TBR News June 5, 2017

The Voice of the White House  

Washington, D.C. June 5 , 2017: ” A planned new route into Europe for Turkish heroin has been discovered as the result of investigations by European law enforcement agencies, to include Interpol and Europol and the American FBI. An Albanian-based group of professional drug smugglers, operating out of two Albanian ports on the Adriatic and are now planning to off-load the heroin at the small Italian seaports of Marano Lagunare or Ausa Como and move it into the mountains of southern Austria.

This group is part of the so-called “Balkan connection,” the Istanbul-to-Belgrade heroin route. The heroin originates as opium, grown in Afghanistan. As a result of a weak American military presence there, opium growing is now exceeding its pre-American occupation levels.

The new state of Kosovo is considered by European enforcement agencies as the crossroads of global drug smuggling routes. Kosovo is primarily a state of ethnic Albanians and for hundreds of years, Kosovar Albanian smugglers have been among the world’s most accomplished dealers in contraband, aided by a propitious geography of isolated ports and mountainous villages. Virtually every stage of the Balkan heroin business, from refining to end-point distribution, is directed by a loosely knit hierarchy known as “The 15 Families,” who answer to the regional clans that run every aspect of Albanian life.

The Kosovar Albanian traffickers are so successful, says a senior U.S. State Department official, “because Albanians are organized in very close-knit groups, linked by their ethnicity and extended family connections.”

The Italilan ROS agency has been conducting an intense investigation of Albanian drug smuggling and one of their official reports reads: “Albanians from Kosovo …are among the most dangerous traffickers in drugs and in arms. They are determined men, violent and prepared to go to any lengths. They are capable of coming up with men and arms in a matter of hours. They have deep roots in civil society.”

Italian investigators have reported that Italy is the most important base for these organizations and it is precisely in Milan that negotiations between the Kosovar bosses and those of the Tirana – based Albanian gangs take place. And Milan, again, is the theater in which exchanges with our own domestic crime bosses take place.

According to detectives, the “Ndrangheta receives and parcels out some 50 kilograms of heroin every day. And it is precisely by following this drug trail that the detectives have succeeded in discovering a fully fledged organization with ramifications throughout Europe: Groups have been identified that operate in France, in Switzerland, in Spain, in Germany, and in Norway. But the Albanians have a particularly aggressive attitude. On the basis of phone calls that we have intercepted, we have discovered that the drugs are not only a source of wealth but also a tool in the struggle to weaken Christendom.”

The new route, which has been uncovered by a joint international investigative effort, is from Albanian Adriatic ports, up the Adriatic to the Italian ports of Marano Lagunare or Ausa Como through Italy via the A 23, over the Nassfeld Pass into Austria and from there, through Hermagor, to the scenic lake, Weissensee in Carinthia. This lake, which has a number of small hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, is perfect for a drug distribution point because it is very private and had only one road, Number 87, which leads from Highway E66 and a direct route to Italy.

The Kosovo smugglers have recently established a connection with elements of Scientology now in the Austrian province of Kärnten. The Scientology group is reported to be FLEXIM Austria GmbH, which through its head, Christian Halper, a German citizen, have targeted the scenic lake as a headquarters. These people have been secretly purchasing property in the Weissensee area and this includes:

• Hotel Alpenhof, Obernaggl (total about 70 hectares) – about 35 rooms – Hans Zoehrer – 5.5 M Euros:
• Hotel Fergius, Neusach (only a few square meters of land) – 38 rooms – no price available: http://www.hotelweissensee.at/
• Hotel Sonnenstrahl, Oberdorf, holiday apartment house (no land) – about 15 apartments – no price available:
• Private house, Gatschach, near the post office (with over 2,000m² of land) – 1.5 M Euros:
• Private house, Neusach (with over 2,000m² of land) – 1,8 M Euros:

The Weissensee area is very secluded and peaceful. There is only one road into the lake to the western end and no exit to the east. The lake is the summer destination of more afflunent visitors and in winter, the frozen lake is used for winter sports and the southern slopes, for skiing. The new plan is to buy up as much property as possible so as to be able to fill up the area with German Scientologists who can vote their members into local offices for better control.

Also, the large Alpenhof Hotel has been gutted and is going to be torn down. Its replacement, according to investigative reports, will have large, concealed cellars where the Albanians can repackage the Turkish heroin for transhipment to Vienna and Munich. Other smaller hotels and apartment houses have been selected to house personnel and a computer system designed to break into computers of drug enforcement agencies worldwide and have also been shut down in order to install bunks, armoured doors, electronic surveillance equipment and other unobtrusive security materials. It is interesting to note that the Scientologists hate both the Germans and the Russians who, like the Germans, have basically booted them out of their countries. While one smuggler’s route leads northeast towards Vienna, the other goes north to Munich.

From an already established distribution point located on the Hohenzollern Strasse, the heroin moves north to the German Baltic Sea port of Sassnitz. Once there, it is put onto the MV Translubeca, owned by Finnlines-Deutschland GmbH of Lübeck. Two Scientologists are crew members on this large cargo-passenger vessel, which leaves Sassnitz, DE on Sundays at 8 AM and docks at St. Petersburg, Russia, on the following Tuesday at 8 AM, where the cargo is offloaded and channeled into Russian mob hands.”

 

Table of Contents

• No, Your Phone Didn’t Ring. So Why Voice Mail From a Telemarketer?
• Robocalls Flooding Your Cellphone? Here’s How to Stop Them
• Of course Washington is plagued by leaks. That’s a good thing.
• Madrid to Manchester to London: A chronology of terror in Europe
• Blessed Prozac Moments! Zero Hedg
• SECRECY NEWS
• Beyond ‘Blowback’: Islam and Terror
• Syrian army captures 1,400 square km from IS in desert
• British people ‘will not want to carry on as beforeErik Prince’s dark plan for Afghanistan: Military occupation for profit, not security
• A 50-Year Occupation: Israel’s Six Day War Started With a Lie

No, Your Phone Didn’t Ring. So Why Voice Mail From a Telemarketer?

June 3, 2017

by Tara Siegel Bernard

The New York Times

Frank Kemp was working on his computer when his cellphone let out the sound of Mario — from Super Mario Bros. — collecting a coin. That signaled he had a new voice mail message, yet his phone had never rung.

“At first, I thought I was crazy,” said Mr. Kemp, a video editor in Dover, Del. “When I checked my voice mail, it made me really angry. It was literally a telemarketing voice mail to try to sell telemarketing systems.”

Mr. Kemp had just experienced a technology gaining traction called ringless voice mail, the latest attempt by telemarketers and debt collectors to reach the masses. The calls are quietly deposited through a back door, directly into a voice mail box — to the surprise and (presumably) irritation of the recipient, who cannot do anything to block them.

Regulators are considering whether to ban these messages. They have been hearing from ringless voice mail providers and pro-business groups, which argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing.

But consumer advocates, technology experts, people who have been inundated with these calls and the lawyers representing them say such an exemption would open the floodgates. Consumers’ voice mail boxes would be clogged with automated messages, they say, making it challenging to unearth important calls, whether they are from an elderly mother’s nursing home or a child’s school.

If unregulated, ringless voice mail messages “will likely overwhelm consumers’ voice mail systems and consumers will have no way to limit, control or stop these messages,” Margot Freeman Saunders, senior counsel at the National Consumer Law Center, wrote in the organization’s comment letter to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of more than a dozen consumer groups. “Debt collectors could potentially hijack a consumer’s voice mail with collection messages.”

The commission is collecting public comments on the issue after receiving a petition from a ringless voice mail provider that wants to avoid regulation under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991. That federal law among other things prohibits calling cellular phones with automated dialing and artificial or prerecorded voices without first obtaining consent — except in an emergency.

All About the Message, the ringless voice mail provider petitioning the commission, uses technology developed by another company, Stratics Networks. All About the Message’s customers use the service to deliver messages for marketing or other purposes right to consumers.

Will Wiquist, a spokesman for the F.C.C., said the commission would review the record after the public comment period closed and consider a decision. There is no formal timeline for resolving such petitions, and the commission cannot comment on the petition until a ruling is issued.

“They are all poised to launch a cannon full of calls to consumers,” said Peter F. Barry, a consumer lawyer in Minneapolis. “If there is no liability for it, it will be a new law that needs to get passed very quickly.”

Even consumers on the “Do Not Call” list could potentially be bombarded by telemarketers, advocates said. “The legal question is whether the people sending the messages would be required to comply with the Do Not Call list,” Ms. Saunders said. “We read the law to possibly not apply if they are not considered calls.”

This is not the first time the commission has received such a request. Nearly three years ago, it received a similar petition from VoAPPs, another voice mail technology company, which wanted to allow debt collectors to reach consumers through voice mail. But the petition was withdrawn before the commission could rule.

More specifically, All About the Message wants the F.C.C. to rule that its voice mail messages are not calls, and therefore can be delivered by automatic telephone dialing systems using an artificial or prerecorded voice. In its petition, the company argued that the law “does not impose liability for voice mail messages” when they are delivered directly to a voice mail service provider and subscribers are not charged for a call.

“The act of depositing a voice mail on a voice mail service without dialing a consumers’ cellular telephone line does not result in the kind of disruptions to a consumer’s life — dead air calls, calls interrupting consumers at inconvenient times or delivery charges to consumers,” All About the Message wrote. The company’s lawyer declined to comment.

If the commission rules against it, All About the Message said, it wants a retroactive waiver to relieve the company and its customers of any liability and “potentially substantial damages” for voice mail already delivered.

The company has reason to ask. Even though it started business just last year, one of All About the Message’s customers — an auto dealer — is already facing a lawsuit involving a consumer who received repeated messages. Tom Mahoney, who said he received four voice mail messages from Naples Nissan in 2016, is the lead plaintiff in a suit filed in United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

According to the suit, the parties in the case have reached a tentative agreement to settle all claims. Lawyers for both Mr. Mahoney and Naples Nissan declined to comment.

The suit said that Mr. Mahoney’s daughter had received similar messages — advertising zero-interest auto financing — and that neither he nor she had given the company consent.

Josh Justice, chief executive of Stratics Networks, said its technology — which can send out 100 ringless voice mail messages a minute — had existed for 10 years and had not caused a widespread nuisance. It was intended for businesses like hospitals, dentist’s and doctor’s offices, banks, and shipping companies to reach customers, for example, and for “responsible marketing.”

“The concept of ringless voice mail was to develop a nonnuisance form of messaging or a nonintrusive alternative to robocalls,” Mr. Justice said.

He contends that telemarketers should be able to use ringless voice mail messages as long as they do so responsibly — that is, skipping over consumers on the “Do Not Call” list, identifying who is leaving the message and giving people a way to opt out. But he said he did not believe that ringless voice mail needed to be subject to the same regulations as other calls — unless regulators find that the messages are generating complaints or being used inappropriately.

Consumer advocates and other experts argue that the courts and the F.C.C. have already established that technology similar to ringless voice mail — which delivered mass automated texts to cellphones — was deemed the same as calls and was covered by the consumer protection law.

“These companies are only spinning an incorrect interpretation of the regulations and the definition of the word ‘call,’” said Randall Snyder, a telecommunications engineering consultant and expert witness in more than 100 cases involving related regulations.

“Definitions of words in regulations and statutes are legal issues,” he said, “but there is certainly lots of common sense here.”

The Republican National Committee, which is in favor of ringless voice mail, goes as far as to argue that prohibiting direct-to-voice-mail messages may be a violation of free speech. Telephone outreach campaigns, it said, are a core part of political activism.

“Political organizations like the R.N.C. use all manner of communications to discuss political and governmental issues and to solicit donations — including direct-to-voice-mail messages,” the committee said in its letter to the commission.

For now, consumers who receive these messages can file complaints with regulators; they can also provide comments on whether they believe ringless voice mail should be subject to consumer protection rules.

But Ms. Saunders said blocking messages might be impossible: It is the phone that blocks calls, and these messages go right to voice mail. (More advice — on how to register for the “Do Not Call” list and how to avoid robocalls and texts — can be found on the F.C.C. website.)

Justin T. Holcombe, a consumer lawyer and partner at Skaar & Feagle in Woodstock, Ga., said the commission’s ruling would have implications for just about everyone. If ringless voice mail could avoid consumer protection rules, “it would be a free-for-all,” he said.

Mr. Kemp, the video editor in Delaware who received the ringless voice mail message, said in recent weeks that he had been targeted by robocallers advertising vehicle financing, even though he owns his truck outright. His strategy? He goes through the menu prompts, acting as if he were interested; when he finally reaches a live person, he angrily demands that his number be removed from the caller’s list.

“Hasn’t worked yet,” he said, “but it’s a good stress reliever.”

 Robocalls Flooding Your Cellphone? Here’s How to Stop Them

May 11, 2017

by Christopher Melemay

The New York Times

An unfamiliar number appears on your cellphone. It’s from your area code, so you answer it, thinking it might be important.

There is an unnatural pause after you say hello, and what follows is a recording telling you how you can reduce your credit card interest rates or electric bill or prescription drug costs or any of a number of other sales pitches.

Another day, another irritating robocall. If it feels as if your cellphone has increasingly been flooded with them, you’re right.

Ryan Kalember, senior vice president of cybersecurity strategy at Proofpoint, a cybersecurity company in Sunnyvale, Calif., said the volume of robocalls has seen a “particularly big uptick” since the fall.

In a Robocall Strike Force Report in October, the Federal Communications Commission said telemarketing calls were the No. 1 consumer complaint.

Citing statistics from YouMail, a developer of robocall-blocking software, the commission said consumers received an estimated 2.4 billion robocalls per month last year, driven in part by internet-powered phone systems that have made it cheap and easy to make them from anywhere in the world.

Alex Quilici, chief executive of YouMail, said his company estimated that 2.3 billion calls were made in December 2016, up from 1.5 billion in December 2015. The company said it extrapolates data from the calls made each month to its users.

More than annoying, the calls can cross over into the outright fraudulent. In one scheme, callers pretending to represent the Internal Revenue Service claim the person answering the phone owes back taxes and threatens them with legal action. The scheme has reaped more than $54 million, the F.C.C. said.

“If the robocalls were not valuable to the scammers, they wouldn’t be doing them,” Mr. Kalember said.

Here’s how you can fight them:

Rule No. 1

The most simple and effective remedy is to not answer numbers you don’t know, Mr. Quilici said.

“Just interacting with these calls is just generally a mistake,” he said.

If you do answer, don’t respond to the invitation to press a number to opt out. That will merely verify that yours is a working number and make you a target for more calls, experts said.

Turn to the government

List your phones on the National Do Not Call Registry. If your number is on the registry and you do get unwanted calls, report them.

Mr. Quilici said the registry is helpful but should not be seen as a panacea.

“If I’m sitting in India dialing a million numbers, what are the odds I’m even going to be fined for violating the Do Not Call Registry?” he asked. “It’s probably near zero.”

Turn to technology

Download apps such as Truecaller, RoboKiller, Mr. Number, Nomorobo and Hiya, which will block the calls. YouMail will stop your phone from ringing with calls from suspected robocallers and deliver a message that your number is out of service.

Mr. Quilici said phone companies, such as T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T, also have tools to combat robocalls. They work by blocking calls from numbers known to be problematic.

Turn the tables

And then there is the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, which turns the tables on telemarketers. This program allows a customer to put the phone on mute and patch telemarketing calls to a robot, which understands speech patterns and inflections and works to keep the caller engaged.

Subscribers can choose robot personalities, such as Whiskey Jack, who is frequently distracted by a game he is watching on television, or Salty Sally, a frazzled mother.

The robots string the callers along with vocal fillers like “Uh-huh” and “O.K., O.K.” After several minutes, some will ask the callers to repeat their sales pitch from the beginning, prompting the telemarketers to have angry meltdowns, according to sample recordings posted on the company’s website.

Watch what you say

One recent scheme involves getting consumers to say “yes” and later using a recording of the response to allow unauthorized charges on the person’s credit card account, the F.C.C. warned in March.

When the caller asks, “Can you hear me?” and the consumer answers “yes,” the caller can gain a voice signature that can later be used to authorize fraudulent charges by telephone.

Best to answer with “I can hear you,” Mr. Kalember said.

What’s ahead

The callers are evolving, Mr. Kalember said. Some have numbers that appear to be from your area code (they result in higher response rates); others employ “imitation of life” software in which the robocall sounds like a live person, complete with coughing, laughing and background noise. This artificial intelligence can be programmed to interact in real time with a consumer.

A recording on the Consumers Union website features an exchange in which a man tries to confirm he is talking to a live person. As the call progresses, the consumer presses for confirmation.

“Will you tell me you’re not a robot? Just say, ‘I’m not a robot’ please,” he says, which is met with various programmed replies of “I am a real person” and “There is a live person here.”

Why do robocalls proliferate?

Mr. Quilici compared robocalling to spam emails: It is all about volume. Companies can use software to make millions of calls at very little expense. They need only a few victims to fall prey to their schemes to more than cover their costs.

“When you hear these guys do these scam pitches, they’re pretty amazing,” he said.

The next development will be integrated efforts combining email, phone calls and social media to scheme money from consumers, Mr. Kalember said, adding that the level of innovation “is really quite astounding.”

“Technology is enabling at a scale we haven’t seen before,” he said.

National Do Not Call Registry

https://www.donotcall.gov/

Sellers and telemarketers:

Go to https://telemarketing.donotcall.gov to access the National Do Not Call Registry

Of course Washington is plagued by leaks. That’s a good thing.

June 4, 2017

by Margaret Sullivan  Media Columnist

The Washington Post

Ever since taking office, President Trump has been condemning leaks, leakers and the journalists they leak to.

“I’ve actually called the Justice Department to look into the leaks,” Trump said in February. “Those are criminal leaks.”

Only days after he took office — as we know from a leak — Trump asked then FBI-director James B. Comey to consider jailing journalists who publish government secrets.

And just a few days ago, Trump again ranted about leakers who “should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

So, I think we understand the president’s position — except that he’s in favor of leaks that damage his political opponents. Recall his campaign cry: “I love WikiLeaks!”

Paul Steiger stakes out the opposite position. The revered former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal (and founder of ProPublica, the investigative nonprofit) put it this way:

“It is not the publishing of these secrets that threatens national security. Publishing these secrets threatens the secret-keepers. It protects the public interest by letting us know what powerful people are doing when they think no one is looking.”

Accepting a journalism award, Steiger summed it up: “We need more journalists revealing more secrets, not fewer.”

He’s right. In a government increasingly obsessed with secrecy, and guilty of rampant over-classification, leaks are necessary and, largely, a very good thing.

And although there are legitimate national security concerns in some cases, I’d far rather live in a leaky America than one sealed up tight — with whistleblowers and journalists behind bars.

Let’s look back at what we wouldn’t know without leaks, bearing in mind that not all leaks are created equal. Some are document dumps; others the result of dogged reporting and the cultivation of confidential sources.

The Pentagon Papers. Perhaps the most famous leak of all, Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to copy and hand to the New York Times the secret history of the Vietnam War told Americans that thousands of young Americans had been killed fighting a war that couldn’t be won. Was it illegal for this former Pentagon official to steal and publicize the documents? Certainly, though he avoided conviction. Was there a greater good? No doubt.

Watergate. The crimes of Richard Nixon and his aides, as revealed in large part by The Washington Post, brought down the president and sent MANY government officials to jail. Was it wrong for Deep Throat, as FBI official Mark Felt was then known, to guide the investigation? Americans were better off knowing the truth.

Red Cross failures. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Red Cross raised a half-billion dollars but misused the funds. NPR and ProPublica used leaks and confidential sourcing to show that an ambitious plan to build housing resulted in jus

Government surveillance of U.S. citizens. Edward Snowden’s leak of documents from the National Security Agency in 2013 allowed the Guardian and The Washington Post to reveal the shocking way Americans were being spied on. As Post executive editor Martin Baron wrote in 2014: “In constructing a surveillance system of breathtaking scope and intrusiveness, our government also sharply eroded individual privacy.”

The inside story of Theranos. Acting on a tip, the Wall Street Journal used confidential sources and documents to reveal how this blood-testing company, a darling of the tech world, was lying about its practices, misleading investors and putting patients at serious risk. The company’s president resigned, and criminal and civil investigations followed.

Without leaks, would we know about the government’s drone-warfare program, which has killed many civilians, including children and U.S. citizens? Would we be aware of the CIA’s “black sites,” where terrorism suspects were tortured in remote parts of the world?

In recent weeks, leaks informed the public about Michael Flynn’s conversations with Russian diplomats about lifting sanctions and indirectly caused Trump to fire his national security adviser. And leaks revealed that the president spilled classified information to Russian visitors to the Oval Office.

Susan Hennessey, a Brookings Institution scholar and former National Security Agency lawyer, told me that these most recent disclosures — involving transcripts of highly classified telephone intercepts — are beyond anything she’s seen before. “This information is really, really sensitive,” she said. What’s more, she thinks such leaks are less necessary now that government investigations of Russian election interference are going forward on several fronts.

But even Hennessey sees why they’re happening: “One need not condone the leaks to view them at least in part as an adaptive response to a system failure.”

There’s little chance that the system, which discourages openness and punishes truth-tellers, will correct itself. Leaks and anonymous sourcing are imperfect, sometimes troubling, and certainly must be handled with great care. But they’re as necessary as ever.

Leakers — and the journalists who depend on them — deserve to be honored, not jailed.

Madrid to Manchester to London: A chronology of terror in Europe

Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Manchester and now another attack in London? European cities have been increasingly targeted by Islamist extremists in recent years.

June 4, 2017

DW

London, June 2, 2017

On June 2, three men drove a van into civilians on London Bridge then exited the vehicle and stabbed people in restaurants and bars in the nearby Borough Market area. British police killed the three perpetrators, who were wearing fake suicide bomber vests, eight minutes after the first call was received by emergency services. An attacker steers a car into pedestrians on a bridge in the center of London and then stabs a policeman. Of the victims on the bridge, four eventually die of their injuries. British security forces shoot the perpetrator dead.

Manchester, May 2017

After a concert by US singer Ariana Grande, a 22-year-old suicide bomber detonated a bomb near the event’s exit area killing himself and 22 civilians, including several children. Over 100 more people were injured.

Stockholm, April 2017

Five people die after a truck hit pedestrians on a busy shopping street in the Swedish capital. On the same day, police arrested a 39-year-old Uzbek on suspicion of carrying out a terrorist act.

Paris, February/March/April 2017

In a series of incidents across the French capital at the start of the year, soldiers are targeted at the Louvre Museum in February and Paris’ Orly airport in March. In April, a gunman opens fire on a police vehicle on the Champs Elysees, killing one officer. The attacker, identified as a 39-year-old Frenchman, is quickly shot dead by other officers.

Berlin, December 2016

Twelve people are killed shortly before Christmas, when the German capital becomes a target. A supporter of the “Islamic State” (IS) militant group steers a captured truck into a Christmas Market. A few days later, the 24-year-old Tunisian is shot dead in a police check in the Italian city of Milan.

Nice, July 2016

At least 86 people are killed when an attacker drives a truck into the crowded Promenade des Anglais in the southern French coastal resort. IS claims responsibility for the atrocity.

Brussels, March 2016

Islamist attackers detonate a number of bombs at the airport of the Belgian capital and in a metro station, killing 32 people.

Istanbul, January 2016

An IS suicide bomber blows himself up in the middle of a tourist group near the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, killing 12 Germans.

Paris, November 2015

IS supporters kill 130 people and injure hundreds more in a coordinated series of attacks on the Bataclan music venue, several restaurants and the Stade de France football stadium.

Copenhagen, February 2015

A 22-year-old opens fire on a café in the Danish capital, killing one person. The attacker then shot and killed a man who was guarding a synagogue before himself being shot dead by police.

Paris, January 2015

Seventeen people die in an attack on the headquarters of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and a separate incident at a kosher supermarket in the French capital.

Brussels, May 2014

A French Islamist is arrested after four people are shot in the Jewish Museum of Belgium. The gunman, a self-proclaimed jihadi, had previously fought in Syria.

London, July 2005

Four British Muslims detonate bombs on the Tube – London’s underground rail system – and on a bus. The attacks kill 56 people and injure about 700.

Madrid, March 2004

Some 191 people are killed and 1,500 are injured when coordinated bombs explode on Spanish commuter trains.

Total Civilians murdered: 682

Total Civilians injured: 3,210

 Blessed Prozac Moments!

Zero Hedge

June 5, 20217

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

Zero Hedge is a very eccentric Austrian economics-based finance blog run by a pseudonymous founder who posts articles under the name “Tyler Durden,” after the character from Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. It has accurately predicted 200 of the last 2 recessions.

“Tyler” claims to be a “believer in a sweeping conspiracy that casts the alumni of Goldman Sachs as a powerful cabal at the helm of U.S. policy, with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve colluding to preserve the status quo.” While this is not an entirely unreasonable statement of the problem, his solution actually mirrors the antagonist in Fight Club: Tyler wants, per Austrian school ideas, to lead a catastrophic market crash in order to destroy banking institutions and bring back “real” free market capitalism.

The site posts nearly indecipherable, and generally bizarre, analyses of multiple and seemingly unrelated subjects that are intended  to point towards a consistent theme of economic collapse “any day now.” “ Tyler” seems to repeat The Economic Collapse Blog’s idea of posting blog articles many times a day and encouraging people to post it as far and wide as humanly possible. “Tyler” moves away from the format of long lists to write insanely dense volumes filled with generally contradicting jargon that makes one wonder if the writers even know what the words actually mean. The site first appeared in early 2009, meaning that (given “Tyler’s” psychotic habit of deenying each and every positive data point), anyone listening to him from the beginning missed the entire 2009-2014 rally in the equities market.

The only writer conclusively identified is one Dan Ivandjiiski, a Bulgarian former medical student, who conducts public interviews on behalf of Zero Hedge. This hysterical blog came online several days after he lost his job at Wexford Capital, a Connecticut-based hedge fund (run by a former Goldman trader). And Ivandjiiski chose his pen name from a nihilistic psychotic delusion.

Zero Hedge is not quite the NaturalNews of economics, but not for want of trying.

This entertaining nonsense is in the same category as the pompous, and often rewritten, political blog, the Drudge Report and the “Sorcha Faal” screeching about the fictional “Planet X.” And for even more light-weight entertainment, look at the conspiracy blogs of “Dr.” Paul Fetzer and Tom Hengehan. Since the media has virtually done away with comic strips, these are all that is left to entertain a bored reader. These sort of babblings also entertain a legion of the feeble-minded conspiracy freaks that flock to the strange Internet sites like flies to shit.

SECRECY NEWS

From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2017, Issue No. 41

June 5, 2017

STATE DEPARTMENT PRESS BRIEFINGS GO DARK

Core practices of open government are eroding in the Trump Administration, with new limitations on the ability of the press to effectively question officials on U.S. foreign policy.

The problem is starkly illustrated by comparing the press briefing schedules of the State Department for May 2016 and May 2017.

In May 2016, the State Department held a press briefing nearly every weekday of the month, with only two exceptions. One of them was Memorial Day.

In May 2017, by contrast, there was not a single State Department press briefing. The last briefing was on April 27. And if anyone was wondering, “There will not be a press briefing today,” the Bureau of Public Affairs website says again today.

Nor can this be explained away by the fact that the Trump Administration is still comparatively new. As of May 2009, the early Obama Administration was already holding press briefings at the State Department three or four times each week.

Some might take these press briefings for granted or dismiss them as insignificant and self-serving, if not occasionally misleading. But that would be a mistake.

Daily press briefings both represent and reinforce a culture of open government. They are a window into the workings of the Administration, an expression of official self-understanding, a forum for challenging that understanding, and an opportunity to ask questions on almost any foreign policy subject, profound or trivial. (Why did Secretary Clinton appear “a little ill,” a reporter wanted to know in a May 1, 2009 briefing. Had she been exposed to the swine flu outbreak in Mexico? No, it was just “mild allergies,” the briefer said.)

The questions that might have been asked at a State Department briefing last week are obviously numerous and urgent. What does it mean that the US is now linked with Nicaragua and Syria as the only countries to actively reject the Paris Agreement on climate change? What are the implications of heightened European cooperation with China in the wake of the Trump Administration withdrawal from the Paris Agreement? What was actually gained compared to what was lost by withdrawal?

Such questions will of course be asked and discussed by others. But in an ominous departure from previous norms, an official State Department briefing was not held to discuss them with the press in a standard, predictable, public format. The loss to open government is tangible. The President’s eccentric tweets are not an acceptable substitute.

In practice, it might have been hard even for a skilled briefer to explain the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, because it does not seem to have been based on any rational policy calculation. The President’s own Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said at his confirmation hearing that the smart move for the US was to adhere to the Paris Agreement. “I think we are better served by being at that table than leaving that table.” That divergence of opinion would itself have been a worthy topic for exploration in a regular press briefing.

Prior to confirmation, Secretary Tillerson also said that “[…] accountability and transparency includes communicating with the public, while engaging with its representation in Congress and the press. If confirmed, I will be sure to interact with the press appropriately, based upon long-standing precedents of the State Department and my predecessors in dealing both with American reporters and the foreign press.”

Those precedents have now been violated.

NET NEUTRALITY, AND MORE FROM CRS

New and updated publications from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

Net Neutrality: Back to the Future, CRS Legal Sidebar, May 30, 2017

East Asia’s Foreign Exchange Rate Policies, updated May 26, 2017

U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Trends and Projections: Role of the Clean Power Plan and Other Factors, updated May 31, 2017

Respirable Crystalline Silica in the Workplace: New Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Standards, updated May 31, 2017

Cuba: U.S. Policy in the 115th Congress, May 26, 2017

Jordan: Background and U.S. Relations, updated June 1, 2017

Advanced Pilot Training (T-X) Program: Background and Issues for Congress, May 31, 2017

Beyond ‘Blowback’: Islam and Terror

June 5, 2017

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

The latest attack in London – the third to hit Britain within seventy-five days – is once again provoking a debate about the relationship between Islam and terrorism. On one side we have those who say Islam is inherently violent, and is incompatible with the basic canons of Western civilization. On the other side, we have liberals who say that this is a libel on an entire religion, and that advocates of religious violence are a distinct minority within the Muslim faith.

These two views have distinct policy implications: the former would impose what amounts to a Muslim ban on travel to Western countries, and would furthermore mandate State surveillance of mosques and other religious institutions of that faith. The latter stance would oppose these measures, and proceed as if Muslims posed the same danger to us as, say, Presbyterians, i.e. none at all.

Both views are simplistic nonsense. Furthermore, neither offers an effective policy to deal with the problem as defined.

The origins of Islamic terrorism are not in dispute: the idea that “they hate us because we’re free,” i.e. because of our secular values and Western lifestyle, was not even worth considering, at least initially. After all, Japan, for example, which is not exactly an exemplar of Islamic values, has never been attacked by Islamic extremists. South America has proved similarly immune. The focus of the Islamists’ wrath has been on the United States and Western Europe – not coincidentally, those countries which have a long history of intervention in the Muslim world.

Which brings us to the theory of “blowback,” the idea that the root cause of radical Islamic terrorism is simple retaliation. Here the writings of Chalmers Johnson, whose book, entitled Blowback; The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, was published before 9/11, and also of Robert Pape, who has done yeomen’s work on this issue, are very useful. Johnson put the concept in its historical context, and Pape shows, with extensive detailed evidence, that occupied peoples routinely adopt such tactics as suicide bombings to fight the overwhelming presence of occupiers. And this is not limited to Islamists, by any means: the Tamil Tigers, fighting for the “liberation” of Sri Lanka, for example, employed these same tactics.

And so the “blowback” concept, in its pure form, avers that this isn’t about religion, but about resistance: the resistance of a militarily weak insurgency against an occupying power that exerts overwhelming force. Adherents of this theory point to the statements of the terrorists themselves, principally al-Qaeda, which declared that the presence of US troops on the “sacred” soil of Saudi Arabia motivated – and justified – the 9/11 attacks. Aside from that, they point to other examples of Western imperialism – the invasion and occupation of Iraq, US support to Muslim despots, and the ongoing “war on terrorism” that, from their perspective, is a war on Islam.

So it’s all very cut and dried, simple really – but is it?

It’s been sixteen years since the 9/11 attacks, long enough for a strand of Islam to emerge that views terrorism against Western targets as a religious duty. Furthermore, the radical Islamist critique of Western values and lifestyle as morally corrupt has been integrated into the purely consequentialist idea of “blowback” as retaliation for specific actions. Because it can surely be argued – especially by religious ideologues – that a society capable of killing hundreds of thousands in, say, Iraq, is inherently depraved. Given the theory of “blowback,” this merging of a typically anti-colonialist narrative with a moral critique was inevitable. And to give it a religious angle wasn’t difficult. After all, in the years since September 11, 2001, have the US and its allies attacked any non-Muslim countries?

And it’s not as if there aren’t elements within orthodox Islam that need only elaboration to legitimize this mutant variation. The very concept of jihad, and the storied history of Islamic conquerors who “converted” new adherents by force, feed into this frenzied fundamentalism, which seeks to return to a “purer” form of Mohammed’s creed. Of course, one could point to similarly aggressive tendencies in Christianity, as well as other faiths, and yet the missing element here is a history of military occupation and conflict.

Religious belief, like all human concepts, isn’t static: it undergoes changes in response to events. It adapts, it mutates, it evolves. Christianity changed in response to the advance of science: Galileo is no longer considered a heretic. Judaism was transformed by the Holocaust: Zionism, yesterday embraced by a tiny minority of Jews, is dominant today. Islam is not immune to the tides of history.

Western liberals downplay this uncomfortable truth because they generally disdain religion and fail to appreciate its power. They cannot understand how a person could drive a truck into a crowd of pedestrians, and go on a stabbing spree, while shouting “This is for Allah!” Allah, for them, is a delusion: religion is a primitive throwback, a reactionary atavism that is on its way out. Yet this is hardly true in most areas of the world outside of the Global Metropolis.

The failure of Western liberal elites to acknowledge this reality – the reality of a newly militant strand of Islam that upholds terror as a sacred duty – is linked to their appeasement of the Saudis. For years the Kingdom has exported its austere version of Islam, Wahabism, which serves as the theological foundations of the very terrorist movement we are supposedly pledged to fight.

A few days before the attack on London Bridge, the news broke that an investigation into the sources of terrorist funding commissioned by the government of former Prime Minister David Cameron would probably not be published due to its “sensitive” nature: there’s too much evidence that the Saudis are the principal financiers of terrorist organizations.

Britain recently signed off on a series of multi-billion dollar arms deals with the Saudis: the US has done the same, in a deal brokered by none other than the President’s son-in-law. Meanwhile, Donald Trump travels to the Kingdom where an “anti-terrorist center” is inaugurated – by the very folks who are funding radical Islamic terrorism worldwide.

The West has done everything possible to encourage the growth and development of radical Islamic terrorism, from invading the Muslim world to succoring and supporting the state sponsors of terrorist organizations. We armed and funded Islamic extremists in Syria in a bid to overthrow the secular despotism of Bashar al-Assad – and then wondered how and why returnees from that conflict took their holy war to the streets of Europe’s cities. One wouldn’t have acted any differently if the goal had been to deliberately create a terrorist menace.

And what is the solution offered by our rulers? British Prime Minister Theresa May says we must regulate the Internet, which is now supposedly a “safe space” for terrorists:

“We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed – yet that is precisely what the Internet, and the big companies that provide Internet-based services provide. We need to work with allies democratic governments to reach international agreements to regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning.”

The British government already regulates the Internet and its powers have been used primarily to quash alleged anti-Muslim sentiment: you can be arrested and charged with a “hate crime” for saying the wrong thing about Islam on Twitter or in a blog post. The “Investigatory Powers Act” was passed by Parliament in November: it requires Internet providers to maintain a list of web sites visited by all Internet users for up to a year, and also gives the government broad powers to intercept communications. May wants to internationalize this regulation.

It’s hard to believe that May and her cohorts really think this will have the least effect on terrorist activities. It’s clearly just a pretext to regulate a phenomenon that threatens the powers-that-be. Rather than combat terrorism, the idea is to extend the authority of government as far as they can get away with – and, as the terrorist wave rises, there’s no telling how far they will go.

Not only are Western governments uninterested in actually stopping terrorism, but the terrible truth is that there is no stopping it. Some problems have no solution, and this is one of them. We can wipe out ISIS in Syria, but they will scatter worldwide, returning as “refugees” to the cities of their enemies. We can restrict travel, reject Muslim immigrants: and yet the second and third generations, already embedded in Western societies, will take up their cause. We can spy on our own citizens, regulate the Internet within an inch of its life, restrict “hate speech,” bomb more Muslim countries – and still the monster’s tentacles will wriggle through the interstices and grasp at our throats.

This is what we have unleashed on ourselves: a monster that won’t be killed. The idea that we cannot live with this is akin to the idea that we cannot live with our own history: it is an idea without meaning. The past is prologue: it won’t be repealed or denied. We invaded Iraq. We invaded Afghanistan. We funded and armed al-Qaeda during the cold war, in league with our Saudi allies, while Riyadh spread its ideology of hate on a global scale.

In Greek mythology, the figure of Nemesis dramatizes our current predicament: she is the goddess of retribution, whose name is “derived from the Greek words nemêsis and nemô, meaning ‘dispenser of dues.’” She pursues her quarry relentlessly, visiting on them the consequences of their deeds.

Her pursuit can be ameliorated, albeit not finally and immediately ended, by reversing our course of futile wars – in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. – and ending our alliance with the mandarins of terror in Riyadh and the sheikdoms of the Gulf. Yet still the monster will live: it cannot be slain by conventional means – it will have to die a natural death. The best we can do is to stop prolonging its life

Syrian army captures 1,400 square km from IS in desert

June 4, 2017

xinhuanet

DAMASCUS, June 3 (Xinhua) — The Syrian army and allied fighters have captured 1,400 square km from the Islamic State (IS) group in the Syrian desert over the past 24 hours, state news agency SANA reported on Saturday.

The progress is part of the ongoing military offensive against IS in the Syrian desert east of the ancient city of Palmyra, SANA said, citing a military statement.

The military offensive in the Syrian desert is ongoing, added the report.

The Syrian army recently declared the commencement of the Great Dawn offensive against IS on several Syrian fronts, mainly in the Syrian desert, which aims to dislodge the terror-designated group from a triangle of border areas between the Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian borders.

The operation also includes in the southeastern countryside of Aleppo province in northern Syria, where the army killed thousands of IS militants over the past few days.

On May 18, the US air force struck a convoy of pro-government fighters advancing in the desert near the Tanf border crossing with Iraq.

Then, reports said the US was protecting its troops and rebels its backing in Tanf, where the US and Britain have bases.

At the time, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said America’s role in Syria’s conflict was unchanged, after the strikes.

“No. We are not increasing our role in the Syrian civil war. But we will defend our troops,” Mattis said, when asked about the strikes.

For its part, the Syrian army stressed that it will continue to fight the terrorist groups and capture areas near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders, as it’s the “legitimate” duty of the Syrian army.

Since then, the army and its allies of Shiite fighters continued to make progress in the desert and are reportedly closing in on areas where the US troops are located.

The Russian air force also played an important role, striking convoys of the IS group fleeing from Raqqa province toward the Syrian desert close to Palmyra.

British people ‘will not want to carry on as before’

The latest attack in London comes only days ahead of one of Britain’s most crucial general elections in decades. DW asked political scientist Anthony Glees what bearing it might have.

June 4, 2017

by Richard Connor

DW

DW: Major political parties have, at least temporarily, suspended the election campaign. Is it possible to assess the political consequences of the attacks coming so shortly before the parliamentary elections?

Anthony Glees: I think it is possible to assess the consequences. For one thing we’ve got a Labour Party led by somebody who believes that you can talk to terrorists and bring them to the conference table. The Islamists are clearly not people who want to talk to anybody at a conference table. They want to explode the conference table.

We’ve also got a Conservative prime minister who, when she was in the Home Office, abolished one of the few measures that could have protected people in Britain from this kind of terrorism: namely, control orders.

I think it’s inevitable that, in the next few days of the election campaign, people will look to the security record of Jeremy Corbyn, who’s also said he’s opposed to a shoot-to-kill policy. I don’t think you’d find anyone in London this morning that was not grateful that police shot these people to kill them within eight minutes of being called out. Jeremy Corbyn has also made a big deal out of his relationship with the IRA and with other groups, like Fatah and Hamas, that many people consider to be terrorists

However, there will also be questions about Theresa May’s judgment because her past has also been, by no means, unchecked.

As home secretary, May was responsible for budget cuts to the police. On the other hand, citizens often trust the Conservatives more than the left.  What will sway them more come election day?

It’s a very good question because the positions have actually been outlined. And, in the aftermath of the Manchester bombing almost a fortnight ago, people did know very clearly what the two sides of the arguments were. Jeremy Corbyn, who looking at the issue globally, said that what’s significant is that Britain should not intervene in foreign wars – that we should talk peace to the world rather than intervening, and that there is a kind of link, an unspecified link, between Islamist terrorism and the sort of foreign policy that Britain has had in the past.

Then, there’s Theresa May, who’s been saying we need more of the same but nothing too dramatic.

These are arguments that we’ve already been thinking about against the background of the terrorist attack in Manchester, and what’s happened is that Jeremy Corbyn has been doing well. Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party are increasing their popular support. Theresa May is losing popular support.

My feeling is that, at the end of the day on Thursday, it will rebound in favor of Theresa May, and that is because – even if she has made mistakes and even if the Conservatives have made mistakes – the ideology of the Conservative Party on security has been clear and strong and firm, whereas the ideology of Labour under Corbyn has been decidedly pacifist and weak. I don’t think that will play well on Thursday, when people are actually at the ballot box.

After every attack, we see police being deployed and foreign leaders expressing their solidarity. However, nothing seems to be changing. Are politicians powerless on this issue?

I don’t think they’re powerless. I think there are things that they can do that they’ve been reluctant to do, but Theresa May just a few minutes ago (on Sunday morning) spoke about the need to tighten up substantially things like powers of arrest, the powers of detention and the powers of exclusion from the United Kingdom. The doubling of the number of people in MI5, Britain’s security service, is also very important. They tell us that there are 23,000 people in the United Kingdom who want to do us harm. We can’t fight these people – let alone defeat them – with the same number of people in our security service as we had when we were talking about hundreds, or a few thousand.

We still have no information about the organizers of the attack, but there is an assumption that we are dealing with terrorism by Islamists. The UK seems to be targeted relatively often. Is there a specific reason for this?

I think the reason is that we have been weakened as a country by a number of things: by successive elections, the Scottish referendum, the general election, the Brexit referendum and now this general election.

We’re a very divided, very uncertain country, and we look vulnerable. Islamists are like the big beasts in the jungle: They go for those they perceive as being weak, and that is the position that Britain is in right now. Without doubt, the Brexit issue has weakened Britain because nobody knows what Brexit means or how it will play out. Nobody knows – not even those who supported it have come up with any clear idea.

There are historical reasons, as well, such as the invasion of Iraq – not that that was an attack on Islamism, of course: It was an attack on Saddam Hussein and his purported weapons of mass destruction.

DW: So far, people in Britain have shown restraint in their response. Are you seeing any risk of that changing in the future?

Anthony Glees: I think the British people will demand the gloves come off now. I think there will be more control orders, there’ll be more exclusion, there’ll be more MI5 officers, there may be other measures, as well. I think the British people will not want to carry on as before.

Erik Prince’s dark plan for Afghanistan: Military occupation for profit, not security

Blackwater founder Erik Prince has a vision for profiting off Afghanistan that President Trump might just love

June 3, 2017

by Matthew Pulver

Salon

Lost in the cascade of stories of potential White House criminality and collusion with foreign governments is the Erik Prince affair. It is reported that Prince, the brother of controversial Education Secretary Betsy Devos who established his power in Washington with his mercenary army Blackwater during the Iraq war, met with Russian intermediaries in an obscure Indian Ocean archipelago to establish back-channel communication with Moscow, possibly in coordination with the efforts of Jared Kushner, who last week was reported to have sought a White House back channel to the Kremlin.

Bloomberg reports that during the presidential transition late last year “Prince was very much a presence, providing advice to Trump’s inner circle, including his top national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.” While President-elect Trump, in reality show style, paraded administration applicants through the gilded front doors of of Trump Tower for the gauntlet of cameras, Prince “entered Trump Tower through the back,” reports Bloomberg.

Prince met at least several times with the Trump team, according to the multiply sourced reporting, including once on a train from New York to Washington, where Prince met with Peter Thiel associate Kevin Harrington, who would later join the National Security Council and be tasked with “strategic planning.” Prince is said to have advised Harrington, Flynn and others on the Trump transition team on the “restructuring of security agencies” and “a thorough rethink of costly defense programs.”

The account sounds innocuous enough as reported, but Prince’s recent appearance on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” sheds considerable light on what the series of furtive discussions likely entailed. The appearance might have been an effort to generate public support for what Prince advocated in private. The man who reinvented mercenary warfare described to Carlson a vision for a corporate military occupation apparatus that makes his infamous Blackwater look modest, despite its capturing of $1 billion in contracts during the Iraq war and occupation. Prince proposed nothing less than the revival of the British East India Company model of for-profit military occupation, wherein an armed corporation effectively governed most of India for the extraction of resources.

Prince explained to Carlson how the almost 16-year-old war and occupation of Afghanistan is premised on a faulty model. “We’ve fought for the last 15 years with the 1st Infantry Division model,” he says. “Now we should fight with an East India Company model, and do it much cheaper.”

“So you replace a military occupation with the ‘American South Asia Company’ or something like that?” asks Carlson.

“Something like that, sure,” Prince replies. “If you look back in history, the way the English operated India for 250 years, they had an army that was largely run by companies — and no English soldiers. So cheap, very low cost.”

It was also “very low cost” to the English because the British East India Company funded itself by extracting wealth from the territories it occupied.

“It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century,” writes the author of “The Anarchy: How a Corporation Replaced the Mughal Empire,”William Dalrymple, “but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath.”

Prince knows this. The British East India Company was not simply a mercenary army like his Blackwater but an armed corporation that colonized like a state power. It was not merely a government contractor like Blackwater but an autonomous military and administrative entity sharing the worst aspects of both the corporation and the imperial state. So, Prince’s first innovation is to do away with civilian-military control administered by the Department of Defense and overseen by civilian, elected leadership, as is currently in place, and replace that apparatus with an armed corporation.

The second innovation is to denationalize the armed force projecting the corporation’s power. Americans are expensive. Blackwater personnel regularly received six-figure salaries for work in Iraq. Prince envisions a sweatshop-ization of the mercenary force, relying on the cheap labor available in the ravaged domestic labor market of war-torn Afghanistan. Loyalty is not cheap, of course, but Prince is imagining a project of colossal capitalization, likely far bigger than his Blackwater endeavor. The per-day base pay for Blackwater personnel in Iraq was somewhere in the neighborhood of $600, nearly 50 percent higher than the annual per capita income for Afghans. An Afghan might make more in a very short time fighting for Prince’s corporation than his countrymen make in a year.

But that deluge of Blackwater money enabling such outsized salaries came from Pentagon and State Department contracts during the mercenary firm’s days in Iraq. Where would revenue come from for what Prince now proposes? Resource extraction, just as the East India Company operated on the subcontinent for British stockholders. This is the third innovation Prince offers.

“There’s a trillion dollars in value in the ground: mining, minerals, and another trillion in oil and gas,” Prince says of Afghanistan. This would provide the revenue stream to replace government contracts. Prince’s firm would be self-funded, self-reliant, and thus autonomous to a degree more similar to a nation-state than a military contractor like Blackwater serving under a defense department.

The corporate rulers, Prince suggests, would even reorganize objectives away from the original mission — i.e., destroy the safe harbor for al Qaeda and other terror groups — and toward the prerogatives of profit. Prince critiques U.S. strategic aims in Afghanistan to Carlson: “Even the whole approach of placing bases U.S. bases was all done to control land and territory but not the arteries that make money.”

Prince’s plan to fund occupations by pillage would otherwise be simply an insane notion howled from the wilderness of policy thought were it not for Prince’s proximity to the president and Trump’s repeated assertion that the U.S. should have taken Iraq’s oil to recoup costs. Indeed in his first speech in his first full day in office, speaking at the CIA headquarters, Trump revived his campaign-season idea of taking Iraqi oil, even telling the audience, “maybe you’ll have another chance.”

But Prince’s innovations on the straight occupy-and-plunder model might excite Trump and his team far more, since it fully neoliberalizes war and occupation into a sleek corporate form, taking those vast Pentagon outlays off the federal budget and opening up those ventures to investment. It’s war that pays for itself! It’s likely an attractive prospect for a party whose central passions are to cut taxes and privatize government services.

But one needn’t be a graduate of the Wharton School to understand what happens when war and occupation are made into a fully capitalist enterprise. Capitalism operates with a simple directive: to increase and sustain profit, to expand. When capitalism doesn’t expand, ideally at a rate of at least 3 percent a year, it’s said to be sick, in recession. Corporations behave according to a genetic desire for permanence and expansion. In fact, the coercive competition of the capitalist market ensures that firms that don’t seek expansion eventually die. It’s not a choice; expansion is an existential imperative in capitalism.

The corporation must act like a cancer, always seeking new growth, conquering every cell and moving on to the next. The health of the capitalist economy depends on this propulsive hunger. U.S. military objectives, conversely, are finite. Victory is sought, at which point troops come home. American military failures of the post-war era have been when permanence and expansion complicate the imperative of victory (e.g., Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq).

But if anyone knows about relegating matters of state to the hunger for profit it’s President Trump, whose extant ties to his business interests already complicate the constitutionality of his dealings. In the same way that his intelligence memos are more interesting to the president when his name is included more often, it could well be that making matters of state into matters of profit speaks to the president in a way that workaday statecraft, even the command of an empire, cannot. Might it be that, for the real-estate-mogul-turned-president, making countries into properties makes sense? Might it be that Prince, certainly Trump’s intellectual superior, knows this?

Appearing on Jeremy Scahill’s Intercepted podcast, the Daily Beast’s Spencer Ackerman shared his dystopian worry about Prince’s potential influence on the president and Trump’s vulnerability to the sort of profit scenarios Prince is selling these days: “A few short weeks after this supposed back-channel conversation gets entered into between Kushner and [Russian ambassador Sergey] Kislyak, Erik Prince actually acts as a Trump back channel. How paranoid should we be, how paranoid should I be that someone with such extensive experience in running a paramilitary private company is kind of a go-to Trump guy? At my most paranoid, I’m asking, is this Trump’s contingency plan?”

We’ve witnessed the tension of military and money since Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, the introduction of capitalist profit into war-making and the predictable effect of an ever-expanding national security state at odds with the founders’ intentions. But Eisenhower’s critique of the arms industry only hinted at what a full subsumption of war by capital might become. A hypothetical American South Asia Company would have no more desire to end an occupation than Toyota would have to stop selling cars or Apple to stop selling electronics. It would, like any other corporation, seek sustenance and expansion. As Prince admitted to Carlson, the aims and objectives of war would immediately shift to “the arteries that make money.” Our problem, says Prince, is that we went to Afghanistan with the intention of combating terrorism, not seeking profit. Our problem, he suggests, is that we went to Afghanistan with the intention of leaving.

Comment: Why ever would the US want to leave Afghanistan? The main reason why we want to maintain a controlling presence there is because of the huge opium poppy fields. Our blessed CIA regularly flies out, in their private aircraft system, large amounts of yen shee or raw opium. They fly it to Columbia where it is turned into very profitable heroin. How unpatriotic and self-centered to deprive the CIA of all that money! ed

A 50-Year Occupation: Israel’s Six Day War Started With a Lie

June 5 2017

by Mehdi Hasan

The Intercept

Fifty years ago, between June 5 and June 10, 1967, Israel invaded and occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. The Six Day War, as it would later be dubbed, saw the Jewish David inflict a humiliating defeat on the Arab Goliath, personified perhaps by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.

“The existence of the Israeli state hung by a thread,” the country’s prime minister, Levi Eshkol, claimed two days after the war was over, “but the hopes of the Arab leaders to annihilate Israel were dashed.” Genocide, went the argument, had been prevented; another Holocaust of the Jews averted.

There is, however, a problem with this argument: it is complete fiction, a self-serving fantasy constructed after the event to justify a war of aggression and conquest. Don’t take my word for it: “The thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June 1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival, was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred after the war,” declared General Matituahu Peled, Chief of Logistical Command during the war and one of 12 members of Israel’s General Staff, in March 1972.

A year earlier, Mordechai Bentov, a member of the wartime government and one of 37 people to sign Israel’s Declaration of Independence, had made a similar admission. “This whole story about the threat of extermination was totally contrived, and then elaborated upon, a posteriori, to justify the annexation of new Arab territories,” he said in April 1971.

Even Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, former terrorist and darling of the Israeli far right, conceded in a speech in August 1982 that “in June 1967 we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us, We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

The reverberations of that attack are still being felt in the Middle East today. Few modern conflicts have had as deep and long-lasting an impact as the Six Day War. As U.S. academic and activist Thomas Reifer has observed, it sounded the “death knell of pan-Arab nationalism, the rise of political Islam…a more independent Palestinian nationalism” and “Israel’s emergence as a U.S. strategic asset, with the United States sending billions of dollars… in a strategic partnership unequalled in world history.”

Above all else, the war, welcomed by the London Daily Telegraph in 1967 as “the triumph of the civilized,” forced another 300,000 Palestinians from their homes and ushered in a brutal military occupation for the million-odd Palestinians left behind.

The conflict itself may have lasted only six days but the occupation that followed is now entering its sixth decade — the longest military occupation in the world. Apologists for Israel often deny that it is an occupation and say the Occupied Territories are merely “disputed,” a disingenuous claim belied by Israel’s own Supreme Court which ruled in 2005 that the West Bank is “held by the State of Israel in belligerent occupation.”

Fifty long years of occupation; of dispossession and ethnic cleansing; of house demolitions and night curfews; of checkpoints, walls and permits.

Fifty years of bombings and blockades; of air raids and night raids; of “targeted killings” and “human shields”; of tortured Palestinian kids.

Fifty years of racial discrimination and ethnic prejudice; of a “separate but unequal” two-tier justice system for Palestinians and Israelis; of military courts and “administrative detention”.

Fifty years of humiliation and subjugation; of pregnant Palestinian women giving birth at checkpoints; of Palestinian cancer patients denied access to radiation therapy; of Palestinian footballers prevented from reaching their matches.

Fifty years of pointless negotiations and failed peace plans: Allon, Rogers, Fahd, Fez, Reagan, Madrid, Oslo, Wye River, Camp David, Taba, Red Sea, Annapolis. What did they deliver for the occupied Palestinians? Aside from settlements, settlements and more settlements? Consider: in 1992, a year before the Oslo peace process began, West Bank settlements covered 77 kilometers and housed 248,000 Israeli settlers. By 2016, those settlements covered 197 kilometers and the number of settlers living in them had more than tripled to 763,000.

These settlements have rendered the much-discussed “two-state solution” almost impossible. The occupied West Bank has been carved up into a series of bantustans, cut off from each other and the wider world. The settlers are not going anywhere, anytime soon. They are Israel’s “facts on the ground.” To ignore them is to ignore perhaps the biggest obstacle to ending the occupation. “It’s like you and I are negotiating over a piece of pizza,” the Palestinian-American lawyer and former adviser to the PLO, Michael Tarazi, explained in 2004. “How much of the pizza do I get? And how much do you get? And while we are negotiating it, you are eating it.”

It wasn’t just the 1967 war that was launched on a lie; so too was the occupation that began after it. It was never supposed to be temporary, nor were the Palestinians ever supposed to get their land back. If Israel had planned to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, as some of its supporters suggest, then why was the first settlement in the West Bank, Kfar Etzion, established less than four months after the Six Day War, in defiance of “top secret” advice from the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser that “civilian settlement” in the Territories would contravene “the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention”? Why has it revoked the residency rights of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank over the past 50 years? Why has the Jewish state spent the past five decades exploiting the charade of a “peace process” to gobble up more Palestinian land and build more illegal settlements? The truth is that the Jewish state, from the very beginning, “used negotiations as a smokescreen to advance its colonial project,” to borrow a line from imprisoned Palestinian activist Marwan Barghouti. Fifty years on, it is time for both the Palestinian leadership and the international community to stop pretending otherwise.

The legendary Israeli general and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who was one of the architects of Israel’s victory in 1967 and was adamant that the country should hold onto the territories it had seized, best summed up the cynical attitude of Israeli governments of both right and left over the past five decades. “The only peace negotiations,” pronounced Dayan, when asked about the possibility of a peace deal with the Palestinians in November 1970, “are those where we settle the land and we build, and we settle, and from time to time we go to war.”