Did Saudi Arabia Hack Jeff Bezos' Phone And Did They Use Israeli Technology?

These are not easy questions as there is no smoking gun.

But unlike Robert Mueller, who would only conclude collusion if he had a contract signed by Putin and Trump, I am quite happy to use my black hole method and look at events and actions surrounding the allegations. If they constitute a reasonable explanatory pattern then the black hole exists.

On that basis, the answer is "very likely" on both counts.

Now if you thought the Khashoggi murder sounded like a spy novel, this one is a techno-thriller with some high-level finance mixed in.

Let me explain.

Mohammed Bin Salman

Mohammed Bin Salman

If you read my take on the Jamal Khashoggi murder and my previous posts about the bleak future of Saudi Arabia, you already know that the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, commonly known as MBS, is a character out of a Shakespearean play.

He is bigger than life, volatile, obsessive and ruthless.

Ever since he pushed aside the previous Crown Prince, MBS has been torturing, detaining and killing scores of people for anything big or small as long as what they did or say displeased him.

Saudi security forces have detained dozens of clerics, intellectuals and activists who were perceived to pose a threat, as well as people who had posted critical or sarcastic comments about the government on Twitter. 

“We’ve never seen it on a scale like this,” said Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. analyst now with the Brookings Institution. 

To achieve his goal to completely control social discourse in the Kingdom, one of the first things MBS did was to form what the American intelligence agencies call the Rapid Intervention Group.

The Rapid Intervention Group was authorized by Prince Mohammed and overseen by Saud al-Qahtani, a top aide whose official job was media czar at the royal court, American officials said. His deputy, Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, an intelligence officer who has traveled abroad with the crown prince, led the team in the field.

One of Saud al-Qahtani's responsibilities was to bring the Twitter network, Saudi Arabia's primary outlet for political dissent, under MBS' control.

Twitter is huge in Saudi Arabia—the country boasts one of the world’s highest rates of Twitter penetration. Because Saudi Arabia lacks a free press, and bans political parties and NGOs, Saudi citizens took to Twitter as their only outlet to discuss public matters. By 2015, Twitter had become the premier hangout of Saudi intellectuals, a critical public sphere often called “The Parliament of the Arabs.”

He achieved this goal after a violent and sustained campaign.

By the end of 2018, MBS’ conquest of Twitter was complete: Prominent independent tweeters were in jail, in exile, compromised by blackmail, intimidated into silence—or dead. No longer was there such a thing as an independent voice within Saudi Arabia—you had to either stop being independent, stop having a voice, or stop being in Saudi Arabia. 

Saudi Twitter is now presided over by a closely controlled network of pro-government accounts—political messages posted on it represent government-promoted narratives, not independent opinion.

Besides silencing dissent, this total control over social media outlets enables MBS to organize concerted attack on a number of political targets and whip up public outrage whenever it suits him.

In short, MBS weaponized the Saudi Twitter space very effectively.

Twitter Trolls Attacking "Jew" Bezos

When Khashoggi was murdered and the Washington Post started asking for the Crown Prince be held accountable, MBS launched a call to boycott Amazon on 15 October 2018.

(“To the people of the Great Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: The leftist Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post, the newspaper of evil and betrayal… we have to defend our country and boycott Amazon.”)

By early November, there was a concerted anti-Bezos campaign on Saudi Twitter orchestrated by government controlled accounts. Under "Boycott Amazon" hashtag one tweet read:

“We as Saudis will never accept to be attacked by The Washington Post in the morning, only to buy products from Amazon and Souq.com by night! Strange that all three companies are owned by the same Jew [sic] who attacks us by day, and sells us products by night!”

The anti-semitic attacks continued even though Bezos is not Jewish. This one had "The Jew: Jeff Bezos" as its caption.

There are too many messages calling him "the hateful filth" and other slurs.

Then, according to Daily Beast (or more correctly to this site) after this troll outburst, there was a period of relative tranquility.

It turns out it was the calm before the storm, as MBS was given a potent weapon with which he thought he could destroy Bezos.

Enquiring Minds Want To Know

On 10 September, Michael Sanchez, the brother of Jeff Bezos' paramour Lauren Sanchez, gave the National Enquirer copies of text messages exchanged by the couple. They contained some adolescent love declarations and would have made good tabloid copy.

Michael Sanchez, Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos

Curiously, National Enquirer did not use the material and sat on it for four months risking a scoop by a rival publication. Curiouser still for a publication struggling with a $1.3 billion debt and losing $70 million a year.

It turns out they thought of a way to make more money out of this than to sell a few more copies to bored supermarket checkout customers. It is quite likely that they took the material to MBS for a bigger payday.

Bezos exposes Pecker

You see, David Pecker, the aptly named CEO of National Enquirer's parent company AMI, had a previous arrangement with MBS.

In July 2017, Pecker's agent Ari Emanuel (yes, of Entourage fame and brother of Rahm) introduced Pecker to an MBS intermediary Kacy Grine.

Right after that, Pecker took Grine to the White House to meet Trump and Jared Kushner. In September 2017, Grine got MBS to invite Pecker to Saudi Arabia.

In March 2018, to mark MBS' official visit to the US, "AMI prints and nationally distributes 200,000 copies of “The New Kingdom”—an expensive 97-page glossy containing no ads. Its sole topic is how MBS is changing the world for the better."

Later in March, the day the MBS tour began, Emanuel received a $400 million investment from the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund.

After Michael Sanchez gave National Enquirer his sister's text messages in September, there was a four-month period of complete radio silence. Then early in January the Enquirer published a special mid-week edition with a 12 page insert on Jeff Bezos.

The day before the issue hit the newsstands AMI announced that it had“successfully completed the refinancing of all outstanding debt.” But it did not divulge who put up the money to save the company.

When Jeff Bezos asked security consultant Gavin de Becker to find out who passed on the material to National Enquirer something very strange happened. AMI contacted Bezos and de Becker and informed them that they had pictures of Bezos' penis (apparently taken from his phone) and would publish them unless they signed a contract denying that any hacking of Bezos' cell phone had taken place.

De Becker:

An eight-page contract AMI sent for me and Bezos to sign would have required that I make a public statement, composed by them and then widely disseminated, saying that my investigation had concluded they hadn’t relied upon “any form of electronic eavesdropping or hacking in their news-gathering process.” 

Note here that I’d never publicly said anything about electronic eavesdropping or hacking—and they wanted to be sure I couldn’t.

After a thorough investigation Gavin de Becker concluded that Jeff Bezos' phone was hacked by Saudi agents, in a effort to blackmail and control him.

That investigation is now complete. As has been reported elsewhere, my results have been turned over to federal officials. Since it is now out of my hands, I intend today’s writing to be my last public statement on the matter. Further, to respect officials pursuing this case, I won’t disclose details from our investigation. I am, however, comfortable confirming one key fact:

Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information. As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details.

What is interesting is the fact that AMI asked de Becker and Bezos to publicly deny that there was any foreign involvement and that any hacking had taken place before the De Becker investigation. That preemptive request was backed by the threat of publishing Bezos' penis pictures taken from his phone.

This would only make sense if they were trying to protect the Saudis and were willing to give up the penis pictures to achieve that goal.

They also wanted me to say our investigation had concluded that their Bezos story was not “instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise.” External forces? Such a strange phrase. 

One final piece of the financial puzzle: 

Weeks ago, David Pecker’s CFO told reporters at Bloomberg News that AMI has again been saved, this time by “several new investors that came into the fold.” Though he would not name the investors, he added: 

“There is no direct investment in the company’s debt or equity by the Saudis.”

Rarely has the word “direct” caused a statement to be so indirect.

It is clear that David Pecker went after Jeff Bezos in order to help the Crown Prince to silence Washington Post's Khashoggi coverage and AMI was handsomely rewarded for its efforts.

The question then is how did the Saudis manage to hack Bezos' phone. The man is the CEO of Amazon and he is likely to be very security conscious.

Enter NSO Group an Israeli firm that developed a spyware capable of accessing the content of any phone without leaving a trace.

Did NSO Group Help Saudis Hack Bezos' Phone?

In his only op-ed after the investigation, Gavin de Becker did not name NSO Group but linked to a New York Times investigative piece about NSO Group, DarkMatter and Black Cube, companies conducting cyber warfare on behalf of authoritarian regimes.

By 2011, NSO had developed its first prototype, a mobile surveillance tool the company called Pegasus. Like its namesake, the Greek mythological winged horse, NSO’s tool could do something seemingly impossible: collect vast amounts of previously inaccessible data from smartphones in the air without leaving a trace — including phone calls, texts, emails, contacts, location and any data transmitted over apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype. 

“Once these companies invade your phone, they own it. You’re just carrying it around,” Avi Rosen of Kaymera Technologies, an Israeli cyberdefense company, said of NSO and its competitors.

Omri Lavie, left, and Shalev Hulio, founded NSO and have tapped into technology developed by graduates of Intelligence Unit 8200, Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency.

NSO was accused by several dissidents of providing MBS access to their cell phones and there are even some reports that the team that murdered Jamal Khashoggi monitored his whereabouts using Pegasus.  The same allegation is made in a recent lawsuit against the company.

While helping Mexico catch drug criminals is within NSO Group's stated mission, the company is at the center of a lawsuit which alleges its technology was used by Saudi Arabia to spy on journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

While Saudi Arabia used NSO's services for some time now, last December the Kingdom applied to buy the technology and Israel's Defense Ministry signed off that the sale on 8 December 2018. A full month before the penis pictures saga.

According to the Post’s David Ignatius, Saudi official Saud al-Qahtani sought Pegasus as part of a surveillance network designed to help the crown prince combat internal enemies as part of his drive for power.

As I mentioned at the outset, Saud al-Qahtani is the head of the Rapid Intervention Group, MBS' operational arm.

NSO Group vociferously denied these allegations and claimed that its technology played no role in the Bezos hacking.

"We can say unequivocally that our technology was not used in this instance. We know this because our software cannot be used on US phone numbers," the spokeswoman said. "Our technology, which is only licensed to prevent or investigate crime and terror, was not used by any of our customers to target Mr. Bezos' phone."

This is an interesting denial, a bit like AMI maintaining no direct Saudi investment. It is a matter of clever parsing.

You see, there is a way around the American numbers limitation.

Bill Marczak, a researcher at Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto group that’s studied NSO for years, said that “describing target limitations in terms of phone numbers makes sense if you imagine targeting phones by using their number, such as by SMS.” 

“But what if you target people using, say, a malicious WiFi hotspot, or network injection, or getting them to visit a compromised website? In that case, [NSO’s spyware] Pegasus might not know the phone number of the person before it infects them.”

Tellingly, the NSO Group had no come back for this loophole.

Without explaining the technical details of how this limitation works, an NSO spokesperson said in an email that NSO's spyware is specifically "designed to ensure it cannot be used in places other than which it is licensed."

To me the whole episode is a bit ironic. The most anti-semitic and least democratic place on earth is using Israeli technology to suppress dissent and kidnap and kill its citizens.

If the same technology was used to go after an American citizen things could get complicated for both MBS and Netanyahu.

As the richest man in the world Jeff Bezos is unlikely to leave this fight. If I were MBS I would worry about the prospect of Bezos coming after me.

Lessons From Two Corruption Stories in North America: Trudeau vs Trump II

Trudeau's woes, as I mentioned them in my previous post, make an interesting backdrop to a real corruption scandal in the US.

Anyone with half a brain and willingness to face reality knows that Trump is a corrupt liar. But his latest is a doozy.

A while ago, the billionaire owner of New England Patriots Robert Kraft was caught in a massage parlor receiving the proverbial "happy ending" or "rub and tug" in current parlance. The spa was part of a chain that was established by Li Yang, a Chinese businesswoman. While she no longer owns that particular establishment, a word I use advisedly, she still has a number of spas and massage parlors in southern Florida.

Currently, Li Yang's (she goes by Cindy) more prominent business is selling access to President Trump to Chinese companies. Yes, you read that correctly. She went from profiting from the debasing work of enslaved and likely trafficked women to funneling money to the Grifter-in-Chief.

Here is how she and her husband Zubin Ging went about it. First, they contributed to Trump Victory, a PAC, over $42,000.

Then Cindy arranged to have her photo taken with the President during a donation dinner at Mar-a-Lago Resort. 

The New York Times now reports that she has raised $ 50,000 in donations so she could take a photo with Trump at an event last March, which the president later even signed with a silver pen. 

This looks like an earmarking scheme.
That's a violation of federal election laws and a crime.

It could be a crime because of the way she raised the requisite $50,000.

Because individual financiers could not contribute more than $ 5,400, but the photo opportunity cost $ 50,000, Yang had at least nine people from their environment to donate money to Trump - each exactly $ 5,400. Among the donors were her husband and her mother, as well as several women who worked in shops of Yang's family.

Li Yang with the Orange Man

Now with visual proof of her proximity to Trump, Cindy and her husband Zubin Gong started a company that promised Chinese businessmen access to the President and prominent cabinet members and other politicians.

The company, called GY US,  "describes itself on its website, which is mostly in Chinese, as an “international business consulting firm that provides public relations services to assist businesses in America to establish and expand their brand image in the modern Chinese marketplace.”

There is more:

On a page displaying a photo of Mar-a-Lago, Yang’s company says its “activities for clients” have included providing them “the opportunity to interact with the president, the [American] Minister of Commerce and other political figures.” The company boasts it has “arranged taking photos with the President” and suggests it can set up a “White House and Capitol Hill Dinner.”

And to prove that they displayed many pictures taken with Trump and his family members.

Her Facebook contains many more pictures taken with (besides Trump and family) "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Rick Scott, Sarah Palin, the president’s campaign manager and an assortment of other high-level Republican operators."

The company website (which is now down) has a list of upcoming Mar-a-Lago events where guests would have the opportunity to mingle with Trump and his family. One such event was Trump's New Year dinner and GY US brought in a number of Chinese businessmen to interact with Trump, his sons and his sister Elizabeth Trump Grau.

Now, that dinner cost $575 two years ago, $750 last year and $1,000 in 2019. Yahoo Finance reported that one Chinese businessman, Huachu Tang flew 17 hours to make it to the dinner and noted that "Tang has paid even more since he received admission as part of a package offered by a public-relations agency." Which is GY US.

However, Trump couldn't attend due to government shutdown. So, to get his money's worth, Tang did the next best thing and had his picture taken with the rest of the Trump family.

So this is a President who profits from his position by selling tickets to private dinners at his own resort, charges $50,000 a pop to get his picture taken and allows Chinese former brothel owners to sell access to him to Chinese businesses.

Now we know why he spends so much time in the Southern White House.

Imagine the uproar if anybody else did these things. Actually no need to imagine, there is precedent.

There was a time when such plainly corrupt conduct would have raised more than an eyebrow or two. Back in the distant past when Crooked Hillary was first lady, her husband had barely won his re-election when the Republicans became obsessed about the Chinese trying to buy their way to some White House influence.

Remember the conservative outrage?

The Chinese influence story was what lead to Ken Starr and Monica Lewinsky.

That supposed Chinese scandal was of course the context for the fateful decision to hire one Ken Starr to investigate Lewinsky et al, to put an end to a president defiling the temple of justice. 

To that end, one Brett Kavanaugh leaked all the juicy bits of the grand jury deliberations and the Starr investigation to the media, and Lindsey Graham argued in a Senate impeachment trial that the nation should cleanse the office of the presidency by firing the president. Graham now plays golf with Donald Trump and Kavanaugh sits on the highest court in the land. The irony gods escaped to the vomitorium some time ago.

IOKIYAR.

That's why the Trudeau scandal is not really a scandal.

Lessons From Two Corruption Stories in North America: Trudeau vs Trump I

Recently, two North American countries witnessed their leaders facing charges of corruption.

In and of themselves they were not particularly interesting. But they were very telling about how political scandals affect conservatives and liberals. And how the media propagates the dominant narrative.

It was edifying.

Corruption In Canada 

Here is a summary of the Canadian scandal. Feel free to add air quotes around the word scandal.

SNC Lavalin, one of the largest engineering and construction companies in the world, paid bribes in Libya in between 2001 and 2011 to get construction projects. When this became public knowledge after the fall of Gaddafi, RCMP charged them with corruption and fraud. The management issued a mea culpa and promised to change their ways and establish corporate procedures to prevent something like this happening again.

They lobbied openly in favor of remediation as opposed to prosecution. In the latter case, if found guilty, and they would certainly be, thanks to their mea culpa, they would be barred from bidding for federal contracts for a full decade. And the company would almost certainly go bankrupt. In remediation, a plea deal would be entered, some fines would be paid and no jobs would be lost.

These deferred-action prosecutions are pretty common in the US but they are a recent introduction in Canada. It is fair to note that this might have been the result of SNC Lavalin's lobbying efforts.

In any event, SNC Lavalin is an aggressive company operating mostly in the developing world and they were willing to do anything to get new contracts. For instance, since 2013 SNC-Lavalin has been unable to bid on World Bank contracts because of another bribery scheme in Bangladesh.

I can't tell you that bribing officials in Bangladesh was necessary but in Gaddafi's Libya - I know from several companies that operated there - that it was a sine qua non. No pay no play. I can affirm that any company that had any contract in Libya paid bribes.

So put yourself in Justin Trudeau's shoes and you have a Quebec company that could go bankrupt if the Attorney General took the bribery in Libya charge too seriously.

Quebec is also a Canadian province that held two referendums to seek independence. And Trudeau is from Quebec.

As a politician what would you do?

Here is the crime he is alleged to have committed: He sent some intermediaries to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to ask her to consider the lighter option.

When she demurred (she says she held firm), Trudeau did a cabinet shuffle and moved Wilson-Raybould to Veterans' Affairs which is a demotion.

She didn't react at first but when the story came out, she accused the Prime Minister of pressuring her to save the company, Quebec jobs and Liberal Party votes in the Province.

She then testified before the judiciary committee of the House of Commons.

During her testimony, Wilson-Raybould said that Trudeau and his senior aides had embarked on a “consistent and sustained” effort to get her to interfere in the case against SNC-Lavalin. She described the pressure as inappropriate but said that in her opinion, it “was not illegal.”

This is an understatement. In the British system, and by colonial extension first-past-the-post single constituency system, any Member of Parliament or MP is obliged to defend, support and look after the interests of their constituency.

This is what Trudeau did. Unlike Jean Chretien's Shawinigate, there is no allegation that he benefited from this support financially or did it for personal benefit.

Yet Canadians were outraged and this whole episode might cost him the election. After a sustained media campaign, the feeling is summarized as "He's not a bad person but..."

This is the first feminist, progressive Prime Minister or President anywhere, a unicorn and he might be replaced by a conservative politician because he tried to protect jobs.

For Canadian liberals, or indeed any of us who cling to outdated ideas such as good governance and liberal democratic values, it was like watching a unicorn get flattened by a lorry. 

Was he blameless? No.

Butts and Wilson-Raybould

A cabinet shuffle after pressuring the Justice Minister was simply stupid. I also suspect that he sent his private secretary and closest confident Gerald Butts to see Ms. Wilson-Raybould and he was likely to be heavy handed.

Butts denied it of course but he is combative and as a former national debating champion his style is confrontational.

That is the extent of the "scandal."

But why did it become a such a big deal?

In a word, the relentless and skewed media coverage.

Canadian media outlets are owned by a small number of companies, (Bell, Corus, Rogers, Newcap, Quebecor) which also hold "a diverse mix of television, cable television, radio, newspaper, magazine, and/or internet operations." (That is the main reason why Canadians still pay long distance charges)

As a group with similar interests, they tend to present a cohesive point of view. And on the whole they favor a conservative editorial perspective. Theirs is not a blatant propagandist position a la Fox News. It is more along the lines of pushing certain priorities and omitting certain points a la The Economist, though with more subtlety.

For instance, prior to the Conservative Party's electoral victory in 2006, deficit was the most important issue that dominated the headlines and evening news, only to be completely forgotten after the Stephen Harper victory.

Similarly, when Canada escaped relatively unscathed the 2008 financial crisis, the media credited Harper even though it was the specific policies of the previous government (such as not relaxing the real estate borrowing rules) that were responsible for that outcome.

The way media outlets achieve their goal to emphasize a specific point of view while appearing objective is to give disproportionate access to right-wing politicians.

Boris Johnson, David Davis, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage dominating television debates during the Brexit referendum is a classical example. No broadcaster confronted their blatant lies about the economic impact, the NHS gains or impossibility to maintain Irish border open.

There are many other examples of wingnuts getting more coverage than anybody else.

One of the best illustration of this in this case is this recent item from the BBC. They posted an article that did very little other than simply list Conservative charges and refute Liberal arguments.

This is the picture of Trudeau they used.

The piece maintained that SNC Lavalin intervention was unnecessary, implied twice that there was more to the story, called Trudeau a "fake feminist" for shuffling a woman minister and cast doubt on possible job losses if SNC Lavalin was convicted of fraud. It only provided quotes from opposition politicians and analysts who question the Trudeau position.

For instance, on the likelihood of job losses, the piece quoted opposition figures and academics who maintained that there was no evidence that if SNC Lavalin was unable to bid on federal contracts, the 9,000 jobs on its payroll might be at risk.

Think about it for a second. What evidence can there be? This is a firm that is already on World Bank's blacklist until 2023, which means most other multilateral lenders shun them. If they were banned from Canadian federal contracts for a decade, where would they get their next project? Why would you need evidence to indicate a substantial number of jobs would be lost? It is a simple equation. No new revenue stream, layoffs. The company might survive but it is a virtual certitude that they would shed a large number jobs.

Which was the Liberal point.

So far no one's is listening.

I expect another Conservative government will come to power in the Fall and start implementing the same blueprint we see everywhere else. Fake news accusations, blaming the immigrants for everything and denying climate change. And dividing the nation into Us and Them.

I do not expect the Canadian media to have a major problem with that platform. There will be a couple of critical op-eds in some regional papers like the Ottawa Citizen. The Globe and Mail will have some investigative journalism reports which will not have any impact, National Post will praise the government and that will be that.

Now let's take a look at the other scandal, one that involves massage parlors, prostitution and paying the President for foreign access.

And the American media's reaction.

Deep Misogyny of Mainstream Media and Women Candidates

The day after Elizabeth Warren announced her intention to form an exploratory committee something very familiar happened.

Politico ran a piece about how Warren was really Clinton "redux" and as an unlikable witch, her candidacy should be dismissed. And, unsurprisingly, it was written by a woman, as editors love to give those hatchet jobs to female journalists:

She’s too divisive and too liberal, Washington Democrats have complained privately. Her DNA rollout was a disaster — and quite possibly a White House deal-breaker. She’s already falling in the polls, and — perhaps most stinging — shares too many of the attributes that sank Hillary Clinton.

It took less than 24 hours to frame her candidacy negatively. And she is by far the most qualified and electable Democratic candidate. She is the one who gave this speech in 2011 when both Republicans and Democrats had moved to the right of Richard Nixon.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. ... You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

She passed legislation to protect consumers, she made life difficult for too-big-too-fail banksters and she went after the Republican grifters.

Yet she is just Clinton redux.

But her DNA?

Around the same time Kirsten Gillibrand announced her intention to explore. A backlash followed. She was the first woman senator to have asked Al Franken to resign. And ever since then, this implicit accusation of humorless harpy followed her everywhere.

Compare this to the reaction to Joe Biden, who, if elected would be 78 in 2020. He declared himself to be the most qualified person in America to be president and the media reported this without any commentary.

Can you imagine the media shitstorm if Hillary Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand or Elizabeth Warren made such a statement? All the liberal (i.e. deeply conservative) and conservative (i.e. proto-fascist) opinion-makers would have a field day with "them arrogant feminazi."

(As I explained before, women are the only minority anyone can call nazi and the normally hyper-vigilant ADL has no problem with that.)

In all this, the corporate media is extremely complicit.

This is how it works. The Republicans will invent a crisis, say Benghazi, and the corporate media will report every utterance or tweet from the Republican leadership. The issue will remain on the front page for as long as the Republicans chose to talk about it.

Conversely, if they uncover (Democrats are too wussy to do it on their own) a Republican scandal, say, Trump's lies or his massive conflicts of interest or his racist record. The so-called liberal media will do a one-off detailed report and that will be that.

During the presidential race, they covered Trump family's racist rental policies, his Washington Hotel or his dubious business associates all linked to Russian criminal circles. But do you know how many articles were published on her emails between March 2015 and September 2016?

560,397. Yes over half a million stories on Clinton's emails. 

Cable news was not any better.

Network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined. 

Cable news has been, if anything, worse, and many prestige outlets have joined the pileup. One malign result of obsessive email coverage is that the public is left totally unaware of the policy stakes in the election. Another is that the constant vague recitations of the phrase ‘‘Clinton email scandal’’ have firmly implanted the notion that there is something scandalous about anything involving Hillary Clinton and email, including her campaign manager getting hacked or the revelation that one of her aides sometimes checked mail on her husband’s computer.

In fact, this is standard modus operandi when it comes to women candidates The Republican slurs are repeated so frequently by the media that they become qualifying adjectives in the minds of the electorate.

And it won't do for such candidates to fight against the bogus charges. The media will use such efforts to rehash the original attack.

Let's take a look at the Pocahontas racial slur used by Trump to taint and belittle Elizabeth Warren. The Republican claim was that Warren lied about having Native American heritage for professional gain.

Well, is it true? No.

Snopes reports that:

-She did put herself on Minority Law Teacher list as a Native American
-Harvard used her Native ancestry to bolster their claim of diversity

But they could find no evidence that she used her ancestry to gain professional advantage. She maintained that

[S]he was recruited for the positions and did not “apply” for them; and for the most part, her record did not indicate any identification as part of a minority group:

The Globe obtained a portion of Warren’s application to Rutgers, which asks if prospective students want to apply for admission under the school’s Program for Minority Group Students. Warren answered “no.”For her employment documents at the University of Texas, Warren indicated that she was “white.”

Now calling her Pocahontas is racist. Do you remember media outlets bringing up this fact repeatedly or at least every time Trump used it in a tweet?

Me neither.

Let's take a look at your options when you are under attack as a progressive woman politician.

If you say nothing, the Republicans will continue to attack and the media will continue to report their attacks. Soon you are a liar and a fraud.

If you push back, they report your statement and counter it with a Republican talking point.

So, Elizabeth Warren was accused of lying about her heritage. She took a DNA test to show that she had Native American DNA only to be ridiculed by the same media outlets. They even quoted the execrable Lindsey Graham saying that he was going to take a DNA test to try to beat Warren's results.

You are doomed if you say nothing and doomed if you defend yourself.

And finally, the media will gleefully put these bogus changes around your neck by repeating them every time you make a statement.

Case in point: When Warren  announced her bid to presidency, most media outlets brought up her DNA tests and claim of Native American heritage. This is what the New York Times said:

While Ms. Warren’s stinging attacks on Mr. Trump and Wall Street have helped make her a favorite of grass-roots liberals, she also faces challenges as a presidential candidate: controversy over a DNA test to prove her Native American heritage, skepticism from the party establishment and a lack of experience in a national race.

Then they ran a piece about Warren apologizing to the Cherokee nation for the DNA test. And quoted Trump saying this

"[Warren's credibility has] "been hurt very badly with the Pocahontas trap". 

"I think she's been hurt badly. I may be wrong, but I think that was a big part of her credibility, and now all of a sudden it's gone."

Donald Trump the man who lied more than all politicians in American history combined was asked to comment on Elizabeth Warren's credibility. Can you see the irony? They don't.

The next day BBC brought it up and had Cherokee Nation's Secretary of State attack Warren:

"Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage." 

"It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonouring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven."

I can give you CNN, Washington Post, USAToday or Vox.

Compare this with Joe Biden withdrawing his 1988 presidential bid for plagiarism. No one remembers it. Do you know why? Because he is a man, no one brings it up.

Just like no one brings up regularly the fact that Donald Trump lied 7,645 times since taking office.

Do you see epithets like "his tendency to make misleading statements dogged him since he became president?"

Or do you see periodic reports on his paying off a porn star or a Playboy model on the anniversary of these incidents?

Me neither.

Yet Monica Lewinsky incident is always back in the news. This is from 15 February 2019 BBC News and the item was on the front page for five days.

In case you think this is about Bill Clinton, it is not. It is still the media's way of skewering Hillary Clinton.

Do you see periodic pieces on Dennis Hastert, the former Republican speaker who abused boys as a wrestling coach and paid them off afterwards?

Do you see anyone mentioning Louisiana (R) Senator David Vitter whose sex worker dealt with his diaper fetish?

All ancient history.

But Benghazi and email servers all the time. Or Warren's DNA.

They tried to do it with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but it didn't work for once, because millennials called their bullshit.

But that doesn't mean they won't try again.

There is a special place in hell for corporate media journalists.

Why Did Trump Pull Out Of Syria: Another Khashoggi Gift

Something funny happened last Thursday.

To the shock and dismay of Republicans in Congress, the military-industrial complex and America's NATO allies, Donald Trump declared that he was withdrawing all the American troops in Syria.

He did it despite strong opposition from his own cabinet, his staunch supporters in the Senate and America's various allies around the globe.

He didn't even flinch when his Secretary of Defense James "Mad Dog" Mattis abruptly resigned over the issue.

Subsequently, when Syria envoy Brett McGurk resigned, he called it a "non-event."

America's withdrawal from Syria means several things.

One, Bashar al-Assad will remain in power completing the dreaded "Shia Crescent."

Two, without the US, Russia and Iran will be the main players in Syria and will largely determine the future of the country and the entire Middle East.

Three, Turkey will be free to enter Northern Syria and bomb Syrian Kurds, a key US ally in fighting ISIS, killing tens of thousands.

Please tell me how these three points make any sense from an American perspective.

The Shia Crescent, which assumes that Iran, Iraq and Syria are trying to encircle the Sunni Arabs, was the main reason why the Gulf countries tried to destabilize Al-Assad's regime and Saudis launched their murderous campaign in Yemen.

Why would they accept this silently?

Moreover, leaving Iran and Russia as the main power players in the region could not be desirable for Israel or the Sunni countries.

Iran will now steadily increase its influence throughout the region.

Already, Russia, Iran and Turkey are working with the Special UN Envoy Staffan de Mistura to draft the new Syrian constitution.

Why was Iran's most implacable foe Bibi Netanyahu's reaction a muted "we will study it"?

Other than Russia and Iran the country that clearly benefits from this withdrawal is Turkey. There are now reports that Trump made that decision on the spot while talking to Turkey's President on Thursday stunning his advisors.

“Why are you still there?” Erdoğan demanded, according to the account.

With the Turkish leader still on the line, Trump asked the same question of his national security adviser, John Bolton, who repeated US policy until then, that the defeat of Isis had to be “enduring”, preventing the possibility of a resurgence.

To the surprise of Bolton and Erdoğan, Trump instantly sided with the Turkish president.

I don't believe for a minute that Trump is the kind of guy who would not react belligerently to a question like "why are you still there?" let alone side with such an interlocutor.

He made it clear that the pull out was to leave Turkey in charge.

Before the Trump's withdrawal decision Erdogan had already declared his intention to attack Syrian Kurds in the coming weeks. He gave a major speech announcing the start a large scale operation in Syria. Two days later he threaten to invade Manbij if the US refuses to remove YPG fighters from the area.

Typically such a bellicose approach does not work well with Pentagon or the White House especially since Turkey is not in a position to start hostilities anywhere if the US is opposed to them.

When I heard the withdrawal decision, I immediately concluded that it had something to do with the Khashoggi murder and Trump's desire to protect Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS).

The muted Israeli reaction and the deafening silence from the Gulf countries supported my guess.

Then I saw this on Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based news network:

"They [people in Congress] are also suggesting that Trump is doing this as a favour to Turkey - the reason he wants Turkey onside, perhaps, is to ease the pressure on Saudi Arabia, particularly over the death of Jamal Khashoggi," said Fisher, referring to the October 2 murder of the Saudi journalist inside the kingdom's consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul.

In other words, Trump threw the Syrian Kurds under the bus to protect MBS, which means Turkey, as I have been claiming, has damning evidence implicating the Crown Prince and is threatening to use it at every turn.

Unfortunately for both MBS and Trump, this will not go far. The pull out is scheduled to complete in 100 days.

During that time, Syrian Kurds will reach out to Bashar Al-Assad and offer their help and support in his campaign to reclaim his rule and the Russians will support that move.

At that point neither Turkey nor the US will be able to do much the change the power balance on the ground.

Once again Putin will be the kingmaker. Because of that there is even a chance that the withdrawal might never take place.

The timeline also coincides with the conclusion of the Mueller investigation, whose findings are expected to be made public sometime in February.

With Trump in a fight for his life, MBS will lose his principal backer. At which point a palace coup might take place and a new Crown Prince might emerge.

We'll see in due course.

But one thing is clear, the Khashoggi murder will continue to have profound consequences.

----------------

UPDATE:

In case you were wondering:

But shortly after announcing Mr Shanahan's appointment on Sunday, Mr Trump moved to calm widespread concerns over the pullout which he initially said would be "rapid". 

Mr Trump said on Twitter that he had spoken with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey about "our mutual involvement in Syria, & the slow and highly coordinated withdrawal of US troops from the area".

He was blackmailed. And now he is trying to reassure the American "deep state."

Good luck with trying to square that circle.

--------------
UPDATE 2

In case you were wondering about the corner Trump found himself in:

Turkey is massing troops near a town in northern Syria held by a Kurdish-led force backed by the US, a war monitor and Turkish media have said.
The buildup comes despite Ankara saying it would delay a promised offensive in eastern Syria in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise announcement on Wednesday to withdraw US troops from the country, which it welcomed.

I really wish MBS was worth it.

But he is not.

----------------
UPDATE 3

Here is what former NATO commander retired General Wesley Clark said about the withdrawal:

During a CNN appearance on December 24, Clark stressed that “there doesn’t seem to be any strategic rational for the decision. And if there is no strategic rational, then you have to ask, ‘Why was the decision made? I can tell you that people around the world are asking this. And some of our friends and our allies in the Middle East are asking, ‘Well, did Erdogan blackmail the president? Was there a payoff or something? Why would a guy make a decision like this?’” [my emphasis]

You read it here first.

The End Game In Khashoggi Murder: Is MBS on His Way Out?

In my previous post, I suggested that the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul could be the result of a joint Qatar-Turkey intelligence operations which aimed to provoke Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) to greenlight a risky hit and find himself in big trouble.

Prison room service

Since ordinarily the disappearance of a Saudi citizen would not have gotten much attention, I offered my guess that the surprisingly sustained media campaign and the withdrawal of CEOs from the Davos in the Desert might have been engineered by Al-Waleed bin Talal, the royal prince who was previously imprisoned, tortured and robbed by MBS.

As a wealthy investor, bin Talal is on very friendly terms with media barons like Rupert Murdoch and also Wall Street and industry titans. No other Saudi has his contacts or his influence.

To me, it was the only theory that explained all the incongruous elements of the Khashoggi case.

Since that post, a couple of interesting things happened to lend support to my thesis.

Initially, Turkey was not among the countries to be granted an Iranian oil import waiver by the Trump administration. The Bloomberg article I linked to did not have Turkey on the list, now it does. The day after my post, Turkish Trade Minister said that they hoped to be on the list but will know for sure by the following Monday.

Second, Al-Waleed bin Talal's brother who was detained for almost a year was promptly released with no explanation. Unlike Khashoggi, Khalid bin Talal was a vocal critique of MBS.

Tellingly, his release led to a lull in the Khashoggi coverage. It could be a coincidence as there were midterm elections. However, it may be worth noting that the Khashoggi murder was the top story in the weeks and days leading to the same elections.

The Khashoggi story reclaimed its front page status when Turkey's president Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkish intelligence agency MIT shared an audio recording of the murder with French, German, Russian, Canadian and American authorities.

A major scramble ensued. The French denied it, Canadians acknowledged it and the rest remained silent.

One party that wasn't very happy about this new light shone on the murder was the Trump Administration as they have been trying very hard, along with Benyamin Netanyahu, to keep MBS as the Crown Prince.

Then something very strange happened. Unlike the Trump Administration the American deep state took a decisive position against MBS.

The CIA, whose chief reportedly blackmailed Erdogan to shut him up, went to the Capitol Hill to inform lawmakers that its analysis supported the conclusion that it was MBS who ordered the Khashoggi hit.

And to top it off, they leaked the existence of a phone call recording between Khashoggi and Khalid bin Salman, MBS' brother and Saudi ambassador to the US.

Khalid told Khashoggi he should go to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to retrieve the documents and gave him assurances that it would be safe to do so, the Post said. The newspaper, citing people familiar with the call, said it was not clear if Khalid knew Khashoggi would be killed, but he made the call at his brother’s direction.

More damningly, the CIA also shared another phone call from the consulate.

Maher Mutreb, a security official who has often been seen at the crown prince’s side, made the call to Saud al-Qahtani, a top aide to Prince Mohammed, to inform him the operation had been completed, the Post said, citing people familiar with the call.

There is more.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is in possession of a phone call recording of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in which he is heard giving an instruction to “silence Jamal Khashoggi as soon as possible,” Hürriyet columnist Abdulkadir Selvi wrote on Nov. 22.

The columnist is very close to the government and has been known to have solid ties with the intelligence community. In his column, he suggested that it was Haspel who informed her Turkish counterpart of the existence of the recording.

According to Selvi, CIA Director Gina Haspel “signalled” during her trip to Ankara last month the existence of the wiretapped phone call between Crown Prince Mohammed and his brother Khaled bin Salman, who is Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States.

Why would the CIA share this bit with Turkey who is hellbent on getting rid of MBS?

Second indication that the deep state doesn't find MBS acceptable anymore was the heavy pressure they exerted on him to dramatically change course. After months of complicit silence, as soon as the Khashoggi murder hit the front pages, the Pentagon and the State Department began pressuring Saudi Arabia to cease hostilities in Yemen and end the massive loss of human life.

They also asked MBS to end the Qatari embargo. And there are reports that he refused. At least so far.

That's why the Khashoggi case is so interesting: its extensive coverage and the carefully planned leaks by Turkey provided significant leverage to those who wanted to either force MBS to change course or to simply force him out.

Washington believes it has more influence with Riyadh as its ally tries to repair the damage to the kingdom's standing, and wants to use this opportunity to push for an end to the Yemen war and rebuild Gulf unity against Iran, four sources familiar with the matter said. (...)

Against this coalition of the willing stand Trump and Netanyahu.

As you know, Trump double downed and shrugged off the CIA information. Yesterday the White House prevented Haspel to brief Senators on the Khashoggi murder asking Mike Pompeo and James Mattis to inform them. Apparently, this is not the regular protocol.

Bruce Riedel, a veteran CIA official and an expert on the US-Saudi relationship at the Brookings Institution, said: “Gina [Haspel] has been the case officer on this. She traveled to Turkey and she is the one who listened to the tapes and is reported to have briefed the president multiple times. 

“This is further evidence that the White House is trying to outdo the Saudis in carrying out the worst cover-up in modern history,” Riedel added.

So what is the endgame? And will MBS survive this?

Erdogan's End Game

The biggest beneficiary of the Khashoggi operation has been Turkey's president.

His daily announcements about the gruesome details of the murder and persistent claims about having audio and video evidence put Western governments in a difficult position: He made it impossible for them to ignore the Saudi crime.

Europeans had to humor him. Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin accepted his invitation for a Summit on Syria and had to give him grudgingly the role of peacemaker in Syria.

Look at Macron's expression.

Four Amigos

He also outplayed the Saudis. They had no idea what kind of evidence he had and consequently, they couldn't put together a coherent defense. Their frequently changing story confirmed their guilt and seriously damaged MBS' and royal family's international standing.

Saudis offered Erdogan money, more investment and the lifting of the Qatari embargo and he refused. In a nicely cynical move, he leaked the offer to make himself look like an honest politician interested only in getting justice for Khashoggi.

He also got offers from the Trump administration.

First they extended an embargo waiver for Iranian oil.  Then White House looked for ways to extradite the preacher Fethullah Gulen "to ease Turkish pressure on Saudis". It didn't go over well with career bureaucrats.

Justice Department officials responded to the White House's request saying the review of Turkey's case against Gulen two years ago showed no basis for his extradition and that no new evidence to justify it has emerged, the U.S. officials and others familiar with the requests said. 

Trump administration officials then asked for other options to legally remove him, the U.S. officials and others said. 

When that didn't work, Trump made another offer:

Trump and Erdogan also recently discussed another option to relieve tensions — the release of Turkish banker Mehmet Hakan Atilla, who was sentenced in May to 32 months in prison by a U.S. federal judge for his role in a scheme to evade U.S. sanctions against Iran, two people familiar with the discussion said.

Interestingly, no one is mentioning the Halkbank fine anymore even though the trial ended almost a year ago. I am sure a reasonable number is being negotiated.

As a sign of their deep desperation, they offered a bounty of $12 million for PKK's leadership. The offer was met with suspicion and derision with one official saying that "Turkey won't be duped by US in Syria."

My guess is that Erdogan has a gruesome video of the killing and an incriminating conversation about MBS.

He is waiting for two reasons.

The first is to get as much as possible from the Trump Administration. He wants them to reduce the Halkbank fine, give him more room of maneuver in Syria and give him a pass about his increasingly autocratic rule.

He is also waiting for Trump to fully commit himself to MBS' defense. Besides the rambling "maybe he did it, maybe he didn't do it" memo, Trump keeps claiming that nobody knows what happened. If Turkey (or the American deep state) released all their information, he would look like a cartoonishly cynical politician.

And while his ignorant and racist base might not notice, this may cost him the support of many old style conservatives who are increasingly unhappy to see "America the beacon of human rights and freedom" rhetoric being destroyed by Trump's crass Mafioso discourse.

Needless to say, the degree of the damage will depend on the upcoming scandals. Mueller report must be almost done. Among other issues, they now connected Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager to Julian Assange. He visited Assange several times at the Ecuadorian Embassy before Wikileaks dumped the DNC emails.

With Trump's tax returns subpoenaed and money laundering schemes exposed by the Democratic majority in the House, Trump will find himself on the defensive and I suspect he will no longer care about MBS.

American Deep State's End Game

When I first wrote about the Khashoggi murder, I expressed my doubt that MBS would lose his position because of this incident. Since the CIA revelations, I am no longer sure.

The Haspel move indicated that the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence community consider MBS a volatile and unpredictable leader who is likely to further destabilize the region. Look at his list of achievements:

- Kidnapping and forcing the Lebanese Prime Minister out.
- Attacking Yemen and creating the worst civilian disaster in recent memory with no end in sight.
- Executing the revered Shia leader Nimr al-Nimr and increasing the persecution of the Kingdom's Shia minority.
- Imposing a blockade and severing diplomatic and economic ties with Qatar (and trying to invade it).
- Continuously provoking Iran in an effort to start a war.

In other words, from a long-term American perspective, MBS is no longer a viable leader and the institutional forces which I call the deep state do not want to continue to work with him.

This is the reason why Senators who are Trump allies are pushing for his dismissal in a forceful fashion.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., long one of Saudi Arabia’s most vocal defenders in Congress, said Tuesday that the kingdom’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has “got to go” and vowed never to return to the country as long as the young leader remains in power.

There is also the issue that the intelligence community never forgave Trump for his initial attacks on them and his siding with Putin against them. Look at the vociferous tweets of  former CIA Director John Brennan accusing Trump of treasonous complicity with Putin.

In short, very soon, there will be no one, save perhaps Netanyahu, left to defend MBS.

But Netanyahu is as weakened as MBS himself. His botched Hamas assassination attempt, his unpopular ceasefire, his piles of corruption dossiers and the departure of Avigdor Lieberman that left his fragile coalition teetering on the brink are all threat to his political survival. He may not be around after the next elections.

Domestically, in Saudi Arabia, I am pretty sure that forces within the Royal Family are already circling MBS like sharks watching a prey. If it wasn't for the way he handled the aftermath of the Khashoggi murder he could and would have pushed back ruthlessly. Now he is too exposed to be able to go after his enemies.

The House of Wahhab wants him gone as do most of the Princes. The ruling elite that always revered stability above all else fear that MBS is incapable of achieving that. And they worry about their own survival.

The army and the intelligence agencies may no longer have any loyalty to him after he decided to prosecute the Khashoggi team with death penalty hanging over them. You do his dirty deeds and he ends up throwing you under the bus to save his skin.

Remember Caligula and the Praetorian Guard? These things never end well.

In that sense, if I were to guess, I would say MBS' days as Crown Prince are numbered. As soon as Trump finds himself in the fight of his life, he will let go of him and that will be enough for his domestic enemies to unseat him.

And if my theory is correct, this would be a monumental Qatari and Turkish achievement.
----------------------
UPDATE:

CIA is leaking like nobody's business. Wall Street Journal just published this:

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sent at least 11 messages to his closest adviser, who oversaw the team that killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in the hours before and after the journalist’s death in October, according to a highly classified CIA assessment.

As an aside, let me add that until his detention by MBS, Al-Waleed bin Talal owned 5.5 percent of News Corp (the owner of Wall Street Journal) and was considered a close ally of Rupert Murdoch. He was forced to sell all his shares while in custody.

The Journal also noted this:

The electronic messages sent by Prince Mohammed were to Saud al-Qahtani, according to the CIA. Mr. Qahtani supervised the 15-man team that killed Mr. Khashoggi and, during the same period, was also in direct communication with the team’s leader in Istanbul, the assessment says. The content of the messages between Prince Mohammed and Mr. Qahtani isn’t known, the document says. It doesn’t say in what form the messages were sent.

And this

 The highly classified CIA assessment says that the Saudi team sent to kill Mr. Khashoggi was assembled from Prince Mohammed’s top security units in the Royal Guard and in an organization run by Mr. Qahtani, the Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Royal Court, the Saudi royal court’s media department.

“We assess it is highly unlikely this team of operators…carried out the operation without Muhammed bin Salman’s authorization,” it says. 

And it wasn't just the CIA leaking.

 A U.S. official said that the U.S. government has recently developed information that under Mr. Qahtani, personnel from the Center for Studies and Media Affairs have for two years engaged in the kidnapping—sometimes overseas—and detention and harsh interrogation of Saudis whom the monarchy perceives as a threat. The interrogations have led to repeated physical harm to the detainees, the official said.