Why Was There a Coup in Sudan After 30 Years?

My oldest readers might remember that I started this blog because of my massive frustration with mainstream media platitudes about the Arab Spring. A self-immolating Tunisian street vendor forcing strongman Ben Ali to flee the country. Or Tahrir Square students overthrowing Hosni Mubarak.

None of these symbolic acts explained what really happened but you wouldn't know that by simply reading to headline.

I had a similar reaction when I first found about the ousting of Omar al-Bashir after 30 years in power. The mainstream narrative was that popular unrest and daily protests increased the pressure on the man and he was finally toppled by his own military.

Once more, we were shown pictures of happy crowds, singing and dancing and marching with signs.

Sudanese protesters at the sit-in in Khartoum last week. Photograph: Amel Pain/EPA

And the narrative was that this was sufficient to get rid of an indicted war criminal who killed, tortured, raped literally millions of people in Darfur and elsewhere. A ruthless autocrat who suppressed every protest violently during his blood-soaked reign.

Omar al-Bashir

If it was that easy, why didn't they do it 20 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago?

Is it possible that this time the street chanting and sit-in protests was too much for his generals who told him that it was time to go.

I decided to take look.

Now, I admit that my knowledge of Sudan was fairly rudimentary.

I knew that Bashir came to power in 1989 with a coup against an elected president.

I knew that he oversaw the Islamization of the country by using the ideological guidelines of Hassan Turabi, a senior Muslim Brotherhood figure.

I knew of the Nile conflict with Egypt and Ethiopia.

And I knew about his horrifying crimes in Darfur to grab their oil and to further subjugate black Africans (vs Arabs of the North).

So it took me some digging. In the end, I uncovered a remarkable story which involved a complex regional power play by Turkey, Qatar on the one side and Saudi Arabia, Egypt and UAE on the other.

Suakin Island

Omar al-Bashir was probably one of the most cynical rulers in the world. For instance, despite being a Sunni fundamentalist, when it suited him, he established close relationships with Iran, a rare Sunni/Shia alliance, which lasted until 2016.

Then when he needed Saudi Arabia's money more, he cut-off Sudan's ties to Iran and offered Sudanese troops for the war in Yemen.

Two years ago, he did something remarkable. He leased the Suakin island to Turkey for 99 years. It didn't hurt that Erdogan was and is a staunch supporter of the Brotherhood. Nor Qatar's $4 billion dollar deal to develop the port city was a hindrance.

But the deal was a subtle reminder to Egypt that Sudan had powerful friends and border disputes and conflict over Nile could be addressed in a different manner.

If you never heard of the island, you are in good company. The island is strategically placed as a historical port for Muslim pilgrims to reach Mecca.

Now, Turkey claimed that it was going to renovate the island and return it to its former glory. But it soon became clear that it had more value as a military base. More importantly, a base that would connect the Turkish base in Qatar and the third one in Somalia.

When the deal was signed, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, taken by surprise, expressed their deep concerns.

At the time, Turkey's deal caused concern on the international scene, particularly in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE, over allegations that Turkey was seeking to expand its military foothold in Africa, in the Gulf and the Red Sea.

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the general who overthrew Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's former President affiliated with Muslim Brotherhood, was especially upset. Following the ousting of Morsi, Egypt's relations with Turkey became rather frosty and a war or words ensued between Erdogan and al-Sisi.

Equally concerned was Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), the Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler of the Kingdom. He is suspicious of Turkish motives because of Erdogan's support for Muslim Brotherhood and his alliance with Qatar.

A Sudanese analyst warned at the time that the Suakin deal was very dangerous.

"Turkey and Egypt, as well as Ethiopia and Eritrea, all have ambitions along Sudan's Red Sea coast, and the situation needs to be handled with great sensitivity," he said. (...)

"Egypt already has a presence in the Halaib disputed area in the northern part of the Red Sea state, and now Turkey has a presence in Port Sudan and Suakin. That's really playing with fire," the analyst said.

With hindsight, prophetic warning to al-Bashir.

The Squeeze Between Qatar And Saudi Arabia

While the Suakin island deal was unfolding Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE and Bahrain tried to bring Sudan into their Anti-Terror Quartet (ATQ) but Sudan refused.

Even though these were important donors for Sudan, Qatar was a big supporter of Muslim Brotherhood and that was a line al-Bashir would not cross.

However, to appease MBS, he distanced himself from Iran and joined the Yemeni coalition.

Omar al-Bashir was playing a high-risk balancing game trying to contain incompatible options. What brought it to a head was Sudan's precarious economy. In 2017 IMF asked the government to gradually remove subsidies on food and fuel.

Unsurprisingly, protests erupted but he violently suppressed them killing scores of civilians.

Despite the presence of Sudanese troops in Yemen, Saudi Arabia did not help him financially. Riyadh waited until his ousting to pledge $3 billion to the new military government.

Within days of the removal of Bashir, Saudi’s purse strings loosened. Along with the UAE, it pledged a $3bn aid package to prop up Sudan’s economy and thus the transitional military government.

Curiously, Qatar refused to help as well.

The Sudanese president, who was ousted by the military on April 11, visited Doha in late January in hopes of getting financial support to ease economic conditions that had triggered more than a month of protests. He received only an offer of political asylum, according to sources.

The Emir must have sensed that the jig was up and there was no way to prop up al-Bashir's government.

As for the dictator himself, my guess is that, strapped for cash, he was contemplating a partial pull out of Yemen.

L’Arabie saoudite (...) vise effectivement à bénéficier de l’absence d’Omar el-Béchir, qui s’opposait à l’engagement militaire « trop vaste » de son pays dans les conflits au Yémen.

Even though he denied such plans, he seems to have failed to convince UAE and the Kingdom.

According to some analysts, al-Bashir’s recent visit to Damascus suggests that Khartoum is distancing itself from the Saudi/UAE axis.

According to Al-Binna, a Lebanese journal, the coup instructions came from MBS himself. who hosted the vice president and the first coup leader, Awad Ibn Auf after al-Bashir's removal.

Le coup d’État au Soudan a eu lieu très probablement suite à une série de coordinations entre le prince saoudien Mohammed ben Salmane et le ministre soudanais de la Défense Aouad Ibn Aouf qui s’était rendu, quelques jours auparavant avant le coup de force, à Riyad pour prendre part à une réunion de “l’OTAN arabe”.

The protesters clamored because of Ibn Auf's closeness to al-Bashir. Shockingly, within 24 hours he resigned. Even more shockingly, his replacement, Salah Abdallah Mohamed Saleh (Salah Gosh) also lasted 24 hours. The third guy was Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

Do you know who he is?

As chief of Sudan’s ground forces he oversaw Sudanese troops fighting in the Saudi-led Yemen war and has close ties to senior Gulf military officials.

Moreover,

A Sudanese source close to Sudan’s military leadership said the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt had a role in planning “the removal of Bashir and General Ibn Auf and Salah Gosh” as part of a strategy of “weakening the power of the Islamists in power in Sudan”.

By Islamists, they mean Muslim Brotherhood.

Given this background, the first thing the new generals did was to reassure Saudi Arabia and Gulf countries that Sudan would continue to provide troops to the war in Yemen.

Then Burhan tweeted that Suakin was an "inseparable part of Sudan."

"Its value cannot be measured with a material price, its history cannot be sold. We emphasize that we care about the sovereignty of our territories. We will not accept the presence of a foreign military existence in Sudan," Burhan added.

Turkey tried to downplay the statement but the implication was clear.

Burhan

 A week ago, Burhan's deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, aka Hemedti, affirmed that Sudan would back Saudi Arabia against Iranian threats.

General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the deputy chief of Sudan's transitional military council, met with Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, the official Saudi Press Agency reported earlier in the day.

"Sudan is standing with the kingdom against all threats and attacks from Iran and Huthi militias," Dagalo, widely known as Himeidti, told the crown prince during their meeting, the council said in a statement.

Incidentally, Hemedti is a dark figure who heads the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The RSF is a paramilitary grouping that grew out of the Janjaweed militias that fought in Darfur and has provided troops to fight in Yemen.

Besides its role in killing and raping in Darfur and Yemen, RSF is the main paramilitary group that al-Bashir used to suppress uprisings.

And now he has MBS' total support and approval.

When you look at the whole picture, what took place in Sudan was not Arab Spring 2 as some media outlets claimed.

MBS moved to have the last regime that had Muslim Brotherhood as its base overthrown and replaced its president with more malleable generals who will continue to help him in his murderous Yemeni campaign. And Egypt got rid of a ruler who could have posed too many problems.

They won.

The influence of their regional rivals Qatar and Turkey, which both had ties to Bashir, will be limited, said the Sudanese military officer. “It was a tug of war, and right now UAE and Saudi won,” he said.

Ostensibly, the losing side is Turkey and Qatar.

But I wouldn't count them out yet. The battle in Sudan might be lost but the wider war is still in play. And I don't even mean this metaphorically.

MBS' war in Yemen is unwinnable and it will ruin the Kingdom financially. He is also less and less able to inject cash into client states like Egypt and soon they will feel the squeeze.

On the Turkish side, the economic picture is not any better. But it has other options like teaming up with Iran and Russia, changing its regional priorities and adopting a softer approach towards Kurds and Syria.

Time will tell.

We live in interesting but scary dangerous times.

Tanker Attacks in the Gulf: In Search of a Casus Belli?

When I heard about four Saudi tankers that sustained "serious damage" I immediately thought that something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

An Act of Sabotage by Iran or a Hastily Made Up Casus Belli?

Let's take a look at the main elements of the story.

First, there were no pictures initially. We had no idea what Saudi Arabia meant by serious damage. Then a short footage from RT Arabic emerged showing a rather small hole at the flat transom stern of a Norwegian-flagged tanker.

Saudi TV showed some pictures apparently but nothing close up or specific.

BBC reported subsequently that the Norwegian company in question said that their tanker was struck by an unknown object.

This is the RT clip showing the extent of the damage:

Second, there were no injuries, no deaths, no sunken ships and no oil spilled. And there were no explosions.

Though the UAE maintained that the four ships were damaged by sabotage, local authorities at Fujairah denied media reports of explosions at the harbor.

Somehow, mysterious figures silently made four little holes in Saudi tankers and no one had seen or heard anything.

Of course, that did not prevent media outlets from reporting explosions.

Tensions rose this month after shipping in the Gulf of Oman was damaged by a series of mystery explosions. 

Third, Lloyd's of London complained that Saudi authorities didn't share any visuals with them and provided no additional information.

Global maritime news website have questioned the details surrounding the incident. The influential Lloyds List Maritime Intelligence, for example, criticised the authorities for "scant" information. 

Quoting the maritime security company Dryad Global, it said: "Saudi reticence to report the incident accurately within their own media channels and the current failure to provide imagery evidence of the attack raises important questions as to the nature of the attack."

This struck me especially odd since Lloyd's is the biggest reinsurance company in the world. If you wanted someone to pay for those damages you would have to come forward. Why would you hide such details?

Fourth, American experts examined the tankers and determined with 24 hours that this was the act of Iranian authorities or militias working with Iran.

The team of US military investigators discovered large holes in all four of the affected ships and believe they were caused by explosive charges, the Associated Press reports, quoting an unnamed official. They did not explain how the damage was linked to Iran. 

CBS carried a similar report quoting unnamed US officials. 

They can't even analyze the contents of a plane's black box for a couple of weeks. It takes weeks to analyse the explosive residue of a device and to get other forensic details right. Here, they took a quick look at the holes and they knew right away that it was made by an Iranian device, case closed.

Fifth, the New York Times reported that intelligence sources shared with their reporters a picture of a small boat that belonged to Iranian paramilitary forces carrying missiles. The paper added that John Bolton, Trump's national security advisor and secretary of state Mike Pompeo used this picture as proof of Iran's belligerent intentions.

Finally, let's think for a minute. Because when it comes to Iran no one seems to be able to do that.

Let's assume Iran was behind this. Let's say they sent some commando units to make small holes in Saudi tankers while being careful not to spill any oil and damage the ships significantly. And they did so without any explosives.

Why would they do something like that? What do they have to gain by provoking the US and its highly unstable president? What do four small holes in Saudi tankers achieve? Is this really a deterrent? Or sign of Iranian superiority? What did they gain with such a stunt?

In short, I don't believe for a minute that this hastily arranged clumsy plot was something Iran cooked up. The evidence is not there, the act has no deterrent value to anyone and it makes no sense for them to goad Trump at this juncture for little or no gain.

Then who did it?

Let's see who might benefit from this.

The Three Amigos

There are three people who might benefit from heightened hostilities between Iran and the US.

The first is the Orange Man.

As you know, Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) even though his own intelligence agencies determined that Iran was largely in compliance of the treaty. His frequent and highly belligerent attacks on Iran is helping the conservative clergy to regain some of their lost popularity. The sanctions he imposed is hurting ordinary Iranians, ensuring the demise of moderates in the next elections.

Trump sent out aides to tell gullible reporters that he did not want any war with Iran and the following day he threatened to wipe the entire country out (which earned him an elegant rebuke from Zarif).

A confrontation with Iran would be a highly beneficial for Trump as it would allow him to change the subject and set the agenda.

You see, he is in a serious struggle with the House of Representatives to make sure that the Democrats do not have access to his tax returns and his shady dealings.

People assume that Steve Mnuchin refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena would be enough to shield him from scrutiny. It won't be. New York State is prepared to send all they have to the committee. And that could prove to be very damaging for Trump who almost certainly laundred hundreds of millions of dollars for Russian crime outfits in the last two decades.

A hot confrontation with the demonized mullahs would make wonders for his popularity, as Democrats, afraid to be labeled unpatriotic, would stop these investigations to present a united front with him. (Which is something the Republicans would never do but that is another story)

The second beneficiary is Bibi Netanyahu and for similar reasons.

As I explained previously, there are a number of serious corruption cases about him, his wife and  several people close to him. In the sound and fury of Israeli elections, most media outlets lost track of the attorney general's announcement of his decision to consider indicting the prime minister. He declared, in any event, that there was enough evidence to do so. Which is bigly.

Avichai Mandelblit, a Netanyahu appointee, probably left it that so as not to be accused of influencing electoral process, though some observers suggested that Netanyahu actually called the elections to stop Mandelblit from indicting him right away. He knew that the dossier was completed last November and an indictment was being discussed in December.

That brings me to the timetable question.

The Attorney General will announce his decision in the coming months. A hearing will be held and after that the decision to indict will be rendered. In Israel a sitting prime minister can be indicted. Previously, when Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Olmert were indicted, they resigned voluntarily but if Netanyahu decides to stay in office no one knows whether this is acceptable or not as there is no precedent.

The case will likely be reviewed by the Supreme Court and therein lies his problem.

The Supreme Court's Chief Justice is Esther Hayut, a brilliant and independent jurist. Netanyahu tried very hard to stop her appointment but failed. He now wants the Justice Minister select the Supreme Court judges with the cabinet and Knesset giving their stamp of approval.

And Netanyahu will also try to change the law about the immunity of Knesset members.

Netanyahu is expected to be indicted pending a hearing. If Netanyahu can’t get out of the hearing, and if after that hearing Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit decides not to indict him, I can only assume that there will be a big legal battle, culminating in an appeal to the Supreme Court over an unreasonable decision.

The new government might even try to limit the authority of the Supreme Court something the current justice minister from the conservative HaBayit HaYehudi party was itching to do.

On the other hand, if the new Netanyahu government rushes to amend the law pertaining to the immunity of Knesset members, or if, in the name of “government reform,” it tries some other ploy, it will be necessary to appeal to the millions of people who voted against Netanyahu in the last April election.

But all of this will take time. He hasn't even formed the government. So Netanyahu has every incentive to use "I am your big daddy and I can protect you from the big bad wolf" card that served him well so far. Heightened hostilities would really work for him.

The third beneficiary if Mohammed bin Salman, whose name is typically abbreviated to sound like a graduate degree program (MBS).

His troubles in the aftermath of the Adnan Khashoggi merder are well documented. He faces a lot of resistance from other royal family members.

His international standing and the carefully cultivated reformist prince image are badly damaged. The war in Yemen is going badly and the royal treasury is hemorrhaging billions because of his adventures.

Of the three, my money is on him. The ineptitude of the sabotage also points the finger to Saudi operatives. My guess is that he was and is counting on Netanyahu goading Trump into bombing Iran into oblivion as they both have something to gain from such confrontation.

After an initial vacillation, Trump has hardened his rhetoric and ordered that 1500 troops sent to the region in addition to an aircraft carrier and bomber planes.

So the question is, will this silly plot to incriminate Iran lead to an actual war.

It actually might.

With all three players having a lot to gain from a conflict and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton pushing for a regime change in Iran, all it would take is a misunderstanding or another "act of sabotage" under murky circumstances, such as a small boat firing at a US ship, and you could have a major war.

I think the photo shared with the New York Times was there for a reason.

And now Trump used this incident to bypass Congress to sell arms to Saudi Arabia.

Consider me worried.

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.