Gorilla Radio blog: Inside the US Anti-Huawei Op

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Inside the US Anti-Huawei Op

America's Anti-Huawei Op: The Inside Story of the Meng Wanzhou Arrest

by Peter Lee - Newsbud

December 19, 2018

The hot story in China watching is the arrest in Vancouver on December 1st of Meng Wanzhou, the Chief Financial Officer of China telecom giant Huawei, on charges relating to violation of US sanctions against Iran.

This episode of China Watch unpacks the arrest of Meng Wanzhou and America’s vendetta against Huawei: the back story, the legal context, the intelligence community power grab, techwar, the political jockeying between the China hawks and the office of the president, the secret history of a U.S. fiasco everybody wants to forget but casts a shadow over the Meng arrest—hello again! John Bolton and Stuart Levey!—and the ugly story of a U.S. strategy to extend the reach of U.S. national sanctions around the world.

Everything, in other words, that big media wants to ignore in the rush to sell the China threat narrative. It’s all here in this special edition of China Watch.

Even though there is no recorded precedent for arresting a corporate executive for fraud on a sanctions beef with the threat of 30 years in prison, this blatant act of economic and legal warfare was vigorously defended by mainstream scribes as just another example of the superior Western system of rule of law, to be contrasted with the lousy non rule of law thing that China uses to intimidate and extort its adversaries around the world.

King of the journo China hawks, Josh Rogin, schooled the ignorant on twitter:

Hey guys, Trump didn't arrest the Huawei exec to use as a bargaining chip in trade talks. The Justice Dept is charging her with crimes. The timing was a coincidence.

Then Donald Trump weighed in, and blew that talking point out of the water:

“If I think it’s good for what will be certainly the largest trade deal ever made – which is a very important thing – what’s good for national security – I would certainly intervene if I thought it was necessary.”