioned the case of his fellow Saudi writer, Saleh al-Shehi, who he said “is now serving an unwarranted five-year prison sentence for supposed comments contrary to the Saudi establishment”.
“Such actions no longer carry the consequence of a backlash from the international community,” he wrote. “Instead, these actions may trigger condemnation quickly followed by silence.”
The result, he said, was that governments had “free rein” to silence the media

Jamal Khashoggi disappearance: The key events
2 October
• 03:28: A private jet carrying suspected Saudi agents arrives at Istanbul airport. A second joins it late afternoon
• 12:13: Several diplomatic vehicles are filmed arriving at the consulate, allegedly carrying some of the Saudi agents
• 13:14: Mr Khashoggi enters the building, where he is due to pick up paperwork ahead of his marriage
• 15:08: Vehicles leave the consulate and are filmed arriving at the nearby Saudi consul’s residence
21:00: Both jets leave Turkey by 21:00
3 October
• Turkish government announces Mr Khashoggi is missing, thought to be in the consulate
4 October
• Saudi Arabia says he left the embassy
7 October
• Turkish officials tell the BBC they believed Mr Khashoggi was killed at the consulate. This is later strongly denied by Saudi Arabia
13 October
Turkish officials tell BBC Arabic they have audio and video evidence of the killing . The existence of such tapes had previously been reported by local media
15 and 17-18 October
• Forensic teams carry out searches of consulate