1. Here’s an essential one: “We assess that Iranian leaders did not orchestrate nor had foreknowledge of the HAMAS attack against Israel.”

After the horrid October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israelis, the majority of them innocent civilians, the usual suspects went wild blaming Iran. The Wall Street Journal, a bizarre hybrid of Rupert Murdoch conspiracy theories and sterling reporting, erred on the side of the former with lurid allegations that Iran trained and put Hamas fighters up to the terrorist attack. The Iran War Lobby swung into action. And yet. The ODNI says all that was a fever dream.

2. It should come as no surprise that the Israeli response, which the International Court of Justice found plausibly genocidal, has given a fillip to al-Qaeda and ISIL, and that the ODNI expects it to provoke terrorism against the US. This conclusion, which seems fairly obvious, contradicts the favored inside-the-Beltway meme that Israel is an asset to US security. Its current government’s dedication to policies that produce starving children is likely to lead to anti-US terrorism.

3. But the assessment also says, “The Nordic Resistance Movement—a transnational neo-Nazi organization—publicly praised the attack, illustrating the conflict’s appeal to a range of threat actors.”

This ugly neo-Nazi movement, by the way, celebrated noisily when Trump won in 2016 and saw it as the beginnning of a global far right revolution.

The European and North American far right is confused about Arab-Israeli conflicts. On the one hand, some of them see Israel as “white” and so side with it against Arabs. But in this case apparently they were willing to idolize Hamas if only it would kill innocent Jews.

4. Another important observation: “Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from HAMAS for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralize HAMAS’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces.”

In other words, the stated goal of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, of wiping out Hamas, is impossible. Hamas will pose a danger for “years to come.” Likewise, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s support for the far right Netanyahu government’s total war on Gaza is misplaced, since he said he believes it is waged “so that this never happens again.” Combine points 2, 3, and 4 we can conclude that Netanyahu is virtually assuring that it does happen again.

5. Then there is this:

“• Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has publicly stated his opposition to postwar diplomacy with the Palestinian Authority (PA) toward territorial compromise.”

First, the ODNI is saying that there isn’t an icicle’s chance in hell of there being a two-state solution as long as Netanyahu is prime minister. This conclusion contradicts everything President Biden keeps saying about the future of the Palestinians, and his tired mantra about the imaginary “two-state solution.”

Well, you could say, if the problem is Netanyahu, he may not be there very long. But what the assessment doesn’t say is that the entire Knesset just voted against a Palestinian state. So it isn’t just Netanyahu. It is the Israeli mainstream.

Times of India: “Netanyahu Out? U.S Intel’s Stark Assessment Of Israeli President’s Political Career I Key Details”

6. Speaking of Netanyahu not being there:

“• Netanyahu’s viability as leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultraorthodox parties that pursued hardline policies on Palestinian and security issues may be in jeopardy. Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections. A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”

Note that US intelligence concurs that the Netanyahu government is extremist, which is the only way to understand the hope for a more moderate successor. Netanyahu gets between 17% and 19% approval in opinion polls, and keen observers of the Israeli political scene believe that his far right Likud Party and its extremist allies (Religious Zionism and Jewish Power) will take a bath in the next parliamentary elections. So US intelligence is not telling us here anything we don’t already know.

Making this assessment public, however, is surely intended to give courage to Netanyahu’s political opponents and to signal that the US intelligence community thinks America would be better off with a different leader.

Reprint Edition.

Fakhreddin Azimi explains that Iran had parliamentary elections in the 1940s and 1950s after the old dictator, Reza Shah was deposed by Britain and its allies in 1941 for refusing to kick the Germans out of his country. Iran was jointly occupied during WW II by Britain, the United States and Russia, and was used by the allies to resupply Russia during its war on the Eastern Front with Nazi Germany.

The lower house in Iran was elected in 1950, and half of the senate was elected in a two-stage election in 1949-1950 (the shah appointed the other half). Many educated Iranians believed that Mohammad Reza Shah, the king, was interfering in the elections behind the scenes, packing parliament with royalists. It was believed that the shah wanted to do a new oil deal with the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) that would be favorable to the British, in return for their political and perhaps financial support of the king.

Many Iranians were unhappy with the 1933 deal between the AIOC and Reza Shah, which paid Iran a small royalty on its own petroleum. By 1950 the British government received more in taxes on the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s profits than the Iranian people did on their own petroleum. Those who wanted a fifty-fifty share of the profits (a deal that the US firm ARAMCO had offered the Saudi royal family) formed the National Front. They staged a huge march in Tehran, led by elderly arisocrat Mohammad Mosaddegh, from his house to the palace of the shah, demanding free elections in which the shah and his interior minister did not intervene. Some 8 members of the National Front were elected. Mosaddegh was the first elected representative of Tehran in parliament, garnering 30,738 votes.

On April 29, 1951, the shah acquiesced in the growing nationalist sentiment and appointed Mosaddegh prime minister. Although in the Iranian system of that time the PM was appointed by the king rather than being elected by parliament, Mosaddegh had been elected with tens of thousands of votes to his seat, and the king by appointing him recognized the consensus of the other elected parliamentarians. He came to power by democratic means, which could not be said of the shah himself, who inherited the throne from his father, a minor colonel who made a British-backed coup in 1925.

Prime Minister Mosaddegh leaves for Embassy. Public Domain via GetArchive.

Two days after his appointment, Mosaddegh led parliament to vote to nationalize Iranian oil. The British had refused to negotiate a new deal, so Mosaddegh and parliament invited all of the British to leave the country. The US and the UK were furious that a country of the global South was asserting sovereignty over its natural resources. Americans are sure that all the petroleum in the world actually belongs to them. Trump even said the US should not have left Iraq without “taking its oil,” though what that means is hard to tell. So Washington and London imposed a boycott on Iranian oil sales and slapped down Italy and Japan when they bought Iranian petroleum from wildcat distributors. Does this sound familiar?

The British MI6 intelligence arm developed a plot to overthrow Mosaddegh, but they no longer had any assets in Iran to carry it out. They therefore shopped it to the CIA, which was interested. But Democrat Harry Truman was still president, and the CIA knew that he would give them hell if they suggested such a coup plot to him.

So the Company bided its time and Eisenhower was elected in November, 1952. In early 1953 they sent the coup plot over to the president, who was all for it. The Republican Party elite misunderstood Modaddegh and the National Front as tilting toward Moscow. This was not true, at all, although Mosaddegh was willing to take support from Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party. He also took support from the religious conservative Ayatollah Kashani.

Authority Figures: Mark J. Gasiorowski explains that CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt (a cousin of FDR) was put in charge of Operation Ajax. He met with Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, a far right wing military man who hated Mosaddegh. He also met two highly placed journalists who were agents run by the CIA. The shah initially was not in favor of a coup, but Roosevelt went to see him and gained his approval.

Media manipulation.: Roosevelt and his team had powerful journalists trash Mosaddegh. They even funded and began publishing six new newspapers that took an anti-Mosaddegh line.

Suborning members of the national Legislature: Roosevelt bought the allegiance of powerful members of the parliament to turn on Mosaddegh.

Street demonstrations: Pro-shah parties were paid to stage street demonstrations against Mosaddegh.

The first coup attempt involved the shah appointing Gen. Zahedi prime minister and having the head of the shah’s royal guard, Colonel Neʿmat-­Allāh Naṣīrī, arrest Mosqddegh. But the prime minister had gotten wind of this plot and had Nasiri arrested instead. The shah ran away to Rome.

The CIA used local Iranian agents to buy huge crowds of demonstrators who staged rallies throughout Tehran, pretending to be Communists. Even some of the real Communists were taken in and rushed to join them. But of course the propertied classes were suddenly terrified that a Communist take-over was imminent.

Then on 19 August a massive mob rallied at a major square in South Tehran and marched to the central bazaar or old covered market. They then attacked government buildings and “the offices of pro-Moṣaddeq organizations.” This crowd, also manipulated behind the scenes, said it was right wingers demonstrating against the leftist mob of the previous two days. But they were all just fueled by Kermit Roosevelt’s bags of millions of dollars.

Embed from Getty Images.
CIA-funded “pro-Shah” crowd, downtown Tehran, 26 August 1953 (Photo by – / INTERCONTINENTALE / AFP) (Photo by -/INTERCONTINENTALE/AFP via Getty Images)

At this point more military officers defected to Zahedi, and they succeeded in arresting Mosaddegh, who was deposed and tried for treason, then sentenced to house arrest. He died at home in 1967.

So the CIA coup of 1953 succeeded, whereas the Trump coup of 2021 failed.

But note the similarities in technique. Billionaire buddies of Trump such as Rupert Murdoch and Robert Herring had created television channels like Fox and OAN that supported the coup, just as the CIA founded 6 newspapers for the purpose. Wealthy Trump allies also flooded Facebook with false stories about Biden not having been legitimately elected, and the possibility of forestalling the congressional certification of the election. Right wing militias like the Oath Keepers used the Parler channel to organize the invasion of the Capitol, and Trump sicced them on it, just as CIA-bought crowds invaded government buildings in Tehran in mid-August.

Disinformation was also important. Just as the CIA mobs advertised themselves incorrectly as Communists to scare Iranians into supporting Gen. Zahedi, so Trumpies put out rumors that the January 6 insurrectionists were actually antifa.

Members of parliament were suborned against the sitting prime minister, just as Frank Navarro claims Trump lined up 100 members of Congress to overthrow Biden.

The techniques were all very similar. The only big failure of Trump was to get significant buy-in from the officer corps, though ex-generals like Michael Flynn were on board.

After World War II, arrogant American policy-makers switched out governments the way they changed their socks, honing techniques of disinformation and learning to deploy mobs strategically.

After all those decades, the chickens finally came home to roost.

Similarity

The charges against Burr, of treason, and against Trump, of mishandling classified documents under the Espionage Act, are both of the highest seriousness. Burr could have gotten the death penalty.

If convicted on all counts and if he were sentenced harshly, Trump could get a 90-year prison sentence, i.e. life.

Difference

The sitting president, Thomas Jefferson, directed the prosecution of Burr from the White House. Jefferson, who had defeated Burr in 1800 and then had to suffer four years of him as vice president, loathed Burr and wanted him hanged.

The sitting president, Joe Biden, has been hands off regarding Trump’s prosecution. Not only did he leave it to the Department of Justice, which he insists is independent of him, but Attorney General Merrick Garland also declined to get personally involved, appointing Jack Smith as Special Counsel. The only role Merrick will have played was to sign off on Smith moving forward with an indictment, but apparently it was Smith’s call. The process for Trump is therefore much less politicized and the sitting government much less weaponized than it had been in the case of Burr.

Similarity

Both Burr and Trump were accused of endangering national security. Burr was accused of trying to get the territories of the Louisiana Purchase to secede from the Union, and of communicating with the British minister in Philadelphia about the ways London might help in this scheme.

The Minister, Anthony Merry, wrote back to the foreign ministry in London in spring 1805, “I am encouraged to report to your Lordship the substance of some secret communications which [Burr] has sought to make to me since he has been out of office…Mr. Burr has mentioned to me that the inhabitants of Louisiana [the lands recently purchased from France] seem determined to render themselves independent of the United States and the execution of their design is only delayed by the difficulty of obtaining previously an assurance of protection and assistance from some foreign power….It is clear that Mr. Burr means to endeavor to be the instrument for effecting such a connection….He pointed out the great commercial advantage which his Majesty’s dominions in general would derive from furnishing almost exclusively (as they might through Canada and New Orleans) the inhabitants of so extensive a territory . . .”

The Trial of Aaron Burr

Trump was charged under 18 US Code 793 (e): “Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation . . . willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.” Unlike Burr, Trump was not charged with conniving with a foreign enemy, but with having sensitive national security documents at home, on a stage at Mar-a-Lago, in a bathroom, and in a room near where people were gathering, thus raising the possibility that the documents could have been taken.

Difference

Burr was out of politics by the time of his adventures out west. Jefferson’s party declined to run him again in 1804, and since he shot Alexander Hamilton to death in a duel, the Federalists didn’t want him either.

Trump is still the head of the Republican Party and is running for president in 2024, and polls suggest that a majority of Republicans so far are sticking with him. Trump’s trial thus has the potential to be much more divisive for the republic than was Burr’s.

Similarity

Burr had a co-conspirator, General James Wilkinson, who was in on the conspiracy until the last minute, when he got cold feet and acted to protect New Orleans and sent a letter to Jefferson detailing the plot. Wilkinson’s letter is cited by historians as the best evidence that Burr really was involved in a treasonous conspiracy.

Trump also had staff and attorneys who were involved in his retention of the top secret documents. Molly Michael, “was deeply involved in all aspects of Trump’s life, advisers said, sitting outside his office, connecting his calls and keeping his schedule,” according to Caroline Anders at WaPo. Texts, documents and photos in the indictment indicate that Molly Michael cooperated with Smith’s team, so she played a role similar to that of Wilkinson in providing smoking guns.

(The Conversation) – Lawyer Thomas A. Durkin has spent much of his career working in national security law, representing clients in a variety of national security and domestic terrorism matters. Joseph Ferguson was a national security prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, where Durkin was also a prosecutor. Both teach national security law at Loyola University, Chicago. The Conversation U.S.‘s democracy editor, Naomi Schalit, spoke with the two attorneys about the federal indictment of former President Donald Trump on Espionage Act and other charges related to his retention of national security-related classified documents.

The word “weaponized” has been used by Trump, his supporters and even his GOP rivals to describe the Department of Justice. Do you see the Trump prosecution as different in any notable way from other Espionage Act prosecutions that you’ve worked on or observed?

Durkin: Obviously, it’s different because of who the defendant is. But I see it in kind of an opposite way: If Trump were anyone other than a former president, he would not have been given the luxury of a summons to appear in court. There would be a team of armed FBI agents outside his door at 6:30 in the morning, he would have been arrested and the government would be immediately moving to detain. So the idea that he’s being treated differently is true – but not from the way his supporters seem to be arguing.

Ferguson: What you have is a method, manner and means of pursuing this matter and bringing it forward to indictment that actually completely comports with the deepest traditions and standards of the Department of Justice, which would normally consider all contexts and the best interests of society.

If Trump were your client, what would you advise him to do?

Durkin: The first thing I would do is show him a guidelines memo, which we typically create for every client to help them understand the potential consequences of the charges. Under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, the consequences for Trump under this indictment are serious. My quick calculations indicate that you’re talking about 51 to 63 months in the best case and in the worst case, which I’m not sure would apply, 210 to 262 months.

Whether he wants to roll heavy dice, that’s up to him. But those are very heavy dice.

Ferguson: I might pull media statements that he has made in the last couple years and explain to him how they have complicated the ability to defend him. I’d put on the table to him that I need to see every statement that he is going to make in the political realm about this before he makes it. I’d tell him he’s otherwise basically hanging himself.

I’d tell him: If you want to die in jail, keep talking. But if you want to try to figure out a way that brings about an acceptable resolution – a plea deal that opens the door to a lighter jail sentence than what the guidelines threaten and, possibly, even no jail time – you need to turn it down or at least have it screened by your lawyers.

Are there specific things he might say between now and a trial that could deepen his trouble?

Ferguson: No question about that. And people should understand that the things that he said already are being used as evidence of intent. From now on, the repetition of them constitutes new admissible evidence. It’s not like, “Oh, I’ve already said it, so I might as well keep saying it.”

That does not mean that he cannot offer the broad brush characterization, “I’m being wronged. This is the weaponization of law enforcement and the justice system against me, and I will be vindicated,” however imprudent I might think that was. But anything that goes beyond that, and into the actual particulars, referencing the documents themselves, will just make it worse.

The Trump indictment provides extensive details of what was said and done. Do you take those as true, or as allegations that need to be proved?

Ferguson: Both. They are technically the allegations that need to be proven, but when you’re speaking at that level of granularity, these are things that actually exist in proof, the proof that is to come.

The government basically raises the bar when it provides this form of granularity. The federal government is a risk-averse enterprise when it comes to these matters, so nothing is put in the indictment unless it exists in actual fact.

Durkin: If you’re defending someone, you treat the allegations as true.

Can you imagine a situation with all of the facts laid out in this indictment but where they would not indict?

Durkin: No.

Ferguson: That’s why we both say that in fundamental respects, this isn’t different from other national security cases. These cases work from the premise that this is a fundamental compromising of the interests of the United States. And those are the cases that the government pursues tooth and nail. With so much in the public domain, and with so much of the defendant himself speaking to all of this, it almost puts the government in a position of saying, “Well, OK, if we have to, here we go.”

Durkin: There’s only one reason the government could not bring this case, and that’s fear of violence or an attack on the republic. Once you do that, then you might as well close the Department of Justice and forget about any rule of law.

Trump knows a lot of state secrets. An angry Trump in prison has risks. If he were found guilty, what does incarceration look like for him?

Durkin: I can tell you what it would mean to anyone else. They’d be put in a hole in the wall in maximum security at Florence, Colorado, and they would apply what’s called “Special Administrative Measures.” Several of my terrorism clients have had those imposed on them. There’s a microphone outside their solitary confinement to monitor anything that they say, even between prisoners. Their mail is extremely limited. Their telephone contact is extremely limited. And that’s what would happen to anyone else similarly situated.

Photo by visuals on Unsplash

Ferguson: Trump’s insistence on keeping talking about this creates a record that would justify isolation in maximum security on the basis that “We can’t trust this man not to continue to talk. We can’t trust him not to further share these secrets with people who may wish to do harm with them. The only way to avoid that is to put him in isolation in supermax where he doesn’t get to talk with people, except under these extremely closely monitored circumstances, certainly isn’t in a general population situation, gets to take a walk in a courtyard for one hour out of the 24 hours of the day, and the other 23 hours, leaving him mostly without human contact.”

Is there a specific line he could cross that would force the government to seek to detain him prior to trial?

Durkin: I predict that if he keeps it up, and especially if he keeps suggesting or threatening violence, that the government will be put in a position where they don’t have a choice but to try to move to detain him. In the real world, that’s what would happen if it was anybody but him. Normally, you can’t be threatening this type of stuff without being put in detention.

Ferguson: The smart play here would be for a judge to put him under a gag order that instructs him on what he may and may not say publicly. That’s already been done by a New York judge in the other pending criminal case against Trump. This would be a complicated exercise in balancing First Amendment rights with national security interests.

Thomas A. Durkin, Distinguished Practitioner in Residence, Loyola University Chicago and Joseph Ferguson, Co-Director, National Security and Civil Rights Program, Loyola University Chicago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hudson writes,

“The UAE has spent more than $154 million on lobbyists since 2016, according to Justice Department records. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on donations to American universities and think tanks, many that produce policy papers with findings favorable to UAE interests.”

The report details the way the Emirates takes advantage of the US electoral system, which is peculiarly open to dark-money campaign contributions, to push policies that favor it in Washington.

There are allegations that the Emirates worked behind the scenes to install Donald Trump in the presidency. Trump went on to offer Abu Dhabi access to tens of billions of dollars worth of high-tech US weapons.

The Emirates has also widely cultivated retired US military personnel, which is a problem since these individuals can at any time be recalled to active service and so are not supposed to have shadowy foreign ties.

The Intercept did an exposé on UAE ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba that alleged that he had plied US contacts with alcohol, high-life partying, and women.

The National Intelligence Council (NIC) is a panel of intelligence officials and academics that tries to bridge the intelligence community and the policy-making world. Contrary to what is popularly assumed, intelligence agencies typically do not make policy but rather do as the executive branch orders them. Moreover, sometimes intelligence agencies cannot get a hearing with policy-makers, and so the NIC is a conduit to the latter.

Hudson notes that it is highly unusual for such a report to be produced concerning a country friendly to the US. It should, however, be noted that the Emirates has often proven to be a fickle friend. It is not an ally, since the US and the UAE have no treaty obligation to defend one another, unlike NATO. UAE banks have been accused of laundering Iranian money, enabling Tehran to skirt US sanctions. The UAE has also pursued adventures such as the Yemen War, which the Biden administration opposes. The UAE recently voted to cut OPEC quotas, putting up the price of gasoline, after President Biden had asked them to pump more oil.

Informed Comment reported on some of these Emirati influence operations in May 2018, concluding that the Emirates sought to put Trump in the presidency in 2016. I wrote that:

“Another meeting between the Trump campaign and a representative of the leader of the United Arab Emirates has been uncovered by the New York Times’s Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, and David Kirkpatrick, this one in August of 2016.

The gathering at Trump Tower was arranged by George Nader, a Lebanese-American international fixer with ties to Israeli intelligence as well as to Erik Prince’s Blackwater mercenary company. In the past decade, Nader emerged as an adviser to Mohammed Bin Zayed al-Nahyan, 57, [crown prince] of the UAE.

Donald Trump, Jr., attended, as did Joel Zamel, head of an Israeli psy-ops firm called Psy-Group specializing in manipulating social media. Zamel appears to have been offered to Trump by the UAE and Nader, and the connection suggests that Mohammed Bin Zayed of the UAE has been deploying Israeli companies for various purposes for some time and offered to let Trump in on the deal. Zamel and Psy-Group are denying working for the Trump campaign according to the Times.”

I added,

“Mohammed Bin Zayed, having helped elect Trump, then slipped into the US incognito (highly irregular) in December of 2016, while Obama was still in office, for a meeting at Trump Tower with Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon. Kushner told the crown prince he wanted a back channel to Russia. Flynn had been communicating directly with Russian ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak. Apparently the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was so thick he did not realize that Kislyak was under NSA surveillance. Jared seems to have realized the danger of a direct communication, so he asked the UAE to set up a back channel.

In January of 2017 before the inauguration, Prince met with Nader and Kirill Dmitriev, an investment banker whose bank is under US sanctions and whose wife has long been best friends with and works for Putin’s daughter. Dmitriev, with whom the UAE has business, was being provided to Trump at Jared’s request as the back channel in place of Kislyak. Also at the Seychelles was Elliott Broidy, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, who had done $200 million in arms sales with the UAE and is also close to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu . . .”

I concluded,

“So the plot had several angles:

1. Get Trump elected since he is corrupt and can be easily bribed and possibly blackmailed

2. Use him to lift sanctions on Russian firms in which the UAE had invested.

3. Use him to scotch the Iran nuclear deal and put downward pressure on Iran’s oil sales, which would help the UAE make more money from its own oil.

4. Offer lobbying money as bribes to Trump principals so as to reward them for past cooperation and to encourage future cooperation.

5. Enlist the US in a UAE/ Saudi raid on Qatar’s $300 billion sovereign wealth fund, while at the same time drying up funding for the Muslim Brotherhood.”

I once observed that since Americans put their politicians up for sale, they should not be surprised when someone buys them.

“Officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented [the term blowback] for their own internal use… [It] refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.”

Ominously enough, he added, “All around the world today, it is possible to see the groundwork being laid for future forms of blowback.” On page 10, he brought up — and remember he was writing this as the previous century ended — the name of “a former protege of the United States,” one Osama bin Laden. In the 1980s, that rich young Saudi had been part of Washington’s secret war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, forming a group to battle the Russians that he called al-Qaeda (“the Base”) to battle the Red Army. By the time Chalmers wrote his book, the Russian war there was long over, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and bin Laden had turned against Washington. He was then believed responsible for the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. On page 11, Chalmers added that such “retaliation” for American acts was “undoubtedly not yet at an end in the case of bin Laden.”

He summed things up this way: “Because we live in an increasingly interconnected international system, we are all, in a sense, living in a blowback world.”

Sadly, that remains even truer today and, if Chalmers could return from the dead, I have no doubt that he would have much to say about how we now find ourselves on the ultimate blowback planet.

Blowback in a Sole-Superpower World

To use an all-too-appropriate word, given what he was writing about, his book bombed. Boy, did it! The reviewer at the New York Times dismissed it as “marred by an overriding, sweeping, and cranky one-sidedness.” And it sold next to no copies. It was dead in the water, until, 18 months later… yes, I’m sure you’ve already guessed what I’m about to write next… on September 11, 2001, those towers in New York City came down and the Pentagon was clobbered.

Suddenly, Blowback was on every bookstore bestseller table in America. As Chalmers would mention in his new introduction to the 2003 paperback, Metropolitan Books had to reprint it eight times in less than two months to keep up with demand.

Buy the Book

In that volume, he had done something deeply unpopular at the time of publication (except among fringe groups on the left). He had called our country an empire — an imperial power intent on maintaining a staggering military presence globally in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the rise of China. A common term used in Washington at the time was the “sole superpower” on planet Earth. And he pointed out, ominously enough, that even without official enemies of any significance, thanks in part to its global imperial presence, Washington had “hollowed out our domestic manufacturing and bred a military establishment that is today close to being beyond civilian control.” He added tellingly that it “always demands more” and was “becoming an autonomous system.” In addition, the post-Vietnam, post-draft, “all volunteer” military was, he pointed out, increasingly “an entirely mercenary force.” Worse yet, he saw the growth of American militarism at home as another form of blowback from this country’s overextension abroad. (Sound familiar in 2022?)

He warned that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the wake of the war in Afghanistan should have been a warning to Washington. Even more ominously, at a moment when this country’s foreign-policy establishment considered us the “indispensable nation” (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s phrase), he suggested that we were already experiencing “imperial overextension” and on the long downward slope that all empires experience sooner or later.

And keep in mind that all of this was written before 9/11; before President George W. Bush and crew launched devastatingly ill-fated invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; before this country’s civilian population became — as the nightmare at Uvalde reminded us recently — armed to the teeth with military-style weaponry. It was long before Donald Trump and before the Republican Party was transformed into something unrecognizable. It was well before Congress became essentially incapable of passing anything of significance for most Americans, even as it was instantly capable of providing $54 billion in aid and arms for the Ukrainians and endless funds for the Pentagon.

President Blowback

Just last month, 22 years later, I reread Blowback. Chalmers is, of course, long gone. (He died in November 2010.) But with the news of these last years and what may be on the horizon in mind, I couldn’t help thinking about how he would have updated the book, were he still here.

As a start, I doubt he would have been particularly surprised by Donald Trump. In June 2005, reintroducing a piece he had done for TomDispatch in 2003 on the scourge of militarism, he was already writing: “The American governmental system is no longer working the way it is supposed to. Many distinguished observers think it is badly damaged in terms of Constitutional checks and balances and the structures put in place by the founders to prevent tyranny.”

And as I added in that same 2005 introduction, reflecting Chalmers:

“In September 2003, only four months after [President George W. Bush’s] ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln, it was already evident to some of us that neocon dreams of establishing a robust Pax Americana on the planet were likely to be doomed in the sands of Iraq — but that, in the process, the American constitutional system as we’ve known it might well be destroyed.”

Yes, the possibility of our system spinning downward toward some version of tyranny wouldn’t, I suspect, have surprised him. Of course, he didn’t predict Donald Trump. (Who did?) But if anyone could have imagined this country “governed” — and I put that in quotes for obvious reasons — by a billionaire grifter and TV impresario who thought not just unbearably well of, but only of himself, it was Chalmers. Had he been here in 2016, when that bizarre figure ran for president, as he’d been dreaming about doing since at least 2011, and won, I’d put my money on his not being even slightly taken aback. Nor, I suspect, would he have been surprised when the economic inequality that helped Trump to victory only grew ever more rampant in his years in office, while billionaires began to multiply like fleas on a rabid dog.

Honestly, if you think about it for a moment, it’s hard not to imagine The Donald’s success as another version of blowback. In fact, he’s almost inconceivable without the sort of imperial mess Chalmers had in mind and that this country did such a splendiferous job of encouraging with its disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and its never-ending war on terror. If it weren’t for the mess that our military machine made of the world in this century (and the money it gobbled up in the process), his rise would be hard to imagine. He now seems like the cause of so much, but honestly, as I wrote during the election campaign of 2016 referring to the disease then in the news: “Perhaps it would be better to see Donald Trump as a symptom, not the problem itself, to think of him not as the Zika Virus but as the first infectious mosquito to hit the shores of this country.”

He certainly marked another key moment in what Chalmers would have thought of as the domestic version of imperial decline. In fact, looking back or, given his insistence that the 2020 election was “fake” or “rigged,” looking toward a country in ever-greater crisis, it seems to me that we could redub him Blowback Donald. (Of course, that “B” could also stand for Blowhard.) And given the present Republican Party, as well as the growing evidence that this country’s political system could be coming apart at the seams, it’s hard not to think that Chalmers was onto something big as the last century ended.

Of one thing I’m sure. He wouldn’t have been slightly shocked to discover that, these days, just about the only thing Congress can agree upon across party lines is the annual raising of the Pentagon budget to levels that now match the military budgets of the next 11 countries combined.

Twenty-First-Century Blowback

In the back of my mind, while rereading his book, I kept wondering how else Chalmers might have updated it in 2022. And what came to mind repeatedly was that potentially ultimate subject, climate change.

Now, Chalmers certainly had a sense of the environmental damage the American empire was already causing, but climate change was not yet on his mind. Recently, to my surprise, I came across a passing reference to it in something I wrote but never published in the 1990s and was surprised I even knew about it then. Still, in this century, as I became ever more aware of it and wrote and published ever more about it at TomDispatch, I came to believe that it would indeed be potentially devastating for humanity. For years, though, I didn’t quite grasp that it would be so in my own lifetime.

Back then, I imagined it as largely a phenomenon of the future, not something for which you could find evidence in the news daily (whether identified as such or not). Yes, at some point I realized, for instance, that South Asia might be more susceptible to climate extremes than many other areas. Still, I hadn’t expected that I would live to see springtime weather with temperatures in the range of 115 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, or that such horrific and, without air conditioning, increasingly deathly warmth would be followed by devastating flooding. Or that such extremes would grow more common so quickly.

Nor, honestly, had I expected a wave of record July temperatures (and humidity) here in the northeast U.S. and across much of my own country this very May (it hit 95 degrees on a recent day in Philadelphia!). Nor did I imagine that the Southwest and West would be embroiled in a megadrought the likes of which hasn’t been seen on this continent in at least 1,200 years, with devastating, often record-setting fires, blazing in New Mexico and elsewhere ever earlier in the year. Or the unprecedented severe drought and record flooding in parts of Brazil and Argentina. Or the staggering burning and flooding in Australia. Or the unparalleled floods in recent years in China, Germany, and other countries.

I hadn’t imagined that every spring I’d see more or less the same spring article predicting another terrible, if not record, Atlantic hurricane season. Or that I’d hear about a May hurricane of record strength hitting the Pacific coast of Mexico.

And of course, that’s just to start down what seems like an increasingly endless list. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned those three rare tornadoes in Germany or the record May heat wave in Spain, or… but why go on? You get the idea. In fact, you or people you know are undoubtedly living that very reality, too, in some daunting fashion — and at this moment, thanks to the war in Ukraine and endless other distractions, the world is only burning yet more fossil-fuels promising so much worse to come.

To return to Chalmers Johnson, if you think about it for even 30 seconds, climate change has obviously become the greatest blowback event in human history — with almost unimaginably greater climate chaos likely to come. As he would undoubtedly have noted, if you’re living in the most significant blowback nation in human history, since no other country has put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than the United States, you’re truly facing — to cite the subtitle of his book — “the costs and consequences of American empire” and, of course, of the imperial oil companies that continue to have such a hand in (mis)shaping our world.

Worse yet, in this century, that newest of imperial powers, China, has already outstripped this country in terms of the fossil-fuelization of this planet’s atmosphere. (Yet another classic case of imperial over-stretch in the offing.)

Talk about decline! These days it almost seems to precede imperial rise. Yikes!

And so many years later, just to out-Chalmers the master himself, let me offer another prediction: if the Republicans sweep into Congress in 2022 and Blowback Donald or one of his act-alikes sweeps (or even creeps) into the White House in 2024, consider that the potential end of the American story, since it would ensure that, for years to come, nothing would be done to stop the ultimate version of blowback.

Copyright 2022 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com )

Published in Foreign Policy No. 156 (Sep. – Oct., 2006), pp. 26-28, 30, 32. Copyright Foreign Policy, all rights reserved. Not for further reprint.

These responses were my assessment of 9/11 and the Bush Forever Wars five years after the attacks. It is perhaps worth revisiting them now, 20 years after the attacks. I think I mostly got it right. I pointed out the US had not refashioned Iraq and Afghanistan but just continued the civil war in both countries by backing the previously weaker side. I pointed out that in many ways 9/11 had also been a disaster for al-Qaeda. I pointed to the future threat of cyber-terrorism. One thing that I would like to underline to today’s readers is that the things I said here in fall, 2006, were extremely controversial and would have been angrily denounced by everyone in official Washington. After you read it, you can see what Bush was telling people around the same time here. Because I said these things I was widely and viciously attacked by the right wing in the U.S., who deluged my university administration for years with demands that I be fired; I was subject to an illegal and outrageous investigation of my private life by the CIA; and I was turned down for a job at Yale (which they had asked me to apply for!). As all Wolverines know, the University of Michigan is in any case the best university in the world, and I was always unlikely to leave Ann Arbor. I say all this not in any search for sympathy; I am aware of my privilege. I say it because much of what I said here later on became common wisdom, and I just want to underline how unusual these views were at that time. In fact, it was brave of Foreign Policy to print them; the Bushies and Neoconservatives were vindictive.

9/11 Was a Victory for Al Qaeda

Only somewhat. The operation was certainly a tour de force of large-scale, theatrical terrorism. But did it really advance the goals of the organization? As a result of the attacks, al Qaeda lost its bases and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. Some al Qaeda strategists had wanted to expand the Taliban’s rule from Afghanistan to neighboring countries, including Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and eventually Pakistan. Instead, the movement’s leaders were forced to either flee overseas or take refuge in a remote network of caves. Military strikes and intelligence operations have disrupted the organization, and hundreds of key operatives have been arrested in Pakistan. Intercepted correspondence and Internet postings reveal that some al Qaeda operatives are bitter toward Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for incurring the full wrath of the United States. Although al Qaeda as a movement or franchise may have benefited from the successes of the Iraqi insurgency, al Qaeda’s leadership did not anticipate the Iraq war. The organization has capitalized on the fighting to further its message and recruiting, but the war was not part of its overarching strategy.

Small Attacks by Local Cells Have Replaced 9/11 -Style Operations

Probably. Post-9/11 terrorism — from Bali to Madrid to London — has become the province of small, local groups who are emulating al Qaeda but not in direct contact with it. These cells can learn a few tricks on the Internet, and they can certainly inflict pain, but they cannot hope to accomplish much. At most, they can carry bombs onto trains. The economic and social disruption of these operations is limited, which is why al Qaeda itself would not bother with them. The core al Qaeda leadership prefers terrorism that has a powerful psychological and political impact. Attaining that level of impact has now become very difficult. The 9/11 hijackers exploited conceptual gaps in U.S. security procedures: American experts did not expect hijackers to be capable of piloting jetliners, and they did not expect them to commit suicide. It would be very difficult to accomplish such an advanced operation again. The organization’s command and control has been severely disrupted, and security agencies around the world are watchful. But al Qaeda is not out of the game entirely. In February 2006, its operatives almost succeeded in bombing the Abqaiq oil refining facility in Saudi Arabia, which would have caused an enormous short term spike in the price of petroleum and widespread fuel shortages. But the fact that a once porous Saudi security apparatus foiled the attack highlights al Qaeda’s limited capabilities.

9/11 Was a Clash of Civilizations

False. The notion that Muslims hate the West for its way of life is simply wrong, and 9/11 hasn’t changed that. The exhaustive World Values Survey found that more than 90 percent of respondents in much of the Muslim world endorsed democracy as the best form of government. Polling by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has found that about half of respondents in countries such as Turkey and Morocco believe that if a Muslim immigrated to the United States, his or her life would be better. The one area where Muslim publics admit to a value difference with the United States and Europe is standards of sexual conduct and, in particular, acceptance of homosexuality. In other words, Muslims reject what might be called Hollywood morality, just as do American conservatives and evangelicals. Those differences alone do not drive people to violence.

If it is not a clash of civilizations, what is it?

It is a clash over policy. Bin Laden has expressed outrage at the occupation of the three holy cities — Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem- – by the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia (now ended) and the Israeli possession of Jerusalem. Before the Iraq war, polling consistently showed that Muslims were most concerned about the United States’ wholehearted support of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. The bloody U.S. occupation of Iraq has now created another point of tension: The Muslim world does not believe that Iraq will be better off because of the U.S. intervention. Autonomy and national independence appear to be part of what Muslims mean by democracy, and they consider Western interventions in Muslim affairs a betrayal of democratic ideals. September 11 and the American response to it have deepened the rift over policy, but they haven’t created a clash of civilizations.

The War on Terror Has no End

That’s the plan. The Bush administration has defined the struggle vaguely precisely so that it can’t end; George W. Bush clearly enjoys the prerogatives of being a war president. So, the administration has expanded the goals and targets of this war from one group or geographical area to another. There is an ongoing counterterrorism effort against al Qaeda and, more broadly, the Salafist jihadi strain of Sunni radicalism. Then there is the struggle to empower the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and to crush permanently the Pashtun-centered Taliban. In Iraq, the goal is to ensure the primacy of the Kurds and the Shiites over the Sunni Arabs. And then there is the effort to contain or overthrow the secular Baathist regime in Syria and the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran. Even North Korea sometimes gets included in this sprawling campaign. It is less a coherent war than a hawk’s wish list.If the war on terror is indeed all these things, then it could drag on for decades. More likely, the American public will not tolerate such a costly grab bag of initiatives for much longer. If there is no major attack in the United States, pressure will build on Washington to stop fiddling with the politics of Kandahar and Ramadi, much less those of Damascus and Tehran. At some point, the American public will have to choose between paying for Bush’s ongoing wars and Medicare.And that will be the true end of the war on terror.

9/11 Radically Changed U.S. Foreign Policy

No. American policy has changed only at the margins. The attacks temporarily removed constraints on U.S. political elites, allowing them to pursue their policies more aggressively. As we now know, President Bush and his advisors wanted to undermine Saddam’s regime well before September 11. Absent the attacks, the administration might have employed a limited bombing campaign, a covert operation, or a coup attempt. The attacks suddenly made a years long land war in the Middle East politically palatable. But that energy has now dissipated, and it has left behind little fundamental change in U.S. policy.Despite talk of a war on terror, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, the Persian Gulf monarchies, Morocco,and Pakistan remain close U.S. allies. Relations with Libya were warming in the Clinton era, and the Iraq war didn’t alter its trajectory. American support for Israel remains steadfast. And Iran and Syria were in Washington’s sights well before 9/11.It is possible to imagine a response to 9/11 that would have been dramatically different. The United States might have allied with the Baathist secularists in Syria and Iraq, and with the Shiites in Iran, to counter the extremist Sunni threat. Instead, all Washington’s old friends in the area (including the three regimes that had recognized the Taliban — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) are still friends, and the old enemies are still enemies. The most dramatic changes, of course, are in Afghanistan and Iraq. But both countries have effectively been fighting civil wars for 25 years, with the United States backing the losing side (the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq). After 9/11, the Bush administration transformed the losers in those conflicts into winners. But the civil wars continue, with the unseated groups now playing the role of insurgents. The change is significant, but the transformation is far less complete than what was imagined in the spring of 2003. The administration’s plan for liberalization and democratization in the Middle East has yielded little beyond a failed state in Iraq, an unstable Lebanon torn between Hezbollah and Israel, and polite but noncommittal noises from allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The Next 9/11 Will Be Even Worse

It’s anyone’s guess. Al Qaeda’s efforts to acquire nuclear material have been amateurish. In 2002, U.S. agents in Afghanistan seized canisters from Taliban and al Qaeda compounds, only to discover that al Qaeda operatives had likely been duped into purchasing phony nuclear materials. The organization has pursued other tools of mass destruction, but without much success. Al Qaeda agents were reportedly planning to use poison gas in New York’s subway system, though it appears that Zawahiri mysteriously called off the operation. Perhaps the experience of the Aum Shinrikyo terrorist group in Tokyo deterred him; its 1995 attack killed 12 people rather than the thousands the terrorists had hoped to claim. Still, it would be irresponsible to minimize the threat. Technological advances are allowing small groups to wreak major damage, and al Qaeda has often attracted skilled engineers and scientists. Breakthroughs in DNA research, for example, could lead to designer viruses that would be a terrorist’s dream. The Internet has created new vulnerabilities as major engineering infrastructure, from dams to nuclear plants, has come to rely on it. The world’s financial systems are increasingly vulnerable as well. Governments, universities, and corporations must ensure that emerging technologies don’t go astray. Al Qaeda may not have fundamentally changed the world on 9/11, but that is no reason to give it a second chance.

Want to Know More?

1 For a discussion of the roots of 9/11 and insight into what makes militants tick, see Fawaz Gerges’s The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006). Noted Islam scholar Gilles Kepel examines the politics behind radical Islam in Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon speculate on what the next 9/11 might look like in The Next Attack:The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (New York: Times Books, 2005). FOREIGN POLICY and the Center for American Progress surveyed more than 100 leading foreign-policy experts about the prospects for America’s war against terror in The Terrorism Index (FOREIGN POLICY,July/August 2006). Richard Clarke offers an insider’s look at the U.S. government’s struggle to adapt to the world of global terrorism in Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004). The 911 Commission Report (New York: Norton, 2004) examines the attack in minute detail, assesses the policy failures that made it possible, and suggests reforms to prevent it from happening again.

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Bonus Video:

9/11: One Day In America | Documentary Series Trailer | National Geographic UK

I’m not sure even an old foreign policy hand like President Biden understands how explosive this move is. Bin Salman is the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, and mildly criticizing him is enough to get people thrown in jail and tortured. It is absolutely forbidden inside the kingdom to tie the crown prince to Khashoggi’s murder.

President Biden’s team seems to think that it can sideline Bin Salman, and just deal with King Salman, 85. In my view, this is like a foreign power thinking they could have sidelined Jared Kushner and just dealt with the odious Trump directly.

Bin Salman is enormously popular with Saudi youth and he has concentrated the levers of power in his hands. He will try to tough out the Biden years while continuing his domestic plans.

Biden says he will call King Salman to discuss the issue. US officials are no longer talking to Bin Salman himself.

Saudi Arabia’s modern history took a sharp and dangerous turn on January 23, 2015, when Salman Bin Abdulaziz acceded to the throne of Saudi Arabia. He made his cunning and ambitious young son, Mohammed Bin Salman, the minister of defense, and within two months the Saudi kingdom was at war in Yemen. The Yemen War, which has stretched on for five years without any benefit to anyone, was Bin Salman’s brainchild. Bin Salman went on to sideline rival after rival, and by summer of 2017 he was crown prince.

Saudi Arabia. h/t Wikimedia.

King Salman allegedly has spells of disorientation, and his son is young and vigorous and actually runs things. He kidnapped his cousins in the royal family, imprisoning them in the Ritz Carlton Riyadh, and shook them down for $100 billion. He kidnapped the sitting prime minister of Lebanon and tried to force him to resign (Beirut was outraged and refused to accept the resignation under duress.)

He colluded with the ruler of the United Arab Emirates to overthrow or at least sideline the government of Qatar, trying to make a deep fake of Qatar’s emir speaking on television, so as to smear him to the Americans. He helped impose a blockade on little Qatar aimed at crashing its economy. Likely he was trying to get hold of its natural gas wealth and its sovereign wealth fund, the latter valued at $345 billion. Bin Salman used his friendship with Jared Kushner to inveigle the odious Trump into supporting, at least initially, this Saudi attack on an ally.

So that’s three countries Bin Salman attacked in some way since 2015. Number of countries Saudi Arabia had attacked since it was formed in 1930 and until 2014?

Zero.

Saudi Arabia is a relatively small country by citizen population but extremely wealthy because of petroleum. It had avoided military adventurism, preferring to use its vast wealth as a carrot and a stick. Saudi Arabia was a little timid. If it felt menace, as by the 1979 Shiite Islamic revolution in Iran (which promulgated the idea that there is no place for kings in Islam), it worked through third parties to curb the threat.In the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, Saudi Arabia bankrolled Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Iran.

But invading countries and bombing the bejesus out of them or kidnapping prime ministers. Not so much, before 2015.

On October 2, 2018, Washington Post columnist of Saudi extraction Jamal Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He needed to do the paperwork to finalize his divorce (imposed on him, more or less, when he was forced out of his country by Bin Salman’s increasing authoritarianism). He wanted to marry his Turkish girlfriend. Mohammed Bin Salman’s brother, Khalid Bin Salman, was ambassador to the US, and he assured Khashoggi that he was welcome in the consulate in Turkey. Was he part of the trap?

A hit team of Saudi assassins flew in. They seized him and put a bag over his head and smothered him to death. To sneak the body out of the consulate, they had brought along a medical examiner who used a bone saw to cut up Khashoggi’s corpse. Apparently even the hit team became nauseous at the slaughter. The ME advised them to listen to music.

The CIA assessed that Bin Salman directly ordered the hit on Khashoggi. He was apparently upset that Khashoggi was writing op eds for the Washington Post that criticized the odious Trump, and was afraid these articles might harm Saudi-US relations, since Khashoggi had until recently been part of the Saudi elite. The odious Trump is notoriously thin-skinned.

CNN’s Alex Marquardt has seen top secret Saudi documents that make it clear that the assassins flew to Istanbul on a plane owned by a Saudi company that was bought up by . . . Mohammed Bin Salman. As if any were needed, here is another piece of evidence for his complicity.

The CIA report is set to hit on Thursday. Stay tuned.

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Bonus Video:

Sky News Australia: “Biden to raise murder of US journalist with Saudi King”

I don’t guess I’m thanking Israel for committing a flagrant act of terrorism. If Israel can murder a scientist in Iran, what is to stop it from murdering people it doesn’t like in other countries, including in the United States?

Former director of the CIA, John Brennan, put the reasons for our shocking ingratitude succinctly:

This was a criminal act & highly reckless. It risks lethal retaliation & a new round of regional conflict.
Iranian leaders would be wise to wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage & to resist the urge to respond against perceived culprits. https://t.co/0uZhyBTM3S

— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) November 27, 2020

I do not know whether a foreign government authorized or carried out the the murder of Fakhrizadeh. Such an act of state-sponsored terrorism would be a flagrant violation of international law & encourage more governments to carry out lethal attacks against foreign officials.

— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) November 27, 2020

Brennan pointed out that in international law there is a difference between killing a member of a non-state terrorist group and simply murdering the citizen of a sovereign country.

By going public in this way, I suspect Brennan is trying to give the incoming Biden administration officials cover to distance themselves from Israel’s action. Brennan’s former deputy, Avril Haines, has been named by Biden the incoming CIA chief.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

Brennan called Trump’s breach of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal signed by the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany “the height of folly” and a “disaster.” This is because Brennan knows that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or nuclear deal closed off all four plausible paths for Iran ever to weaponize its civilian nuclear enrichment program. By destroying the treaty, Trump has left Iran free to enrich to higher levels, with more and better centrifuges than the treaty had allowed.

Israeli officials at least say that they do not accept this firm international consensus, and want to destroy the JCPOA because they hold it provides cover for a secret Iranian weapons program. This is no doubt a guilt complex speaking, since Israel has dozens of atomic bombs that it made clandestinely while promising Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon that they would never do such a thing. The difference is that the UN inspection regime in the JCPOA is rigorous, and no country under its inspections has ever developed a nuclear bomb. Israel on the other hand never accepted inspections, and so was free to make its deadly arsenal.

By going nuclear, Israel started an arms race in the Middle East that has cost the United States trillions of dollars. Iraq’s 1980s nuclear enrichment program was in response to the Israeli Bomb, and that Iraq so much as did those (failed) experiments helped lead to the disastrous 2003 Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now we are going around about Iran and could well end up at war with it, a war Israel is goading Washington on to.

With the murder of Fakhrizadeh, its responsibility for which Israel is leaking to the New York Times, the government of Benyamin Netanyahu joins a rogues gallery of backers of state terrorism who kill civilians abroad.

They include Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, who had his half-brother, Kim Jong-nam poisoned to death at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in February, 2017.

Or there is the Saudi government, whose hit squad smothered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to death in an Istanbul consulate on October 2, 2018 and then cut his body up with a bone saw.

And then there is Vlad “the Poisoner” Putin, who enjoys using toxins only a government has access to in order to signal his responsibility, even while denying it orally.

Here is the kind of thing Brennan was talking about: Both the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute that governs the International Criminal Court forbid the murder of non-combatants. Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was a civilian. This action is a war crime, and if it is pursued systematically, it is a crime against humanity.

In 2010-2012, four other Iranian scientists were murdered — Masoud Alimohammadi, Majid Shahriari, Darioush Rezaeinejad and Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, also likely by Israel through agents it ran inside Iran. So this activity does seem to be systemic and therefore is a crime against humanity.

The alternative to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal is, at some point down the road, war, which is what Netanyahu is plumping for. Only he is trying to goad the US into fighting that war for him.

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Bonus Video:

Democracy Now! “A Trap? Why Assassination of Top Iranian Nuclear Scientist Could Tie Biden’s Hands in Future Talks”