Off-Balance Israel Reassessing Regional Situation

Israel’s Geopolitical Gut Check

by Sharmine Narwani - The American Conservative

September 6, 2017 

A once favorable balance of power has shifted, clipping Tel Aviv's wings

Tel Aviv has had a bad few weeks. A once favorable regional balance of power has suddenly shifted in a direction that clips Israel’s wings—all while adversaries on its borders are making swift strategic gains. At the core of the issue is Israel’s obsession with Iranian ascendancy in the region. The 2015 nuclear deal that ended the Islamic Republic’s isolation was a real setback for the Israeli establishment, but what really hit home this summer was a steady succession of political and military victories for the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad and his Iranian and Hezbollah allies.

So Israel’s power players headed to the United States and Russia to try to claw back some lost leverage on the ground.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock/yakub88

They returned from Washington empty-handed, unable to wrest guarantees on keeping Iranian and allied troops out of southern Syria, where the U.S. and Russia in July established a de-escalation zone near Israel’s border.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s consultations with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi went nowhere too. Russian accounts of those talks describe a highly “agitated” and “emotional” Netanyahu who was told in no uncertain terms by a calm Putin: “Iran is Russia’s strategic ally in the Middle East.” To Netanyahu, Putin offered what must have comparatively felt like crumbs: “Israel is also an important partner of Russia in the region.”

The Israeli prime minister and other senior officials went on the offensive after that meeting, promising to “defend ourselves by all means” from Iran’s ambitions in Syria, and threatening military attacks on Assad’s “palace in Damascus.”

But the Russians clearly hadn’t forgotten that shortly after Netanyahu’s last encounter with Putin in March, Israel launched strikes against Russia’s Syrian ally, one of which came dangerously near Russian troops.

This time around, it seems Putin was set on drawing new red lines with Israel. In the aftermath of the Netanyahu meeting, the Russians announced the establishment of a unified air defense system with Syria, “capable of destroying targets within a range of up to 400 kilometers at an altitude of up to 35 kilometers.”

Yet the Israeli threats haven’t ceased. So, what explains the panic in Israel right now? And why has it escalated so suddenly?

Lebanon: Last week, Hezbollah, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) closed a chapter on the years-long occupation of eastern Lebanon by ISIS and the Al Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra terrorist groups. The three forces launched a stunning military offensive that took out al-Nusra in a mere six days and ISIS in nine—including time spent in negotiations.

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah dubbed the successful anti-terrorism operation “the Second Liberation”—the first being Lebanon’s liberation from Israeli occupation forces in 2000.

In the years leading up to this battle, Hezbollah and the LAF have been coordinating anti-terrorism efforts in Lebanon, an unprecedented collaboration that has outraged both Israelis and Americans. The U.S. provides training and weaponry for the LAF but considers the Lebanese resistance group a terrorist organization, even though Hezbollah is part of Lebanon’s cabinet and parliament.

The liberation of the strategic Lebanese-Syrian border area has not only freed up Hezbollah forces for deployment on other frontlines—including its southern border with Israel—but importantly, now represents the first full Syrian border reclaimed by the SAA from terrorists since the start of the Syrian crisis.

“The enemy [Israel],” announced Nasrallah after the fight, “is crying over its orphans and is acknowledging the defeat of its project and friends in Syria.”

Syria: The Hezbollah leader may have a point. Outside of ISIS’s stronghold in eastern Syria where it has lost thousands of square kilometers to the SAA and its allies, the terror group occupies one small remaining territory near the border of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. That area in southwestern Syria is also home to several other militant groups, most prominently al-Nusra, whose injured fighters have been tended to by Israeli medics for much of the conflict.

The Israelis, who have reportedly launched dozens of strikes against Syrian allied forces during this conflict, have rarely attacked al-Nusra or ISIS. Israel’s Defense Minister in 2016, Moshe Yaalon, made headlines when he said:

“In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State.” 

Some in the Israeli policy community have supported this line—one recent report from an Israeli think tank entitled “The Destruction of Islamic State is a Strategic Mistake” advocates for keeping ISIS around to “hamper Iran’s quest for regional hegemony.” Given Israel’s fixation with keeping Iran’s influence contained, it’s perhaps no surprise that Syria’s recent spate of victories against ISIS have set off alarm bells in Tel Aviv.

To compound Israel’s setbacks, the U.S.-Russian southern de-escalation agreement has now halted the militants’ ability to fight Syrian allied forces around Quneitra (Syrian Golan), Daraa, and As-Suwayda—areas now policed by Syria’s Russian allies.

Jordan: In Amman, a joint de-escalation monitoring center for this southern zone has just been launched, which will likely force the Jordanians to secure and normalize their northern border with Syria. Earlier this summer, the Jordanians had been on board a Saudi-led (and Israeli-supported) alliance of mostly Sunni Muslim states that sought to squash Iran’s regional influence. At the time, Jordan had loudly insisted on the removal of Iranian-backed fighters from its border with Syria. But today, that “Arab NATO” alliance has collapsed amidst a heated inter-GCC dispute, and Jordanians appear to be recalibrating their regional stance to accept the “de-escalation zone” vision launched by Russia, Turkey, and of course, Iran.

The terms of the southern de-escalation agreement reached between the U.S. and Russia are secret, but the word is that there is no specific language that diminishes the role of Iran, Hezbollah and their allied militias in Syria.

This means Israel can no longer count on Islamist militants obstructing Syrian government control over the south. It also means that Jordan, which just last week re-opened its Trebil border crossing with Iraq, is now moving incrementally toward re-opening its Nasib border crossing with Syria. The commercial dividends of these two actions could contribute between $1-2 billion to Jordan’s depleted coffers—a healthy incentive for the Jordanians to play nice with Syria.

Turkey: Jordan’s political and security “diversification” comes directly on the back of a visit to Amman by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, once the most vocal regional critic of Bashar al-Assad, and a major supplier of weapons and Islamist fighters in the Syrian military theater.

Erdoğan is back in play with the Russians and Iranians after briefly toying with the Saudi “Arab NATO” project directed against Iran. Jordanian media reports even claim the Turkish president offered to coordinate mediation with Iran to smooth over Jordan’s lingering doubts about the de-escalation zone.

But what accounts for his transformation?

While Erdoğan has not explicitly embraced an Assad-ruled Syria or an active Iranian role south of his border, two urgent regional developments have softened his position and drawn him back into the Iranian-Russian orbit.

The first is the major political crisis engulfing the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, pitting Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain against Qatar. Like its Turkish ally, Qatar has been a leading supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and is pursuing a diversified foreign-policy agenda, which includes political and economic relations with Iran.

The GCC spat created a further divide within the region, which until recently consisted mainly of pro-Iran and pro-Saudi camps. Now, Turkey and Qatar form a third camp, and have sought to mitigate Saudi-UAE pressures by re-engaging with Iran and its allies.

The second impetus comes from Washington’s unrelenting support for the mostly-Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighters in the north of Syria. Erdoğan has beseeched the Americans to abandon their support for these Kurds, who are primarily Syrian affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, a group considered a terrorist organization by both Ankara and Washington.

The Americans have ignored Erdoğan’s requests, even though the SDF has shown intent to occupy and federalize the entire north of Syria—from Iraq to the Mediterranean—an area spanning the length of the Turkish border.

On this issue, Ankara now shares common cause with Tehran, Baghdad, and Damascus—all are vehemently opposed to Kurdish national aspirations. This realignment takes place against the backdrop of a Kurdish referendum for independence in Iraq slated for late September, which all four capitals oppose. Israel, which has close ties to the Kurdish government in Erbil, is the only country to date that supports the referendum. Kurdistan is a matter of strategic interest for Tel Aviv. The establishment of Kurdish federal entities in Syria and Iraq, after all, would mean the partitioning and weakening of those Arab states. And importantly, Kurdish statelets in these areas can act as geographic buffers that impede Iran’s easy access to Israel’s borders.

So Turkey’s re-engagement with Iran and Russia not only contributes to the stability of the Syrian state, but also puts a spanner in the works of Israel’s goal of Kurdish independence.

Hamas: The “Resistance Axis” was once a club of four: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas. But conflicting objectives in Syria drew Hamas out of the group—until now. New Hamas leadership has prioritized neutral relationships with all regional states, and has sought to reinstate relations and funding from the Islamic Republic.

Last week, Hamas’ politburo chief in Gaza, Yahya Senwar, announced:

“Iran is the largest supporter of the Ezzedine al-Qassam brigades [Hamas’ military wing] in terms of financial support and support with weapons,” and expressed optimism that “the Syrian crisis shall end, which will open the horizons for restoring the relations with [Syria].”

For Israel, that means the rift between the Hamas-led Gaza Strip and Iran has ended, and weapons and aid will flow back to the Palestinian resistance group unimpeded.

Events on Israel’s western, northern and eastern borders have suddenly—in a few short weeks—scuttled the geopolitical balance that once favored Tel Aviv. Just a few years ago, Syria was disintegrating, Iraq was fragmenting, Lebanon was over-extended, and Gaza struggled alone.

Today, the likelihood of Iran enjoying a contiguous land corridor between its borders and the occupied Golan territory is greater than ever before. The Resistance Axis has gained tremendous military experience in the past six years in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon—and most importantly, has done so by coordinating troops, intelligence and battle plans from a single command center, for the first time in its history as an alliance. Furthermore, this axis now enjoys international political cover from two permanent UN Security Council members, Russia and China. The Russians now have significant military experience alongside three members of this axis, and the Chinese are eager to expand their economic vision into those West Asian states, with Iran as a key hub for oil and gas pipelines.

As these countries move forward to extinguish regional terrorism and reconstruct their infrastructure and societies, the Israelis will be left out in the cold. But while Israel’s options dwindle, its military plans seem to keep getting more attention. It’s the one option—the stick—that the Israelis gravitate to most easily, and a war of aggression against Lebanon and Gaza, or strikes against Syria, are not out of the question.

Hezbollah continues to demand the return of the remaining Israeli-occupied Lebanese territories, the Shebaa Farms and Kfarshuba hills, and Syria, once back on its feet, will do the same with the Golan. Both will do so from a strengthened position in this new Middle East.

Yet the question remains: Does Israel recognize its new environment?

Sharmine Narwani is a commentator and analyst of Mideast geopolitics, based in Beirut.

Pushing Kim: The Other Shoe in Korea Crisis

What the Media isn’t Telling You About North Korea’s Missile Tests

by Mike Whitney  - CounterPunch

September 4, 2017

Here’s what the media isn’t telling you about North Korea’s recent missile tests.

Last Monday, the DPRK fired a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan’s Hokkaido Island. The missile landed in the waters beyond the island harming neither people nor property.

The media immediately condemned the test as a “bold and provocative act” that showed the North’s defiance of UN resolutions and “contempt for its neighbors.”


Photo Stefan Krasowski | CC BY 2.0

President Trump sharply criticized the missile test saying: 

“Threatening and destabilizing actions only increase the North Korean regime’s isolation in the region and among all nations of the world. All options are on the table.”

What the media failed to mention was that, for the last three weeks, Japan, South Korea and the US have been engaged in large-scale joint-military drills on Hokkaido Island and in South Korea. These needlessly provocative war games are designed to simulate an invasion of North Korea and a “decapitation” operation to remove (Re: Kill) the regime.

North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un has asked the US repeatedly to end these military exercises, but the US has stubbornly refused. The US reserves the right to threaten anyone, anytime and anywhere even right on their doorstep. It’s part of what makes the US exceptional. Check out this excerpt from an article at Fox News:

“More than 3,500 American and Japanese troops kicked off a weeks-long joint military exercise Thursday against the backdrop of an increasingly belligerent North Korean regime. The exercise, known as Northern Viper 17, will take place on Hokkaido — Japan’s northern-most main island — and will last until Aug. 28….

“We are improving our readiness not only in the air, but as a logistical support team,” Col. R. Scott Jobe, the 35th Fighter Wing commander, said in a statement. “We are in a prime location for contingency purposes and this exercise will only build upon our readiness in the case a real-world scenario occurs.” (US, Japanese troops begin joint military exercise amid North Korea threat”, Fox News)

Monday’s missile test (which flew over Hokkaido Island) was conducted just hours after the war games ended. The message was clear: The North is not going to be publicly humiliated and slapped around without responding. Rather than show weakness, the North demonstrated that it was prepared to defend itself against foreign aggression. In other words, the test was NOT a “bold and provocative act” (as the media stated) but a modest and well thought-out response by a country that has experienced 64 years of relentless hectoring, sanctions, demonization and saber rattling by Washington. The North responded because the Washington’s incitements required a response. End of story.

And the same is true of the three short-range ballistic missiles the North tested last week. (two of which apparently fizzled out shortly after launching.) These tests were a response to the 3 week-long joint-military drills in South Korea which involved 75,000 combat troops accompanied by hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, landing craft, heavy artillery, a full naval flotilla and flyovers by squadrons of state of the art fighters and strategic bombers. Was the North supposed to sit on its hands while this menacing display of brute military force took place right under its nose???

Of course not. Imagine if Russia engaged in a similar operation over the border in Mexico while the Russian fleet conducted “live fire” drills three miles outside of San Francisco Bay. What do you think Trump’s reaction would be?

He’d blow those boats out of the water faster than you could say “Jackie Robinson”, right?

So why the double standard when it comes to North Korea? Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

North Korea should be applauded for showing that it won’t be intimidated by the schoolyard bully. Kim knows that any confrontation with the US will end badly for the North, even so, he hasn’t caved in or allowed himself to be pushed around by the blustering, browbeating thugs in the White House. Booyah, Kim.

By the way, Trump’s response to Monday’s missile test was barely covered in the mainstream media, and for good reason. Here’s what happened two days later:

On Wednesday, a US-led flight-group of F-35B fighters, F-15 fighters and B-1B bombers conducted military operations over a training range east of Seoul. The B-1B’s, which are low-altitude nuclear bombers, dropped their dummy-bombs on the site and then returned to their home base. The show of force was intended to send a message to Pyongyang that Washington is unhappy with the North’s ballistic missile testing project and is prepared to use nuclear weapons against the North if it fails to heed Washington’s diktats.

So Washington is prepared to nuke the North if they don’t straighten up and do as they are told?

It sure looks that way, but who really knows? In any event, Kim has no choice but to stand firm. If he shows any sign of weakness, he knows he’s going to end up like Saddam and Gaddafi. And that, of course, is what’s driving the hyperbolic rhetoric; the North wants to avoid the Gaddafi scenario at all cost. (BTW, the reason Kim has threatened to fire missiles at the waters surrounding Guam is because Guam is the home of Anderson Airforce Base which is the point-of-origin for the B-1B nuclear-capable bombers that have been making threatening flyovers on the Korean Peninsula for some time now. The North feels like it has to respond to that existential threat.

Wouldn’t it help if the media mentioned that fact or does it better serve their agenda to make it look like Kim is barking mad by lashing out against the ‘totally innocent’ United States, a country that only seeks to preserve the peace wherever it goes?

Give me a break!

It is so hard to find anything in the media that doesn’t reflect Washington’s bias and hostility. Surprisingly, there was pretty decent article at CBS News last week written by a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia. It’s the only article I’ve found that accurately explains what’s really going on beyond the propaganda. Check it out:

“Prior to President Trump’s inauguration, North Korea made it clear it was prepared to give the new U.S. administration time to review the policy and come up with something better than President Obama’s. The only wrinkle was that if the U.S. went full-steam ahead with its annual joint exercises with South Korea (especially if that were accompanied by more talk of “decapitation” and more flights of strategic bombers over the Korean peninsula), the North would react strongly.

In short, the U.S. did, and the North reacted.

Behind-the-scenes contacts went up and down, but couldn’t get traction. In April, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un paraded new missiles as a warning, to no effect. The regime launched the new systems, one after another. Still, Washington’s approach didn’t change.” (Analysis: Pyongyang’s view of the North Korea-U.S. crisis”, CBS News)

Okay, so now we know the truth: The North gave it their best shot and came up snakeeyes, mainly because Washington doesn’t want to negotiate, they’d rather twist arms (Russia and China), tighten the embargo and threaten war. That’s Trump’s solution. Here’s more from the same piece:

“On July 4, after North Korea’s first successful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch, Kim sent a public signal that the North could put the nuclear and missile programs “on the table” if the U.S. changed its approach.

The U.S. did not, so the North launched another ICBM, very deliberately deeming it a warning to the U.S. that they were to be taken seriously. Still, more B-1 bombers flew over the Peninsula, and the U.N. Security Council passed new sanctions.” (CBS News)

So, the North was ready to do some serious horse-trading, but the US balked. Kim probably heard what a wheeler dealer Trump was and figured they could work something out. But it hasn’t happen. Trump has turned out to be a bigger bust than Obama, which is pretty bad. He not only refuses to negotiate but he also delivers bellicose threats almost every day. This isn’t what the North was expecting. They were expecting a “non interventionist” leader who might be receptive to a trade-off.

The current situation has left Kim with no good options. He can either cave in and terminate his missile program altogether or increase the frequency of the tests and hope that they pave the way for negotiations. Kim chose the latter.

Did he make a bad choice?

Maybe.

Is it a rational choice?

Yes.

The North is betting that its nuclear weapons programs will be valuable bargaining chits in future negotiations with the United States. The North has no plan to nuke the west coast of the United States. That’s ridiculous! That doesn’t accomplish anything. What they want is to preserve their regime, procure security guarantees from Washington, lift the embargo, normalize relations with the South, extricate the US from the political affairs of the peninsula, and (hopefully) end the irritating and endlessly provocative 64 year US occupation. Yankee go home. Please.

Bottom line: The North is ready to deal. They want negotiations. They want to end the war. They want to put this whole nightmare behind them and get on with their lives. But Washington won’t let them because Washington likes the status quo. Washington wants to be a permanent feature in South Korea so it can encircle Russia and China with lethal missile systems and expand its geopolitical grip bringing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon.

That’s what Washington wants, and that’s why the crisis on the peninsula will continue to boil.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

More articles by:Mike Whitney

Appalling! Meeting the Pottingers

The Appalling Pottingers

by Craig Murray

6 Sep, 2017

One wealthy family through generations has been a pillar of the British establishment, and at the same time responsible for an astonishing amount of harm. Yet you have probably never heard of the Pottingers.

Their history can almost make you believe in Grand Guginol stories that a capacity for evil can be genetically inherited.

The Bell Pottinger scandal in South Africa, where the PR firm has been found to have deliberately exacerbated racial tension in collusion with corrupt billionaires, is only the latest episode. Here is a glimpse into the astonishing story of the Pottingers.

Purely by chance I have stumbled in three entirely different ways on the activities of the Pottingers in different generations, which is how I can tell this story, and nobody else can.

Sir Henry Pottinger 1789-1856 Protagonist of the Opium War – Tiberius Like Imperial Ruler Steeped in Sexual Exploitation

In researching Sikunder Burnes, I encountered Sir Henry Pottinger, pillar of the British establishment and Burnes’ boss, who features prominently throughout the book. As a very young man Henry undertook one of those heroic journeys in disguise that were a staple of Raj exploration, across the Baloch lands to Persia. But he developed into an extremely bellicose imperialist, craving the annexation of the territory of modern Pakistan. He also developed a pathological hatred of Burnes. This caused him to contradict Burnes’ advice to disembark Sir John Keane’s Bombay Army at Karachi in 1839, instead choosing a completely unsuitable beach. He also overruled Burnes’ personally reconnoitred supply line through the Thatta desert. Both decisions were wrong and based on intense jealousy of Burnes, and caused major delays and losses to the army.

Henry Pottinger found the outlet for his Imperial aggression in the Opium War, as breathtakingly immoral a war as any in the history of all Empire, in which Britain forced China to accept the flow of opium from the East India Company. After killing Chinese with brutal efficiency, Pottinger was responsible for the forced cession by lease of Hong Kong as a UK colony. He became the first Governor of Hong Kong.

The history books are coy on the circumstances which led to his tenure of Hong Kong being cut short, and this being beyond the scope of my Burnes book I did not get into manuscript research on it, but it involved a dispute with the British merchants and involved both Henry Pottinger’s personal money-making schemes and his relationship with “pretty Mrs Morgan.” Removed to South Africa as Governor of Cape Colony, the history books are more explicit about why he did not last long there. G M Theal’s History of South Africa recounts:

No other Governor of his colony ever lived in such open licentiousness as he. His amours would have been scandalous in a young man, in one approaching his sixtieth anniversary they were inexcusable… a cold, calculating, sneering, unsympathetic demeanour prevented men of virtue being attached to him.

Eldred Pottinger 1811-43 Imperial Fraud 

 

Henry’s nephew Eldred became famous to Victorians as “The Hero of Herat”. It is a great story of the British Empire. On shooting leave, Eldred Pottinger was indulging in the favourite heroic occupation of exploring the North West Frontier of the Raj in disguise. He chanced to be in Herat when this Afghan city came under lengthy siege from a Russian-officered Persian army. The cowardly Afghan rulers would have been overwhelmed but fortunately the lone plucky Brit in the City organised the defences and held the Russian hordes at bay, preventing their marching on India. Famously, at one point when Persian troops had breached the defences, Pottinger drove the cowardly fleeing Wazir, Yar Mohammed Khan, back to fight with the flat of his sword.

Except it is all utter bullshit. Surviving manuscript letters of Alexander Burnes make plain Pottinger was in Herat on Burnes’ orders, and Burnes explicitly states that Eldred Pottinger’s presence in the city being “on leave” was a ruse because Britain was breaking its explicit treaty obligation to be neutral in a conflict between Afghanistan and Persia. Yet no British historian has ever published this until I published Sikunder Burnes – even Peter Hopkirk and William Dalrymple repeat the lie of Eldred being there accidentally.

Furthermore the idea that the Afghans were cowards inspired by a true Brit is total nonsense. Pottinger was by no means the only European involved in the city’s defence. The entire story of the “Hero of Herat”, including the bit about driving the Wazir to the breach with his sword, was concocted by the Raj’s great Victorian propagandist, Sir John Kaye. The only evidence for it was said to be in Pottinger’s own journals, which were “accidentally” destroyed in a fire in Kaye’s study. To be fair to Eldred Pottinger, Burnes (who knew the Wazir well and doubted the story) records that Eldred never spoke of his famous exploits, and became embarrassed when they were mentioned. Eldred Pottinger survived captivity in the First Afghan War but died during the Opium War, possibly by suicide.

Sir Frederick Pottinger 1831-65 – Australian Villain 

 

Henry Pottinger’s son Frederick occupies a position in Australian folklore akin to the Sheriff of Nottingham in England, as the ruthless enforcer of harsh British rule and enemy of the Bushrangers. While the latter are unfairly romanticised, there is no doubt Fred was a nasty piece of work.

Eton educated, Frederick whored and gambled his way through much of the family estate, and although his father was a senior Imperial governor, Fred was cut off and sent to a lowly position in the New South Wales police. All of Henry’s ruthlessness in the Opium War was displayed by Fred in law enforcement in Australia. In March 1863 a young boy accused of being a gang lookout died in detention under Fred Pottinger and his notoriety spread. In 1865 Pottinger was dismissed for his violent conduct in pursuing fugitives, and died shortly thereafter in a gun accident, again possibly a suicide.

William George Pottinger 1906-98- Scotland’s Corrupt Civil Service Chief 

 

The Pottingers continued right at the heart of the British political establishment, and I skip several generations – but assure you it is the same family – to come to William Pottinger. The most disgusting example of a modern corrupt civil servant imaginable, William was right up there in the monarchical pecking order, awarded by the Queen as a Companion of the Royal Victorian Order and Companion of the Order of the Bath. While Permanent Secretary at the Scottish Office, Pottinger corruptly handed the architect George Poulson a contract to design the Aviemore Centre. Poulson’s bribes to Pottinger included £20,000 cash, cars and Savile Row suits. William Pottinger was sentenced to seven years in jail, reduced to four on his flashing his royal awards and establishment connections. Oh sorry, I meant on appeal.

This was the second time I came into contact with the baleful Pottinger story, my own father having a relationship with Poulson and Pottinger through T Dan Smith, my father serving for years as a manager at the Aviemore Centre where I also worked throughout my teens.

After jail William published, under his middle name George Pottinger, execrable biographies of his ancestors Henry and Eldred Pottinger, which elide pretty well all I have told you here.

Piers Julian Dominic Pottinger 1954-present – Right Wing Propagandist 

 

The son of the disgusting criminal William George Pottinger is Piers Pottinger, and I wish to make plain that I do not believe that psychotic behaviour can be inherited and that in no way is this blog intended to imply that Piers Pottinger, Chairman of MySquar Ltd registered in Tortola in the entirely respectable British Virgin Islands, is in any way connected with anything dodgy.

Mr Pottinger is a highly accepted pillar of the British establishment just like all his ancestors.

Piers currently chairs the Asian wing of Bell Pottinger, which he co-founded with Tim Bell. They were famously propagandists for Thatcher and also Tory Party donors.

Until the current massive corruption scandal in South Africa led to suspension of operations, Bell Pottinger had represented an entirely respectable slate of clients including:

Dictator President Augusto Pinochet of Chile
Dictator Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus
The vicious torturing monarchy of Bahrain
Oscar Pistorius
Kate & Gerry McCann
Rolf Harris
Trafigura
Coca Cola

I could go on.

This current manifestation of this “remarkable” family was the subject of my third personal stumbling on information. In about (from memory) 2006, Uzbek opposition leader Mohammed Solih visited Britain, after I had helped campaign to get him a visa. While here, one businessman took him to a meeting in a grand board room in the City of London. There an astonishing presentation was made to him, and an astonishing proposition put.

Solih could be made President of Uzbekistan in a year. Substantial money would be invested upfront to undermine President Karimov. Key named leaders in the Uzbek security services and defence forces would be bought up. The media narrative to the Uzbek public would be secured. Financial sector activity would isolate Karimov’s access to his money in the UK and Europe. A revolution could successfully be procured. In return, all Solih had to do was to sign contracts to deliver Uzbekistan’s oil, gas, gold and uranium to certain Western companies – special purpose vehicles which disguised who really would benefit.

Solih was astonished. “Just who are you?” he joked “are you MI6 or the Illuminati?”

No, came the reply, we are Bell Pottinger.

Solih of course refused to sell his country down the river. The story sounded amazing when he first told me, but in the light of what we now hear from South Africa it makes perfect sense.

The Pottingers. A key cog in the evil ways of the British establishment, down the centuries. Understanding the history of this family gives an essential glimpse into just how the British establishment really works.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Nathalie Chambers, Ken Boon, Christina Nikolic September 6, 2017

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

September 6, 2017 

In the last days of last winter, long-time Saanich councillor, Vic Derman died. Derman championed the conservation of the municipality's dwindling farm lands and agricultural heritage, and one of those he supported was Madrona Farm in the Blenkinsop Valley.

Nathalie Chambers farms at Madrona, and was the first to declare her intentions to run in the by-election to fill Vic's seat; an election scheduled for Saturday, September 23rd.

Listen. Hear.

Chambers is an organic farmer, business owner, progressive community leader, fundraiser, project manager, public speaker on biodiversity and local food security, and author of the book, 'Saving Farmland: The Fight for Real Food,'. She earned a diploma in Restoration Ecology at UVic, and has years of experience in community planning, and issues management.

Nathalie Chambers in the first half.

And; the recent change of government in BC has opened the books on the Site-C project, the 9-plus billion dollar mega-project in the province's Peace Country. It's been highly contentious from the start, and the exclusion of the BC Utilities Commission from the assessment process was just one of the project's many bones of contention. Now, the BCUC is back in the picture, and has announced 11 community input sessions to be held across the province as part of its review process, starting Sept. 23, three days after the release of its preliminary report on the proposed dam.

Ken Boon is a Peace River Valley farmer whose family farm was expropriated by BC Hydro for a Site-C connecting highway scheme. He's also president of the Peace Valley Landowners Association, and has fought the dam from the beginning.

Ken Boon and the fighting the last dam on the Peace River in the second half.

And; Victoria gardening guru and green entrepreneur, Christina Nikolic will join us at the bottom of the hour with Left Coast Events highlights for the coming week. But first, Nathalie Chambers and a Saanich election at the crossroads.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Wednesday, 1-2pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: https://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

Rise of the Generals

Victory at Last! In America’s Wars, Failure Is the New Success

by Tom Engelhardt - Tom Dispatch

September 5, 2017   

It was bloody and brutal, a true generational struggle, but give them credit. In the end, they won when so many lost.

James Comey was axed. Sean Spicer went down in a heap of ashes. Anthony Scaramucci crashed and burned instantaneously. Reince Priebus hung on for dear life but was finally canned. Seven months in, Steve Bannon got the old heave-ho and soon after, his minion, Sebastian Gorka, was unceremoniously shoved out the White House door. In a downpour of potential conflicts of interest and scandal, Carl Icahn bowed out. Gary Cohn has reportedly been at the edge of resignation. And so it goes in the Trump administration.

Except for the generals. Think of them as the last men standing. They did it. They took the high ground in Washington and held it with remarkable panache. Three of them: National Security Advisor Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Secretary of Defense and retired Marine General John Mattis, and former head of the Department of Homeland Security, now White House Chief of Staff, retired Marine General John Kelly stand alone, except for President Trump’s own family members, at the pinnacle of power in Washington.

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Last Men Standing

[Note to TomDispatch Readers: We’re back from a rare break and ready to roll. Don’t forget to order a copy of Dispatch Books’ latest volume (due out next week), historian Alfred McCoy’s remarkable and all-too-timely exploration of the waning of imperial America, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. And if you weren't online in the last days of August, make sure to check out McCoy's most recent TD piece on his half-century of adventures with the CIA. Like his book, it’s an instant classic. Tom] 

Victory at Last! In America’s Wars, Failure Is the New Success

by Tom Engelhardt

 

Those three generals from America’s losing wars are now triumphant. One of them is the ultimate gatekeeper when it comes to who sees the president. All three influence his thoughts and speeches. They are the “civilians” who control the military and American war policy. They, and they alone, have made the president go against his deepest urges, as he admitted in his address to the nation on the war in Afghanistan. (“My original instinct was to pull out and historically I like following my instincts.”) They’ve convinced him to release the military (and the CIA) from significant oversight on how they pursue their wars across the Greater Middle East, Africa, and now the Philippines. They even convinced him to surround their future actions in a penumbra of secrecy.

Their wars, the ones that began almost 16 years ago and just keep morphing and spreading (along with a proliferating assortment of terror groups), are now theirs alone to fight and... well, we’ll get to that. But first let’s step back a moment and think about what’s happened since January.

The Winningest President and the Losingest Generals

The most surprising winner of our era and possibly -- to put ourselves fully in the Trumpian spirit -- of any era since the first protozoan stalked the Earth entered the Oval Office on January 20th and promptly surrounded himself with a set of generals from America’s failed wars of the post-9/11 era. In other words, the man who repeatedly promised that in his presidency Americans would win to the point of tedium -- “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore’” -- promptly chose to elevate the losingest guys in town. If reports are to be believed, he evidently did this because of his military school background, his longstanding crush on General George Patton of World War II fame (or at least the movie version of him), and despite having actively avoided military service himself in the Vietnam years, his weak spot for four stars with tough monikers like “Mad Dog.”

During the election campaign, though a general of his choice led the chants to “lock her up,” Trump himself was surprisingly clear-eyed when it came to the nature of American generalship in the twenty-first century. As he put it, “Under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton the generals have been reduced to rubble, reduced to a point where it is embarrassing for our country.” On coming to power, however, he reached into that rubble to choose his guys. In the years before he ran, he had been no less clear-eyed on the war he just extended in Afghanistan. Of that conflict, he typically tweeted in 2013, “We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let's get out!”

On the other hand, the careers of his three chosen generals are inextricably linked to America’s losing wars. Then-Colonel H.R. McMaster gained his reputation in 2005 by leading the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment into the Iraqi city of Tal Afar and “liberating” it from Sunni insurgents, while essentially inaugurating the counterinsurgency tactics that would become the heart and soul of General David Petraeus’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq.

Only one small problem: McMaster’s much-publicized “victory,” like so many other American military successes of this era, didn’t last. A year later, Tal Afar was “awash in sectarian violence,” wrote Jon Finer, a Washington Post reporter who accompanied McMaster into that city. It would be among the first Iraqi cities taken by Islamic State militants in 2014 and has only recently been “liberated” (yet again) by the Iraqi military in a U.S.-backed campaign that has left it only partially in rubble, unlike so many other fully rubblized cities in the region. In the Obama years, McMaster would be the leader of a task force in Afghanistan that “sought to root out the rampant corruption that had taken hold” in the American-backed government there, an effort that would prove a dismal failure.

Marine General Mattis led Task Force 58 into southern Afghanistan in the invasion of 2001, establishing the “first conventional U.S. military presence in the country.” He repeated the act in Iraq in 2003, leading the 1st Marine Division in the U.S. invasion of that country. He was involved in the taking of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in 2003; in the fierce fighting for and partial destruction of the city of Fallujah in 2004; and, in that same year, the bombing of what turned out to be a wedding party, not insurgents, near the Syrian border. (“How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?” was his response to the news.) 

In 2010, he was made head of U.S. Central Command, overseeing the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan until 2013 when he urged the Obama administration to launch a “dead of night” operation to take out an Iranian oil refinery or power plant, his idea of an appropriate response to Iran’s role in Iraq. His proposal was rejected and he was “retired” from his command five months early. 

In other words, he lost his chance to set off yet another never-ending American war in the Middle East. He is known for his “Mattisisms” like this piece of advice to U.S. Marines in Iraq in 2003: “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”

Retired Marine General John Kelly was assistant division commander in Iraq under Mattis, who personally promoted him to brigadier general on the battlefield. (Present head of the Joint Chiefs, General Joe Dunford, was an officer in the same division at the same time and all three reportedly remain friends.) Though Kelly had a second tour of duty in Iraq, he never fought in Afghanistan. Tragically, however, one of his sons (who had also fought in Fallujah in 2004) died there after stepping on an improvised explosive device in 2010.

McMaster was among the earliest figures in the Pentagon to begin speaking of the country’s post-9/11 wars as “generational” (that is, never-ending). In 2014, he said,

“If you think this war against our way of life is over because some of the self-appointed opinion-makers and chattering class grow ‘war weary,’ because they want to be out of Iraq or Afghanistan, you are mistaken. This enemy is dedicated to our destruction. He will fight us for generations, and the conflict will move through various phases as it has since 9/11.”

In short, you could hardly pick three men more viscerally connected to the American way of war, less capable of seriously reassessing what they have lived through, or more fully identified with the failures of the war on terror, especially the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. When it comes to the “rubble” of American generalship in these years, Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly would certainly be at the top of anyone’s list.

Think of them, in fact, as the ultimate survivors of a system that at its upper levels is not known, even in the best of times, for promoting original, outside-the-box thinkers. They are, in other words, the ultimate four-star conformists because that’s the character trait you need to make it to generalship in the U.S. military. (Original thinkers and critics never seem to make it past the rank of colonel.)

And as their “new” Trump-era Afghan policy indicates, when faced with their wars and what to do about them, their answer is invariably some version of more of the same (with the usual, by-now-predictable results).

All Hail the Generals!

Now, let’s take one more step back from the situation at hand, lest you imagine that President Trump’s acts, when it comes to those generals, are unique to our time. Yes, two retired generals and one still active in posts previously (with the rarest of exceptions) reserved for civilians do represent something new in American history. Still, this Trumpian moment should be seen as the culmination of, not a departure from, the policies of the two previous administrations.

In these years, America’s generals have failed everywhere except in one place, and that just happens to be the only place that truly matters. Call Afghanistan a “stalemate” as often as you want, but almost 16 years after the U.S. military loosed the power of “the finest fighting force the world has ever known” (aka “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known”), the Taliban are ascendant in that benighted land and that’s the definition of failure, no matter how you tote things up. Those generals have indeed been losers in that country, as they and others have been in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and someday undoubtedly Syria (no matter what immediate victories they might chalk up). In only one place did their generalship work effectively; in only one place have they truly succeeded; in only one place could they now conceivably proclaim “victory at last!”

That place is, of course, Washington, D.C., where they are indeed the last men standing and, in Trumpian terms, absolute winners.

In Washington, their generalship has been anything but rubble. It’s always been another kind of more -- more of whatever they wanted, from money to surges to ever-greater power and authority. In Washington, they’ve been the winners ever since President George W. Bush launched his Global War on Terror.

What they couldn’t do in Baghdad, Kabul, Tripoli, or anywhere else across the Greater Middle East and Africa, they’ve done impressively in our nation’s capital. In years when they unsuccessfully brought the full power of the greatest arsenal on the planet to bear on enemies whose weaponry cost the price of a pizza, they continued to rake in billions of dollars in Washington. In fact, it’s reasonable to argue that the losing conflicts in the war on terror were necessary prerequisites for the winning budgetary battles in that city. Those never-ending conflicts -- and a more generalized (no pun intended) fear of (Islamic) terrorism heavily promoted by the national security state -- have driven funding success to staggering levels in the nation’s capital, perhaps the single issue on which Repubicans and Democrats have seen eye to eye in this period.

In this context, Donald Trump’s decision to surround himself with “his” generals has simply brought this reality more fully into focus. He’s made it clear why the term “deep state,” often used by critics of American war and national security policies, inadequately describes the situation in Washington in this century. That term brings up images of a hidden state-within-a-state that controls the rest of the government in some conspiratorial fashion. The reality in Washington today is nothing like that. Despite both its trove of secrets and its desire to cast a shadow of secrecy over government operations, the national security state hasn’t exactly been lurking in the shadows in these years.

In Washington, whatever the Constitution may say about civilian control of the military, the generals -- at least at present -- control the civilians and the deep state has become the all-too-visible state. In this context, one thing is clear, whether you’re talking about the country’s panoply of “intelligence” agencies or the Pentagon, failure is the new success.

And for all of this, one thing continues to be essential: those “generational struggles” in distant lands. If you want to see how this works in a nutshell, consider a single line from a recent piece on the Afghan War by New York Times reporter Rod Nordland. “Even before the president’s [Afghan] speech, the American military and Afghan leaders were laying long-term plans,” Nordland points out and, in that context, adds in passing, “The American military has a $6.5-billion plan to make the Afghan air force self-sufficient and end its overreliance on American air power by 2023.”

Think for a moment about just that relatively modest part (a mere $6.5 billion!) of the U.S. military’s latest plans for a more-of-the-same future in Afghanistan. As a start, we’re already talking about six more years of a war that began in October 2001, was essentially an extension of a previous conflict fought there from 1979 to 1989, and is already the longest war in American history. In other words, the idea of a “generational struggle” there is anything but an exaggeration.

Recall as well that, in January 2008, U.S. Brigadier General Jay Lindell, then-commander of the Combined Air Power Transition Force in Afghanistan, was projecting an eight-year U.S. plan that would leave the Afghan air force fully staffed, supplied, trained, and “self-sufficient” by 2015. (In 2015, Rod Nordland would check out that air force and find it in a “woeful state” of near ruin.)

So in 2023, if that full $6.5 billion is indeed invested in -- perhaps the more fitting phrase might be squandered on -- the Afghan air force, one thing is a given: it will not be “self-sufficient.” After all, 16 years later with not $6.5 billion but more than $65 billion appropriated by Congress and spent on the training of the Afghan security forces, they are now taking terrible casualties, experiencing horrendous desertion rates, filled with “ghost” personnel, and anything but self-sufficient. Why imagine something different for that country’s air force $6.5 billion and six years later?

In America’s war on terror, such things should be considered tales foretold, even as the losing generals of those losing wars strut their stuff in Washington. Elsewhere on the planet, the U.S. military’s plans for 2020, 2023, and beyond will undoubtedly be yet more landmarks on a highway to failure. Only in Washington do such plans invariably work out. Only in Washington does more of the same turn out to be the ultimate formula for success. Our losing wars, it seems, are a necessary backdrop for the ultimate winning war in our nation’s capital. So all hail America’s generals, mission accomplished!

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Tom Engelhardt

The Other Flood: Western Media Largely Passes on Record Monsoon

Media Downplays Millions Affected by Climate Change-Linked Floods in Asia 

by TRNN

September 1, 2017

Over 1200 people have been killed in rains that have inundated a third of Bangladesh along with portion of India, Nepal and Pakistan.

As the devastation of Hurricane Harvey dominates the airwaves, another massive flooding event is happening across Southeast Asia, leaving two thirds of Bangladesh under water, according to Oxfam. Flooding has inundated eastern India to Mumbai, Karachi, Pakistan and Nepal. 41 million people have been affected, with the death toll at 1200 and rising.

To talk about the links between climate change and what could be done about, we reached Neha Khandekar, from The Center for Global Environmental Research.

Rescuers in the Indian city of Mumbai wound down on Friday their search for victims in the ruins of a condemned building that collapsed, after pulling 12 survivors and 34 bodies from the rubble, emergency services said. The 117-year-old, six story building in a congested old neighborhood came crashing down early on Thursday after heavy rain had drenched the financial hub for days.

Harvey: Freak Storm, or Harbinger of New Normal?

Harvey: Fierce Climate Change at Work

by Robert Hunziker - CounterPunch

September 1, 2017

Is Harvey a force of nature or something more?

Clearly, Harvey is a natural disaster of monstrous proportions. Its destructiveness is the hottest topic on TV coast-to-coast and around the world. Still, cynics of climate change say natural disasters, like hurricanes, are normal and nothing more than nature’s way.

The evidence, however, points in another direction; climate change is no longer simply nature doing its thing. It’s lost purity of the force of nature, only nature.

Similar to the record setting massive meltdown of Arctic ice in a flash of geologic time, fierce storms and zany weather patterns are setting all-time records, hyper-speeding nature’s time clock.

In point of fact, bigger/faster all-time records have become the norm, racing ahead of nature, prompting the question: Why is this happening?

The likely answer is: The human footprint is driving climate change to hyper speed; in some instances 10xs faster than climate change over the past millennia.

Indeed, today’s rapidly changing climate is the upshot of the Great Acceleration or post WWII human footprint into/onto the ecosystem, with authority, knocking down weather records along the way. Abnormal is now normal. One-hundred-year floods are passé, outmoded, old hat. Epic floods and historic droughts are the norm. It’s all happened within the past couple of decades. Recent examples include the following:

It was only a couple of years ago that Hurricane Sandy caused $75B in damages as the 2nd costliest hurricane in U.S. history. But then again, New York is not located in hurricane country. Still, it happened and is but one more example of a climate gone bonkers.

In France in 2003, the hottest heat wave in over 500 years killed approximately 15,000, as well as 70,000 throughout Europe. Stifling heat hung in the air for months, no movement, atmospheric troughs of jet streams stood still, likely influenced and altered by global warming, specifically via radical changes in the Arctic, which is losing its bright reflecting ice cap that used to reflect up to 90% of solar radiation back into outer space. But, alas, warming 2xs-to-3xs the world average hit Arctic ice, losing much its reflective cover, with danger signals ever-present thereafter, like crazed out-of-whack jet streams (which negatively alter weather patterns throughout the Northern Hemisphere) to methane eruptions from below, potentially endangering all life forms with runaway global warming.

Meanwhile, drought clobbered the Middle East, especially Syria, experiencing its worst-ever drought in 900 years, displacing one-to-two million farmers/herders and contributing to Syria’s socio/economic disruption, leading to conflict.

Throughout the Middle Eastern region “it’s well outside the norm of natural variability indicating that a climate change signal is likely emerging in the region.” (Source: Benjamin I. Cook, et al, Spatiotemporal Drought Variability in the Mediterranean Over the Last 900 Years, Journal of Geophysical Research- Atmospheres, DOI: 10.1002/2015/D023929)

The regular ole brand of climate change for hundreds and thousands of years is history. In the past, when tropical storms and hurricanes hit, swooshing onshore, they’d die-off when hitting land. That’s nature marching to its own drummer.

Whereas, Harvey hits and then hits again and again while carrying boatloads of moisture, well above and beyond any storm ever recorded. Cause and effect, it’s the human footprint, too much of everything, including too much CO2 emitted from planes, trains, and automobiles and power plants and big fat cows weighing down the atmosphere, heating things up and altering jet streams that dictate weather patterns. It’s a deadly cocktail of nature plus the human footprint of the Great Acceleration deviously at work!

Harvey is so monstrous that it brings forth the best of the best talking heads, a prerequisite with something so momentous, so absolutely huge, all encompassing. For example, Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University), one of America’s most illustrious atmospheric scientists writing for the Guardian, says “human action” made Harvey worse because (1) anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change has raised seawater levels, goosing the storm surge, and (2) higher temperatures than in the past cause more moisture in the atmosphere meaning more rainfall, and (3) Harvey mysteriously hovers over Houston, not dying over land like hurricanes always do because human-caused global warming has altered weather patterns. (Source: Mann, M. E. et al. Influence of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Planetary Wave Resonance and Extreme Weather Events. Sci. Rep. 7, 45242; doi: 10.1038/srep45242, 2017).

Meanwhile, day-over-day, hour-by-hour Houstonians fight for survival, but back in Washington, D.C., Trump’s proposed budget calls for a 16% cut to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which serves as the public’s eyes and ears for all things atmospheric, satellite and weather related. For example $513M is cut from NOAA”s satellite division, potentially crippling NOAA’s ability to keep afloat key satellites relied upon by business, military, and weather services for the general public.

“Scientists and meteorologists have worried that the cuts, and much more devastating reductions in climate change programs at NASA and other agencies, would harm the agency’s ability to forecast storms. In recent decades, the improvement in forecasting technologies has saved hundreds of lives, especially when it comes to tornadoes. The National Weather Service notes that hundreds used to die from pop up tornadoes like the ones that blew through Oklahoma in the mid-1970s, and that deaths are way down due to accurate predictions.” (Source: Matthew Cooper, Trump’s Proposed Cuts to Weather Research Could Make it Much Harder to Prepare for Storms, Grist- Climate Desk, Aug. 25, 2017).

The tragedy of Houston is heartrendingly supremely more tragic under guidance of the Trump administration, which is cutting anything and everything related to science. By all appearances, Trump has a bone to pick with intellectual and scientific matters of state. He’s uncomfortable unless involved in primitive elementary scenarios, like speaking before a crowd of glassy-eyed lackeys.

As it happens, Houston’s mourning exposes and brings to the surface Trump’s destructionist mentality in pure numbers that will soon be presented to the public via congress for consideration.

Trump’s budget proposal cuts $667M from FEMA state and local funding, including disaster preparedness and response programs and cuts $90M from FEMA’s pre-disaster mitigation program and eliminates the entire $190M for national flood insurance analysis program. Henceforth, states and localities will contribute 25% toward grants that they previously did not fund.

The same Trump budget that cuts FEMA programs by about $1B proposes $2.6B in funding for The Wall. For this spending proposal Trump is willing to shut down the government to force Congress to pay up or be damned/blamed for shutting down the fiefdom.

But, will The Wall prevent storms or will it perversely create more?

  

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at roberthunziker@icloud.com

More articles by:Robert Hunziker 

GI Cop:Trump’s ‘Arms for Cops’ Program Just Means More Militarization of the Police

Another sop to the gun nuts : President Trump’s ‘Arms for Cops’ Program Just Means More Militarization of the Police

by Dave Lindorff  - This Can't Be Happening

August 30, 2017

President Trump’s pandering executive order reversing an Obama decision to scale back the dumping of surplus military equipment on the nation’s already over-armed police departments includes word that his new “toys (arms)-for-cops” benefit program will include Army and Marine surplus bayonets.

Let’s ponder that for a moment.




Cops or soldiers? In today's America it's hard to know.

The Army gave up bayonets for combat use after the Korean War (the last recorded US bayonet charge was in 1951 in that war). Now, while the Marines still train in bayonet use in boot camp in a bow to tradition, the reality is that nobody actually uses them in combat.

So you have to ask: If the military doesn’t think that bayonets are needed or useful in actual combat, why would police in the US need them?”

It’s a good question and gets to the larger question of why American cops need any of the gear that they’re being offered — once again — by the US military: everything from RPGs to MRAP “tanks” so heavy that if called out for a SWAT raid, a route has to first be carefully plotted and followed that doesn’t cross over any of this country’s worn-out and and crumbling bridges and culverts (an MRAP weighs 14-18 tons, while local street viaducts in many communities frequently have tonnage limits in the single digits).

 Before he retired, I had a conversation with the chief of police of my community of Upper Dublin, a quiet middle-class suburb of Philadelphia, about militarized policing. A thoughtful veteran of the Vietnam War himself, he disabused me of an automatic and commonly shared assumption I had made that local police SWAT teams were probably populated by combat veterans looking for more adrenalin-pumping action. Actually, he told me, combat vets who go into police work — and there are many who do, thanks to the extra points awarded to veterans by most communities in their hiring — don’t want to be playing soldier when they become police officers. “They’ve had enough of war and killing,” he told me. “It’s the ones who have never been in the military who volunteer for SWAT teams.” He Described such SWAT volunteers as “wannabe soldiers.”

Maybe if police and sheriff’s departments get old Korean War-era bayonets from the Pentagon to put on their semi-automatic rifles, they’ll try launching bayonet charges next time they bust into a house to deliver a bench warrant for a bald tire or missed family court appearance or to look for pot plants, instead of just walking up to the front door in the early morning and bashing it in with a battering ram, as my son witnessed the Savannah Police SWAT unit do trying to arrest a pot dealer who lived next door to him and his schoolmates (the suspect wasn’t home, but his little kids were).

Next we’ll be reading about police stabbings of innocent civilians, instead of their being shot.

Maybe that would be a a good thing. A stabbing victim, I should think, would have a much better chance of survival than someone who is the victim of a barrage of bullets fired by an over-excited assault-rifle carrying cop in the heat of urban, suburban or rural “battle.” That is unless the cop wielding the bayonet decides to engage in multiple piercing of his victim.

Really, this whole thing is getting seriously out of hand.

I was just in England, where I had to spend some time in a National Health Service hospital waiting room, and among other things, I got to see an English version of a reality cop show, where the camera was following a couple of bobbies around on their night patrol. I don’t know what city it was but judging by the size of the railroad station where the portion of the program I watched took place, it must have been a big one.

At any rate, the two bobbies drove up to the train station in response to a call about an apparently deranged man attacking a locked station door and shattering its glass pane. The cops exited their squad car and walked up to the perp. He tried to leave but they gently took him by the arms and restrained him. They kept their voices low and calm and did not draw any weapons (I’m not sure they were carrying guns at all).

“Why did you break that glass?” one cop asked him.

The man had no answer. The other cop asked him where he lived. When he replied that he didn’t have a home, he was told they could take him to social services, which could find him a place.

They told him he had destroyed public property and might have to pay for it. The man said he had no money, so they said they had to bring him in to the station. They then walked him — no handcuffs needed — to the squad car, and helped him gently into the back seat, which is walled off from the front seats, and drove off.

I didn’t get to see the rest of the show as I was called away for some tests, but what struck me was that the cops remained calm at all times through this incident, and that they did not rough the man up. He was not thrown to the ground and piled on by the arresting officers, which is now pretty much standard practice for arrests in the US. And he didn’t have his arms wrenched behind him and cuffed — another US standard police practice that frequently results in injured hands, wrists, elbows and shoulders, and that can also result in more serious injuries if the cuffed person, unable to protect his head, “happens” to fall over, or down some stairs.

The same retiring police chief also told me, back during our conversation about militarized police, that when he first got hired as chief in our town, he found that the department had earlier been supplied by the Pentagon, under the arms-for-cops program of handing out surplus military equipment, with enough fully automatic M16 rifles for every cop on the force. This in a town where the biggest violent crime in two decades was whatever the largest barroom brawl was during that period. We did have a restaurant owner murdered in what appears to have been a mob hit, but that is a kind of unique thing that hardly required use of a SWAT team or M16’s to handle. The guy was found shot dead, and it became a job for detectives, including the FBI.

Anyhow, the chief said one of the first things he did was send back the automatic weapons to the Pentagon. He said “We didn’t need police running around with fully automatic weapons.”

True enough, though they still all have semi-automatic AR-15s racked in their SUV patrol vehicles. These weapons only get used, though, for putting injured deer out of their misery. There are no other types of crimes calling for such guns to be unracked in Upper Dublin.

Truth is, most SWAT raids across the US — and there are over 20,000 of them a year across the country, mostly to serve warrents that could be served by a knock on the door, or to search for drugs, which could be done without breaking down doors and terrorizing families — are clearly unjustified. In fact they have resulted in numerous killings of innocent citizens, sometimes because police raid the wrong address, and other times because the cops don’t do good pre-raid intelligence to see whether their are children in the targeted home. Babies have been killed when police toss flash-bang grenades into windows as part of a raid and they end up landing in an occupied crib or playpen.

The whole thing should sicken decent people of all political stripes, but we seem to have accepted the idea of cops behaving like occupying troops in a foreign land as normal policing in the United States of 2017.

Trump is catering to that mentality by reactivating the arms-for-cops conveyor belt.

How long will it be before we have the first baby stabbed by a bayonet-wielding cop who will predictably claim he couldn’t see because his visor was fogged up from the tear gas canister police launched, or smoke from the stun grenade they tossed into the house before rushing in?

It’s time to back this whole thing up. Most of this up-arming of police, and the adoption of brutal and aggressive tactics in arrests is justified as necessary to protect officers from perceived risk of harm. But that’s outrageous and wrongheaded.

Firefighters are also uniformed public servants — many of them volunteers! — and we expect them to be ready and willing to run into burning buildings if they think there’s any chance that a person might be trapped inside. They do this knowing that they could be running to their deaths. I actually watched two New York City cops do this, kicking open the door of a burning apartment in my building and, without a second’s pause rushing in as smoke and flame burst out of the busted doorway. It’s almost hard to imagine a firefighter, confronted with a burning building and cries from someone inside the conflagration, just standing there with a hose and doing nothing because he or she was afraid of injury or death. It’s just not what firefighters do.

Yet all a police officer has to do to get off the hook for panicking and slaughtering an unarmed person during an arrest is to say, “I feared for my life.” The cop doesn’t have to offer any serious evidence of a threat. It could be a person reaching, in response to an order from the cop, for his wallet (all too common a situation). If the cop says that he or she thought the wallet might have been a gun, that would be enough, and often is, to convince a district attorney not to prosecute, or in the rare instance where there is a prosecution, to convince a jury not to convict.

That’s wrong. When someone becomes what should be called a “peace officer” (now a laughably anachronistic term), that person is hired to “protect and serve” the public, and given the nature of the job, that should entail a assuming a considerable amount of risk, just as becoming a firefighter entails assuming a certain amount of risk. Part of that risk should include not shooting first and asking questions later, and trying to de-escalate conflict situations instead of amping them up by yelling, swearing and trying to “disorient” the subject facing arrest.

We’re going in the opposite direction by offering cops military arms and equipment, as President Trump is doing, which just encourages police to think of themselves as soldiers in a war zone instead of as peace officers in a community.

EyePhone: Spy v. Spy Goes Mainstream

IMSI Catching: Phone surveillance measures and countermeasures go mainstream

by Rick Falkvinge

 

August 29, 2017

 

The German newspaper Die Zeit has a long feature this week about IMSI catchers and their countermeasures, words that were long heard only in countersurveillance cultures at Black Hat and Defcon. 

 

Observing this phenomenon make the jump from the obscure to the mainstream tells us a lot about the years to come: surveillance and countersurveillance will be a cat-and-mouse game for quite some time.

Most people have heard of their IMEI, their phone’s unique identifier. It’s short for International Mobile Equipment Identity, and a lot of people learn how to read this number. 

 

Originally, it was produced by typing ×#06# on your phone, a sequence that amazingly still works, but it’s also on the phone receipt, in the menus, and in a number of friendlier places. This is the number you can insure, and this is the number you can report stolen to brick the phone.

A more secretive number is the IMSI, the Subscriber Identity, which identifies not the phone but the SIM card inside the phone. In most parts of the world, you’re expected to buy these separately from the phone, and you can replace the SIM card to change carriers but keep the same phone. In some other parts of the world, where telco carries have exercised regulatory capture and have a dysfunctional market, the SIM is typically card prebaked into the phone, and in these countries, you might never have seen it – but it’s still there, identified by the IMSI.

There are many good technical reasons to keep this number a secret. For example, any reconfiguration instructions sent to the phone from the carrier – so-called Over-the-Air provisioning — must be signed cryptographically with the IMSI of the current SIM card, in order to prevent fraudulent configuration. It’s also the number used when the phone contacts the carrier network, and therefore, anybody intercepting that handshake will see the IMSI.

This is the technology used in so-called IMSI catchers. When there is a large number of people in an area that the regime — police or other forces — want to keep tabs on, they deploy high-powered fake celltowers that the phones connect to, believing that these fake celltowers are their carrier’s. The fake towers then contact the real ones in turn, performing what we call a man-in-the-middle attack, which is just what it sounds like, sitting between the phones and the real cellphone towers.

This is a fairly sophisticated attack, one made by law enforcement in a highly dubious legal area. That’s why it’s really interesting to see mainstream media cover the topic now.

It’s particularly interesting as law enforcement won’t immediately get identities out of this attack — it will merely read which IMSI numbers were in the area at the time of the man-in-the-middle attack. Some of the time, this could conceivably be translated into people’s actual names, by means of subpoenas or similar to the carriers. A lot of the time, it won’t (think anonymous prepaid SIM cards).

While this attack can be used to track an individual’s movements once you have their IMSI — and has been used for this, notably with the American-made Stingray devices — it’s more alarming that law enforcement is increasingly using the attack to keep a catalog over which people, or at least their phones, are present at a certain type of protest.

Die Zeit’s article also covers countermeasures to the IMSI catcher attack, and mentions that while there are numerous apps that detect IMSI catchers, the better ones can only detect about 90% of those attacks.

We can expect this to escalate in the coming years. 

Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the first Pirate Party and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. He works as Head of Privacy at the no-log VPN provider Private Internet Access; with his other 40 hours, he's developing an enterprise grade bitcoin wallet and HR system for activism.

Syndicated Article - This article was previously published at Private Internet Access.

This is What a Spill Looks Like: Pictures and Stories from the Nathan E. Stewart Disaster

“This is What a Spill Looks Like”: Photographer, First Responder Share Images, Stories from 2016 Great Bear Rainforest Oil Spill

by RAVEN

August 29, 2017

VICTORIA - RAVEN (Respecting Aboriginal Values and Environmental Needs) presents "This is What a Spill Looks Like", a fundraising event in support of the Heiltsuk Nation. The event features underwater and wildlife photography of the Great Bear Rainforest by April Bencze and a talk by Jaimie Harris of the Heiltsuk Nation.

The pair are fundraising to keep wild fisheries safe from spills and support the Heiltsuk Nation who are struggling to recover from a devastating spill in their traditional territories. Both Harris and Bencze were in Bella Bella in the fall of 2016 when the tug, Nathan E. Stewart, spilled over 110,000 litres of diesel fuel straight into the Heiltsuk’s main marine harvesting area.

After spending weeks fighting to contain the oil spill, the Heiltsuk are now preparing a civil case against Kirby Corporation, and the government of Canada, to recover damages for loss of Aboriginal rights to food, social and ceremonial harvesting, and the loss of their commercial harvesting of marine resources.

“For thousands of years we have created clam gardens, and seeded them, to ensure we would always have access to that resource. Our harvesters come down with a punt full of clams and call it out on the radio: come get clams! And everyone comes down, old people who can’t go out themselves, single moms, people who need that food, they come down to the dock and help themselves. And now it’s gone.” – Ayla Brown

The Heilsuk were instrumental in standing against the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project, joining 6 other Indigenous Nations in a legal challenge that ultimately resulted in the cancellation of that project’s permit. RAVEN, in partnership with Sierra Club B.C., raised $600,000 for Indigenous legal costs through the Pull Together campaign.

Says Heiltsuk Chief Marilyn Slett, “Everything that we do as people is tied to the land and to the sea- our history, our stewardship, our culture, our livelihood. Who we are is tied to the land and sea, so we have a responsibility to be stewards of the territory, so that is why we filed, to protect our way of life for the future.”

“We’ve felt such a generous outpouring of people just reaching out to us from all over the world. It’s a good feeling knowing that we’re standing together united in solidarity with British Columbians at large.”

Now, the Heiltsuk aim to expose the actual state of British Columbia and Canada’s “world class” oil-spill response system. The small First Nation are reaching out for assistance to prepare their case and to stand up against lawyers from the Department of Justice and Kirby Corporation.

If they can demonstrate how the poor spill response impacted directly on their community’s breadbasket, their case may support increased environmental awareness, better safety measures and/or restrictions on oil shipping, and real improvements to spill response.

Events:

August 30th

Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea, 6 pm-9:30

with pre-show reception from 6-7 $25

Tickets: fundraise.raventrust.com/sidneybc

August 31st

The Hub, Cowichan Station 7:30-9:30

By donation, at the door.


September 1st

Fulford Hall, Salt Spring Island 6-9:30

with pre-show seafood bbq $30

Slideshow & Talk 7 pm : by donation.

Tickets: fundraise.raventrust.com/saltspring

— 30 —

For immediate release
Contact: Ana Simeon, campaigns manager:
778-677-4740 (cell)
Ana will arrange interviews with Heiltsuk representative(s) if desired.

Ana Simeon
Fundraising Campaign Manager
RAVEN (Respecting Aboriginal Values & Environmental Needs)
Office: 250-383-2331​, ext. 201​

Cell: 778-677-4740
www.raventrust.com