Category Archives: Analysis

You don’t need a no-fly zone to pressure Russia in Syria

Steven Heydemann writes: The Obama administration’s Syria policy has collapsed under the weight of a brutal assault on Aleppo by the forces of President Bashar al-Assad and Russia. Shrugging off global condemnation, Russia and Mr. Assad have dispatched their aircraft to attack schools and hospitals, singling out civilian targets to make the city uninhabitable and force its remaining population to flee.

Secretary of State John Kerry and other world leaders are now calling for Russia and the Assad government to be investigated for war crimes. But for the past year, Mr. Kerry had held firm to the belief that only through cooperation with Russia could the United States pressure the Assad government, reduce violence in Syria and move the country toward a political transition. The United States is now struggling to respond to the reality that Russia has little interest in a political settlement.

With an election days away, the Obama administration is reluctant to do anything that might tie the next president’s hands. Mr. Obama himself remains as resistant as ever to increasing involvement in Syria’s war. But continuing his hands-off approach will have crippling effects on his successor’s ability to make diplomatic progress.

Two steps are needed to advance America’s Syria policy. The first is to move beyond a discussion limited to no-fly zones or increased support to the armed opposition; the second is a cleareyed, fact-based assessment of just how risky further American involvement might be. Both are possible between now and when the next president takes office. [Continue reading…]

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With Mosul under siege, ISIS leader anticipates collapse of the sky

The New York Times reports: After a nearly yearlong silence, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph of the Islamic State, released a blistering audio recording imploring his forces to remain firm in the face of the American-backed Iraqi offensive in Mosul and excoriating those who might consider fleeing.

“Know that the value of staying on your land with honor is a thousand times better than the price of retreating with shame,” he said, adding: “This war is yours. Turn the dark night of the infidels into day, destroy their homes and make rivers of their blood.”

The last time Mr. Baghdadi addressed his followers was in a recording released Dec. 26. His silence since then has led to persistent rumors that he had been wounded or killed. He was not heard from even after one of his closest associates — the extremist organization’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, who headed the group’s efforts to export terror abroad, including overseeing attacks in Paris and Brussels — was killed in an airstrike in August.

The terrorist leader’s tone in the new recording at times suggested an air of panic, as if he was trying to shore up his fighters and enjoin them to continue battle, promising them heavenly rewards: “Oh soldiers of the caliphate, if you stand in the line of fire from America’s jets and its allies, then stand firm.”

He added: “Know that if the sky collapses onto the earth, God will make room for the believers to breathe.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Western intelligence sources believe the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is no longer in Mosul, Boris Johnson has said.

In an unusual reference to intelligence, the British foreign secretary said Baghdadi’s audio recording issued on Thursday calling for the defeat of the Iraqi forces fighting to liberate Mosul was “cruelly ironic since some of the intelligence we have suggests he had himself vacated the scene himself and is yet using internet media to encourage others to take part in violence”. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt’s ties to its chief benefactor, Saudi Arabia, are starting to unravel

The New York Times reports: In the tumultuous two years since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt came to power, one ally has kept the Arab world’s most populous country from economic ruin: Saudi Arabia pumped more than $25 billion into the faltering Egyptian economy, dwarfing aid from the United States.

The Saudis may have thought they were buying loyalty. But Egypt’s vote last month for a Russian United Nations resolution on Syria threatens to unravel Mr. Sisi’s relationship with Egypt’s most crucial benefactor.

Shortly after the vote, the Saudi ambassador to Egypt left Cairo for an unscheduled three-day visit to Riyadh. The state-owned Saudi oil company, Aramco, postponed a promised shipment of 700,000 tons of discounted oil in October, and the spokesman for Egypt’s oil ministry said the fate of November’s shipment remains unknown.

Then last week, the Saudi head of a major Islamic organization, who has since resigned, publicly mocked Mr. Sisi, exposing the rift in a new way.

Ahmed Moussa, a prominent Egyptian talk show host and staunch supporter of Mr. Sisi, was one of many Egyptian commentators who reacted angrily.

“They want to make Egypt kneel,” Mr. Moussa said of the Saudis, then offered his own threats. “Don’t you ever think you can pressure Egypt into backtracking,” he said. “Its decisions are sovereign. We don’t owe anyone anything. We are the ones who are owed.”

The fraying of the alliance between the two most influential Sunni nations is unfolding amid increasing sectarianism across the region. And the potential loss of Saudi support could hardly come at a worse moment for Egypt, whose economy is crashing amid a devaluing of its local currency, reduction in imports, and tourism tailspin. [Continue reading…]

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FBI email disclosure broke a pattern followed even this summer

The New York Times reports: The F.B.I. and Justice Department faced a hard decision in two investigations this past summer that had the potential to rock the presidential election. The first case involved Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and secretive business dealings in Ukraine. The second focused on Hillary Clinton’s relationships with donors to her family foundation.

At the urging of the Justice Department, the F.B.I. agreed not to issue subpoenas or take other steps that would make the cases public so close to the election, according to federal law enforcement officials.

Against this backdrop, the decision of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to send a letter to Congress last week about a renewed inquiry concerning Mrs. Clinton’s emails is not just a departure from longstanding policy; it has plunged the F.B.I. and the Justice Department directly into the election, precisely what Justice officials were trying to avoid.

Mr. Comey’s letter, which he sent over the objections of the Justice Department, stirred outrage across party lines. It unleashed a torrent of news that laid bare the government’s internal deliberations and exposed the infighting and occasional mistrust between rank-and-file F.B.I. agents and senior department officials.

Since Mr. Comey’s revelation, the F.B.I. has hurried to analyze a cache of emails belonging to one of Mrs. Clinton’s aides, Huma Abedin. It is increasingly unlikely that the review will be complete by Election Day, F.B.I. officials said, although they said there was a chance they could offer updates before Nov. 8.

The mood at the F.B.I. is dark, and nobody is willing to predict what the coming days will bring, particularly if agents and analysts do not complete their review of Ms. Abedin’s emails by Election Day. Officials said it would take something extraordinary to change the conclusion that nobody should be charged. But the absence of information has allowed festering speculation that the emails must be significant. [Continue reading…]

ThinkProgress reports: Tuesday afternoon, the FBI Records Vault Twitter account abruptly shared records “from the FBI’s files related to the William J. Clinton Foundation” on Twitter. The 129 pages of heavily redacted documents appear to pertain mostly to “a 2001 FBI investigation into the pardon of Marc Rich,” which was closed in 2005 without any finding of wrongdoing.

Though some of the records portray Bill Clinton in a less than flattering light, the documents released Tuesday reportedly contain little new information. Eyebrows were raised, however, by the Bureau’s decision to share them just seven days before Election Day and at the same time controversy is swirling around FBI Director James Comey’s decision to resurrect the Hillary Clinton email case. (Though he was appointed by President Obama, Comey told Congress this summer that he has been a registered Republican “for most of his adult life.”) [Continue reading…]

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Debunking Trump’s ‘secret server’

Robert Graham (Errata Security) writes: According to this Slate article, Trump has a secret server for communicating with Russia. Even Hillary has piled onto this story.

It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia. https://t.co/D8oSmyVAR4 pic.twitter.com/07dRyEmPjX
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 31, 2016

This is nonsense. The evidence available on the Internet is that Trump neither (directly) controls the domain “trump-email.com“, nor has access to the server. Instead, the domain was setup and controlled by Cendyn, a company that does marketing/promotions for hotels, including many of Trump’s hotels. Cendyn outsources the email portions of its campaigns to a company called Listrak, which actually owns/operates the physical server in a data center in Philidelphia.

In other words, Trump’s response is (minus the political bits) likely true, supported by the evidence. It’s the conclusion I came to even before seeing the response.

When you view this “secret” server in context, surrounded by the other email servers operated by Listrak on behalf of Cendyn, it becomes more obvious what’s going on. In the same Internet address range of Trump’s servers you see a bunch of similar servers, many named [client]-email.com. In other words, trump-email.com is not intended as a normal email server you and I are familiar with, but as a server used for marketing/promotional campaigns. [Continue reading…]

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Assad in person: Confident, friendly, no regrets

Anne Barnard reports: The guns were silent atop Mount Qasioun and the lights on its slopes twinkled over Damascus as President Bashar al-Assad of Syria welcomed a group of Western visitors into his French-Ottoman palace on Monday night, presenting himself as a man firmly in control of his country.

He radiated confidence and friendliness as he ushered a group of British and American journalists and policy analysts into an elegant wood-paneled sitting room where he claimed that the social fabric of Syria was stitched together “much better than before” a chaotic civil war began more than five years ago. It was as if half his citizens had not been driven from their homes and nearly half a million had not been killed in the bloody fighting for which he rejected any personal responsibility, blaming instead the United States and Islamist militants.

“I’m just a headline — the bad president, the bad guy, who is killing the good guys,” Mr. Assad said. “You know this narrative. The real reason is toppling the government. This government doesn’t fit the criteria of the United States.”

It was a surreal meeting for me after years of writing about a devastating and intractable war that has reduced several of Syria’s grand city centers to rubble and prompted accusations of war crimes. While hundreds of thousands of Syrians are besieged and hungry, here was Mr. Assad, secure in his palace because he has outsourced much of the war to Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah forces whose influence has grown to a degree that makes some of his own supporters uncomfortable. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s intervention in Syria could have been stopped 20 years ago

Oleg Kashin writes: War and bloodshed doesn’t have the power to shock you when it’s been seen thousands of times before, on television, in films, in newspapers.

That’s why the Russian reaction to the violent bombing campaign in the Syrian city of Aleppo has been so muted. There has been no public outcry over news footage of women, children and the elderly living in ruins, and images of the dead and the maimed have largely gone unnoticed.

It’s because we’ve seen it all before, a lot closer to home. Grozny was its name. Twenty-two years ago, thousands were dying in a brutal conflict between Chechen separatist fighters and Russian government forces which had started in 1994 after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Lasting nearly two years, the war did not distinguish between armed separatists, children or young army conscripts. The number of deaths is unknown, estimations vary from 30,000 to 100,0000, with nearly half a million displaced and much of the republic left in ruins.

Russia’s foreign policy is more than 20 years old, and emerged from the dust and devastation in Grozny
But despite the brutality, the conflict’s proximity to the rest of Europe and the clear shock among the Russian population, there was no international outrage. [Continue reading…]

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Has the small Belgian town of Vilvoorde figured out how to reintegrate its Islamists?

Financial Times reports: One winter’s day in 2014 in a small Belgian town, an apparition from Syria’s war walked unannounced into Hans Bonte’s office. Only recently released from prison, the returned fighter wove his way through the corridors of Vilvoorde’s town hall in search of the mayor.

Still wearing his electronic security bracelet and arriving with no notice or permission, the 20-something man never threatened Mr Bonte. Instead, he blurted out his problem — local police and social services were making his life a misery — and his cunning solution.

“He told me ‘the day I don’t have to wear my bracelet any more I will move to Brussels’,” says Mr Bonte, the mayor of Vilvoorde, a struggling industrial town just outside of the Belgian capital. “He said, ‘You are controlling me too much, and I have all these problems here.’”

His plan remains on hold — the man ended up back in prison for other offences — but for Mr Bonte, the possibility that the former jihadi in Syria could go to Brussels and fall off the radar was real. “The lack of control and organisation in the Brussels area remains an enormous problem, also for the security of the whole country,” the Vilvoorde mayor says.

Not long ago, the Flemish town’s biggest problem was factory closures. But since taking office three years ago, Mr Bonte’s top priority has become counter-radicalisation. About 30 people from this community of 40,000 left to fight in Syria and Iraq; some of them even used to play football with Mr Bonte’s son.

His strategy for stemming the flow has shown clear signs of success and has won praise as a creative model of how to effectively marshal the mayor’s powers, which include oversight of local police. [Continue reading…]

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Beyond Trump and Putin: The American Alt-Right’s love of the Kremlin’s policies

Casey Michel writes: While the phenomena of fascistic, hard-right support for Moscow within Europe has been well-documented elsewhere, most especially by Anton Shekhovtsov and Alina Polyakova, among others, the parallel networks and linkages within the United States have seen depressingly little coverage. Indeed, while “praise of Putin by [Europe’s] far-right leaders” becomes “commonplace,” as Polyakova wrote, so, too, has the pro-Kremlin fealty from far-right leaders in America, almost all of whom uniformly back Trump.

It doesn’t take much work to follow a trendline threading the Kremlin, most especially under Putin’s third term, directly to the leading far-right figures undergirding Trump’s candidacy. Take, for instance, Matthew Heimbach, tabbed by ThinkProgress as the “most important white supremacist of 2016.” The founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party and an unabashed anti-Semite, Heimbach espouses views not even Trump has deigned to offer, including the removal of birthright citizenship and the creation of white ethno-states. (The Southern Poverty Law Center has described Heimbach as “The Little Fuhrer.”) Heimbach has become one of the leading voices behind the expansion of the “alt-right” Clinton detailed. In a recent rundown of the “alt-right’s” main proponents, Yahoo! offered Heimbach top billing.

While Heimbach has offered vocal support for Trump this year — he was cited in a violence-related lawsuit, stemming from his actions at a Trump rally in Kentucky — there’s one leader he appears to admire more than the rest. As Heimbach, who has expressed support for the Kremlin’s “Novorossiya” project in Ukraine, recently told me, “Putin is the leader, really, of the anti-globalist forces around the world,” adding that Putin’s Russia has become “kind of the axis for nationalists.” Citing the creation of a “Traditionalist International,” a far-right counterpart to the Soviet-era “Communist International,” Heimbach also noted that Alexander Dugin, the neo-fascist ideologue behind the Kremlin’s push toward “Eurasianism,” gave a (recorded) speech at the 2015 unveiling of Heimbach’s party. And as Heimbach told Al Jazeera, “Russia’s our most powerful ally.” [Continue reading…]

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There’s no such thing as a protest vote

Clay Shirky writes: We’re in the season of protest vote advocacy, with writers of all political stripes making arguments for third-party candidates (Jill Stein, Gary Johnson), write-in votes (Bernie Sanders, Rod Silva), or refusing to vote altogether (#NeverTrump, #BernieOrBust.) For all the eloquence and passion and rage in these arguments, however, they suffer from a common flaw: there is no such thing as a protest vote.

The authors of these pieces rarely line up their preferred Presidential voting strategies  — third-party, write-in, refusal  —  with the electoral system as it actually exists. In 2016, that system will offer 130 million or so voters just three options:

A. I prefer Donald Trump be President, rather than Hillary Clinton.
B. I prefer Hillary Clinton be President, rather than Donald Trump.
C. Whatever everybody else decides is OK with me.

That’s it. Those are the choices. All strategies other than a preference for Trump over Clinton or vice-versa reduce to Option C.
People who believe in protest votes do so because they confuse sending a message with receiving one. You can send any message you like: “I think Jill Stein should be President” or “I think David Duke should be President” or “I think Park Eunsol should be President.”

Similarly, you can send any message you like by not voting. You can say you are sitting out the election because both parties are neo-liberal or because an election without Lyndon LaRouche is a sham or because 9/11 was an inside job. The story you tell yourself about your political commitments are yours to construct.

But it doesn’t matter what message you think you are sending, because no one will receive it. No one is listening. The system is set up so that every choice other than ‘R’ or ‘D’ boils down to “I defer to the judgement of my fellow citizens.” It’s easy to argue that our system shouldn’t work like that. It’s impossible to argue it doesn’t work like that. [Continue reading…]

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John Dean: Hillary Clinton’s mistakes bear no similarities whatsoever with Richard Nixon’s criminality

John W Dean writes: Donald J. Trump wasted no time in seizing on the unprecedented letter that the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, sent to Congress on Friday, regarding the bureau’s investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails. “This is bigger than Watergate,” Mr. Trump’s team tweeted just a few hours after the letter was made public.

It’s not the first time Mr. Trump has made the Watergate comparison. In fact, he’s been saying it regularly since the arrival of his new campaign manager, Stephen Bannon, in August. And that’s fitting — Mr. Bannon came from Breitbart, the conspiracy-minded right-wing news site, and his Hail Mary strategy seems to be to paint Mrs. Clinton as a criminal mastermind. And who better a measuring stick than America’s most infamous president, Richard M. Nixon?

But these comparisons are nonsense. Only someone who knows nothing about the law, and the darkest moment of our recent political history, would see a parallel between Nixon’s crimes and Mrs. Clinton’s mistakes.

The Watergate scandal, for the record, began on June 17, 1972, as a bungled burglary by men working out of Nixon’s re-election committee, who were arrested in the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington.

It ended more than two years later, with Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, followed by the criminal trial of his former attorney general, John Mitchell; his former White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman; and his top domestic adviser, John D. Ehrlichman, who were found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice on Jan. 1, 1975. Along the way, some four dozen Nixon aides and associates were convicted of or pleaded guilty to criminal misconduct, including me.

Taken together, these investigations revealed astounding abuses of presidential power by Nixon, which included other illegal break-ins and burglaries; illegal electronic surveillance; misuses of agencies of government like the I.R.S., C.I.A. and F.B.I.; the practice of making political opponents into enemies and using the instruments of government to attack them; and then employing perjury and obstruction of justice to cover it all up.

Whatever mistakes Mrs. Clinton made, her actions bear no similarities whatsoever to Nixon’s criminalization of his presidency, and his efforts to corrupt much of the executive branch. [Continue reading…]

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Ann Jones: Donald Trump’s open carry

Recently, the New York Times produced a veritable thesaurus of Trumpian twittery — every insulting tweet of The Donald’s that their researchers could find since he declared his candidacy.  It’s quite a collection in which he goes after 282 people, places, and things in his uniquely abusive fashion. (Don’t even get me started on his tweets about Hillary Clinton; you’d be reading until tomorrow.) Here, instead, is a relatively limited list of his, a tiny entry of classic nastiness aimed at a peripheral character in this year’s election campaign, Senator Elizabeth Warren:

“Pocahontas” “bombed last night!” “Sad to watch” “Pocahontas” “Pocahontas” “wanted V.P. slot so badly but wasn’t chosen because she has done nothing in the Senate” “Goofy” “a very weak Senator” “Goofy” “Pocahontas” “Goofy” “the least productive Senator in the U.S. Senate” “one of the least productive senators” “goofy” “Goofy” “Very racist!” “Goofy” “one of the least productive U.S. Senators” “has a nasty mouth” “All talk, no action!” “Total hypocrite!” “Goofy” “lowlife!” “If it were up to goofy Elizabeth Warren, we’d have no jobs in America” “she doesn’t have a clue” “failed Senator” “goofy” “gets nothing done” “lied” “Our Native American Senator”“goofy couldn’t care less about the American worker” “does nothing to help!” “using the woman’s card” “Goofy” “didn’t have the guts to run for POTUS” “phony Native American heritage” “Goofy” “didn’t have the guts to run for POTUS” “phony Native American heritage” “Goofy” “one of the least effective Senators in the entire U.S. Senate” “has done nothing!” “Goofy” “weak and ineffective” “Does nothing” “All talk, no action — maybe her Native American name?” “Goofy” “phony Native American heritage” “Goofy” “Hillary Clinton’s flunky” “has a career that is totally based on a lie” “goofy” “a fraud!” “goofy”

Of course, Warren falls into a category that is commendable indeed. She doesn’t take this sort of crud from anyone — and certainly not any man. And throughout election 2016, she’s responded blisteringly to Trump’s abuse. The most recent moment of this: after The Donald so infamously leaned into his mic in the third presidential debate and half-whispered the phrase “such a nasty woman,” while his opponent was speaking about social security. (“My Social Security payroll contribution will go up, as will Donald’s, assuming he can’t figure out how to get out of it.”)  Warren later rose at a Clinton rally in New Hampshire and offered a classic riposte, the sort of thing that hasn’t been part of the Trumpian playbook when it comes to the women he goes after. “Get this, Donald,” she said. “Nasty women are tough. Nasty women are smart. And nasty women vote. And, on November 8th, we nasty women are going to march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever.”

If there’s another “nasty woman” around who got The Donald deep in his abusive soul, it’s been TomDispatch regular Ann Jones. Back in June, before it was the subject of real attention, she pointed out the blazingly obvious (to her, but not to the massed mass media of election 2016): that many women recognized The Donald, saw right through him because “every woman who has ever had to deal with a Trump-style tyrant in her own home or at her job already has Trump’s number. We recognize him as a bloated specimen of the common garden variety Controlling Man, a familiar type of Household Hitler. In fact, Donald J. Trump perfectly fits the profile of an ordinary wife abuser.” Once again, today, she’s a step ahead of the rest of the media crowd when it comes to the essence of The Donald in this end-game moment. Tom Engelhardt

Nasty women
Donald Trump, the greatest victim in the history of the world
By Ann Jones

Donald Trump grabbed a new lifeline. Speaking at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on October 15th, he raised a hand as if to take an oath and declared: “I am a victim!” The great business tycoon, the one and only man who could fix America and make the place great again (trust me, folks), was laying claim to martyrdom — and spinning another news cycle. “I am a victim,” he declared, “of one of the great political smear campaigns in the history of our country. They are coming after me to try and destroy what is considered by even them the greatest movement in the history of our country.”

“I am a victim.”  That pathetic line echoed in my head, which is why I’m writing this.  In my long life, I had seen a large white man stand up in a public arena and proclaim those words — the shrill, self-pitying complaint of the remorseless perpetrator — only once before.  That was in a courtroom in lower Manhattan in 1988. The man was Joel Steinberg, a New York lawyer who, over a 12-year period, had brainwashed and beaten into oblivion a woman named Hedda Nussbaum, once a successful young editor of children’s books.  In the early years of their relationship, she had run away several times, seeking help, and every time a doctor or friend had called Steinberg to come and get her. At that point — time and again — Steinberg would administer “punishment,” breaking her bones and her spirit. She took on what police would later describe as “a zombie-like quality.”

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Iran’s man in Beirut

Alex Rowell writes: On the morning of 13 October, 1990, the Syrian Air Force launched fighter jet strikes on the Lebanese presidential palace in Baabda, southeast of Beirut. Their target was a General Michel Aoun, an army commander appointed two years previously by an outgoing president to lead a temporary cabinet until elections could be held, who instead went rogue, moving himself into Baabda Palace and effectively declaring himself ruler of the republic — and happy to fight anyone who said otherwise.

His reign, such as it was, saw thousands killed in quixotic military campaigns against rival warlords and the Syrian army then occupying Lebanon. By October 1990, the Syrians were determined to finish him off, and the United States — of whom he had also managed to make an enemy — was willing to let them, not least as a nod of gratitude for Damascus’ assistance in the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. “I am ready to die on the battlefield of honor rather than surrender — be sure I shall die fighting,” Aoun told a crowd of supporters on the 12th, when it was clear a final Syrian push was imminent. By noon the following day, Aoun had surrendered without firing a shot and fled to the French embassy, leaving scores of his men massacred in the ground and air onslaught, and the presidential palace in ruins. Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war was over.

Today, the same Michel Aoun — now 81 years old — was elected to return as president to the same Baabda Palace, ending Lebanon’s thirty-month leadership vacuum after spending over a quarter of a century between exile in France and Lebanon, tirelessly plotting his eventual comeback with near-Shakespearean ambition. “I can add colours to the chameleon,” boasts the rapacious Richard III in Henry VI; “Change shapes with Proteus for advantages/ And set the murd’rous Machiavel to school.” Aoun’s long life has seen him morph from a Fort Hill-trained commander in a US-backed army (once even photographed in Israeli company) to an anti-American proxy of the Iraqi Baath regime to a Bush-supporting neoconservative fellow traveler (speaking at the Hudson Institute in favor of the Iraq War on a 2003 tour of Washington, during which he also testified to Congress in support of the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act) to, most recently, a stalwart comrade of the Iranian-Syrian “Axis of Resistance.” His election today came after he and his Hezbollah ally boycotted all electoral sessions for more than two years, bluntly refusing to attend unless and until his victory was guaranteed in advance. Earlier in the month, the last of his major remaining opponents — Saad al-Hariri of the Saudi Arabia-backed Future Movement — caved in, endorsing Aoun in what he called a “sacrifice […] for the nation, the state, and stability.” [Continue reading…]

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Blackmail: Russia has been cultivating Trump for at least 5 years says a former senior intelligence officer

Mother Jones reports: a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the [FBI] with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump — and that the FBI requested more information from him.

Does this mean the FBI is investigating whether Russian intelligence has attempted to develop a secret relationship with Trump or cultivate him as an asset? Was the former intelligence officer and his material deemed credible or not? An FBI spokeswoman says, “Normally, we don’t talk about whether we are investigating anything.” But a senior US government official not involved in this case but familiar with the former spy tells Mother Jones that he has been a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.

In June, the former Western intelligence officer — who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a US firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients — was assigned the task of researching Trump’s dealings in Russia and elsewhere, according to the former spy and his associates in this American firm. This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project’s financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.) “It started off as a fairly general inquiry,” says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, “there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit.”

This was, the former spy remarks, “an extraordinary situation.” He regularly consults with US government agencies on Russian matters, and near the start of July on his own initiative — without the permission of the US company that hired him — he sent a report he had written for that firm to a contact at the FBI, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates, who asked not to be identified. (He declines to identify the FBI contact.) The former spy says he concluded that the information he had collected on Trump was “sufficiently serious” to share with the FBI.

Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this former spy wrote. The first memo, based on the former intelligence officer’s conversations with Russian sources, noted, “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.” It maintained that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” It claimed that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and could “blackmail him.” [Continue reading…]

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Sen. Harry Reid says FBI possesses ‘explosive information about close ties and coordination’ between Trump and Russian government

The Washington Post reports: In a letter to FBI Director James B. Comey on Sunday night, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) says Comey may have broken the law.

And that’s not even the most brazen claim in the letter — not by a long shot.

In the course of arguing that Comey’s disclosure that the FBI is looking into new Hillary Clinton investigation emails may have violated the Hatch Act, Reid slips in an extremely bold claim about the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity. The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information.

Even for a man known for bare-knuckle politics, this is remarkable.

Reid is saying that he has been told the FBI has evidence of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. And he’s not just saying this information came from mysterious and unnamed national security officials; he’s saying Comey himself has left him with this impression. [Continue reading…]

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On Clinton emails, did the FBI Director abuse his power?

Richard W Painter writes: The F.B.I. is currently investigating the hacking of Americans’ computers by foreign governments. Russia is a prime suspect.

Imagine a possible connection between a candidate for president in the United States and the Russian computer hacking. Imagine the candidate has business dealings in Russia, and has publicly encouraged the Russians to hack the email of his opponent. It would not be surprising for the F.B.I. to include this candidate and his campaign staff in its confidential investigation of Russian computer hacking.

But it would be highly improper, and an abuse of power, for the F.B.I. to conduct such an investigation in the public eye, particularly on the eve of the election. It would be an abuse of power for the director of the F.B.I., absent compelling circumstances, to notify members of Congress that the candidate was under investigation. It would be an abuse of power if F.B.I. agents went so far as to obtain a search warrant and raid the candidate’s office tower, hauling out boxes of documents and computers in front of television cameras.

The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election.

Such acts could also be prohibited under the Hatch Act, which bars the use of an official position to influence an election. That is why the F.B.I. presumably would keep those aspects of an investigation confidential until after the election. The usual penalty for a violation is termination of federal employment.

That is why, on Saturday, I filed a complaint against the F.B.I. with the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates Hatch Act violations, and with the Office of Government Ethics. I spent much of my career working on government and lawyers’ ethics, including as the chief White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush. I never thought that the F.B.I. could be dragged into a political circus surrounding one of its investigations. Until this week. [Continue reading…]

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Emails, genitalia and the FBI

Charles M Blow writes: Who would have thought that the final leg of this election cycle would be dominated by crowing about violating vaginas and by probes into penis pictures?

But even that frame is problematic because it creates an equivalency that doesn’t exist. One scandal is about a man boasting of predation and the other is about a woman weary of people’s prying. These are fundamentally different flaws, one being clearly about a pattern of assault and the other about a pattern of ill-fated insularity.

And yet an utterly irresponsible media, thirsty for a scoop and ignoring the consequences of its scope, has egged on a public with a scandal lust, aiding and abetting Republicans in turning an email mistake into a colossal crime.

Far from the faux election rigging that Donald Trump has been harping on for weeks, this election isn’t in danger of being stolen by Hillary Clinton, but in danger of being stolen from her. [Continue reading…]

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Eric Holder: James Comey is a good man, but he made a serious mistake

Eric Holder writes: I began my career in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section 40 years ago, investigating cases of official corruption. In the years since, I have seen America’s justice system firsthand from nearly every angle — as a prosecutor, judge, attorney in private practice, and attorney general of the United States. I understand the gravity of the work our Justice Department performs every day to defend the security of our nation, protect the American people, uphold the rule of law and be fair.

That is why I am deeply concerned about FBI Director James B. Comey’s decision to write a vague letter to Congress about emails potentially connected to a matter of public, and political, interest. That decision was incorrect. It violated long-standing Justice Department policies and tradition. And it ran counter to guidance that I put in place four years ago laying out the proper way to conduct investigations during an election season. That guidance, which reinforced established policy, is still in effect and applies to the entire Justice Department — including the FBI.

The department has a practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations. Indeed, except in exceptional circumstances, the department will not even acknowledge the existence of an investigation. The department also has a policy of not taking unnecessary action close in time to Election Day that might influence an election’s outcome. These rules have been followed during Republican and Democratic administrations. They aren’t designed to help any particular individual or to serve any political interest. Instead, they are intended to ensure that every investigation proceeds fairly and judiciously; to maintain the public trust in the department’s ability to do its job free of political influence; and to prevent investigations from unfairly or unintentionally casting public suspicion on public officials who have done nothing wrong. [Continue reading…]

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