Israeli A Serious Problem Here, Con't

While the Israeli ground war ramps up and the death toll in Gaza is now well over 8,000, the world is not standing idly by as Palestinians are bombed and Israelis are hit with rockets, and while the most obvious candidate and route for this disaster to expand is Hezbollah and Iran, it turns out the more immediate threat may in fact be Turkey.

President Tayyip Erdogan addressed hundreds of thousands of supporters at one of the largest pro-Palestinian rallies since the Israel-Hamas war began, courting his Islamist political base a day ahead of the centenary of Turkey's secular republic.

"Israel has been openly committing war crimes for 22 days, but the Western leaders cannot even call on Israel for a ceasefire, let alone react to it," Erdogan told the crowd in Istanbul, who waved Palestinian flags.

"We will tell the whole world that Israel is a war criminal. We are making preparations for this. We will declare Israel a war criminal," he said.

In an hour-long speech, Erdogan also repeated his assertion that Hamas was not a terrorist organisation, describing Israel as an occupier.

Turkey has condemned Israeli civilian deaths caused by Hamas's Oct. 7 rampage through southern Israel, which killed 1,400, but Erdogan this week called the militant group Palestinian "freedom fighters".

He also criticised some Western nations' unconditional support for Israel, drawing sharp rebukes from Italy and Israel.

Unlike many NATO allies, the European Union and some Gulf states, Turkey does not consider Hamas a terrorist organisation. It has long hosted its members, supports a two-state solution and has offered to play a role in negotiating the release of hostages abducted by Hamas during the Oct. 7 assault.

Political analysts said Erdogan was keen to reinforce his criticism of Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip and to overshadow Sunday's celebrations marking Turkey's secular roots.

Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat and director of the Centre for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies, an Istanbul-based think-tank, said Gaza's worsening humanitarian crisis and pressure from political allies had prompted Erdogan to sharpen his rhetoric.

Turkey "will protect its principles and share these with the international community, but it needs to do this with a more delicate diplomacy if it expects to play such a diplomatic role," Ulgen said.

The heads of allied nationalist and Islamist parties - which helped Erdogan secure victory in tight May elections - attended the rally at Istanbul's old airport. Erdogan criticised opposition parties for not calling Netanyahu a "terrorist" and for using the same term with reference to Hamas.

Needless to say, a NATO ally coming in on the side of Hamas against Israel right now would be the definition of catastrophic. Erdogan spouting saber-rattling rhetoric is one thing, but if this gets worse, or gets military, all bets are off. 

Turkey could in fact be the key to brokering a cease fire, but not if Ankara continues down this path.

Of course, there's always the usual suspects who could make things worse as well

We'll see.

Last Call For The Return Of Syria's Business

We're bombing Syria now in retaliation for attacks on US bases in the Middle East, and this all feels like October 2001 again.

U.S. fighter jets launched airstrikes early Friday on two locations in eastern Syria linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pentagon said, in retaliation for a slew of drone and missile attacks against U.S. bases and personnel in the region that began early last week.

The U.S. strikes reflect the Biden administration’s determination to maintain a delicate balance. The U.S. wants to hit Iranian-backed groups suspected of targeting the U.S. as strongly as possible to deter future aggression, possibly fueled by Israel’s war against Hamas, while also working to avoid inflaming the region and provoking a wider conflict.

According to a senior U.S. military official, the precision strikes were carried out near Boukamal by two F-16 fighter jets, and they struck weapons and ammunition storage areas that were connected to the IRGC. The official said there had been Iranian-aligned militia and IRGC personnel on the base and no civilians, but the U.S. does not have any information yet on casualties or an assessment of damage. The official would not say how many munitions were launched by the F-16s.

A senior defense official said the sites were chosen because the IRGC stores the types of munitions there that were used in the strikes against U.S. bases and troops. The two officials briefed reporters after the strikes on condition of anonymity to provide details on the mission that had not yet been made public.

According to the Pentagon, there have now been at least 19 attacks on U.S. bases and personnel in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 17, including three new ones Thursday. Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said 21 U.S. personnel were injured in two of those assaults that used drones to target al-Asad Airbase in Iraq and al-Tanf Garrison in Syria.

In a statement, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the “precision self-defense strikes are a response to a series of ongoing and mostly unsuccessful attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria by Iranian-backed militia groups that began on October 17.”

He said President Joe Biden directed the narrowly tailored strikes “to make clear that the United States will not tolerate such attacks and will defend itself, its personnel, and its interests.” And he added that the operation was separate and distinct from Israel’s war against Hamas.

 

Of course the fear is that strikes on Iranian positions won't be distinct and separate from the current Israel-Hamas conflict for much longer. More attacks on US bases and troops will continue if the last two decades are indicative, no matter how many F-16 sorties we run.

Of course, if Trump were in charge instead of Biden right now, there wouldn't be fear of a global war, we'd be neck deep in one, so I'll take the hope that Biden and company know what they are doing when it comes to deterring a wider war any and every day over that.

Last Call For Israeli Getting Serious Out There, Con't

President Biden is expected to visit Israel on Wednesday as part of a wider Mideast shuttle diplomacy tour this week.

It took an explicit commitment from his Israeli counterpart to open Gaza for humanitarian aid for President Joe Biden to agree to make an extraordinary wartime trip to Tel Aviv.

While the trip will amount to a dramatic show of support for Israel as it prepares the latest stage of its response to last week’s Hamas attacks, it will also act as Biden’s strongest push for easing the suffering of civilians and allowing those who want to leave Gaza out. That mission got more complicated Tuesday as Biden was about to take off on Air Force One for the region – a planned summit with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was canceled after an explosion at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City killed hundreds. Palestinian officials quickly blamed Israel for the blast as the Israelis denied responsibility and pinned the blame on a failed rocket by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The high-stakes diplomacy with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his interlocutor of four decades, underscores the delicate balance Biden is striking as he embarked upon the last-minute wartime visit Tuesday evening.

The White House had attempted to balance the public and military support for Israel with the reality that Arab partners are critical to Biden’s approach by going to Jordan for a summit with the key Arab leaders. But the last-minute scrapping of that meeting meant Biden would no longer go to Amman and instead faces a new diplomatic headache.

At stake on the trip to Israel are the lives of millions of civilians, including Americans, currently stuck in the coastal Palestinian enclave where a humanitarian crisis is underway as Israeli troops mass at its borders ahead of an expected ground invasion.

While there was no explicit stipulation from the US that Israel not launch its invasion until Biden leaves the region, that’s the understanding among American officials who have spent the past several days debating and planning the president’s visit, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

American officials want humanitarian plans for Gaza fully signed off on and implemented before start of the invasion, the people said, describing that task as among Biden’s main objectives during his visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday.

 

Secretary of State Tony Blinken is getting some heavy diplomatic backup. He's going to need it. 

 

An attack on al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, a Christian-run medical complex in central Gaza City, killed 200 to 300 people on Tuesday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

The ministry’s spokesman, Ashraf Al Qudra, estimated that at least 200 were injured.

Officials in Gaza and in Israel blamed each other for the carnage.

Al Qudra said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had targeted the hospital for bombing. Hamas also blamed Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied that, saying, “It was barbaric terrorists in Gaza that attacked the hospital in Gaza, and not the IDF.”

Photos of the hospital showed fire engulfing the halls, shattered glass and body parts scattered across the wreckage. Videos posted to a Palestinian paramedic’s Instagram stories show first responders arriving at the hospital and taking bloodied bodies out.

Looking visibly shell-shocked in a video shared with NBC News, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah said there were three artillery attacks on the hospital. “Part of the roof started to fall,” he said, as he was treating a patient for a jugular injury.

If the hospital bombing death toll of 200-300 is confirmed, it would be the deadliest incident inside Gaza since Hamas’ terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

Doctors Without Borders said on the X platform that it was “horrified” by the bombing.

 

Understand that Israelis may be rallying 'round the flag right now, but not rallying around Bibi. 

One Israeli cabinet minister was barred from a hospital visitors' entrance. Another's bodyguards were drenched with coffee thrown by a bereaved man. A third had "traitor" and "imbecile" shouted at her as she came to comfort families evacuated during the horror.

The shock Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas gunmen has rallied Israelis to one another. But there is little love shown for a government being widely accused of dropping the country's guard and engulfing it in a Gaza war that is rattling the region.

Whatever ensues, a day of judgment looms for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after a record-long career of political comebacks.

Public fury over some 1,300 Israeli fatalities has been further fuelled by Netanyahu's signature self-styling as a Churchillian strategist who foresaw national-security threats.

Another backdrop is social polarisation this year over his religious-nationalist coalition's judicial overhaul drive, which triggered walkouts by some military reservists and raised doubts - now borne out in blood, some argue - about combat-readiness.

"October 2023 Debacle" read a headline in top-selling daily Yedioth Ahronoth, language meant to recall Israel's failure to anticipate a twin Egyptian and Syrian offensive in October 1973, which eventually led then-Prime Minister Golda Meir to resign.

That ouster put paid to the hegemony of Meir's centre-left Labour party. Amotz Asa-El, research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, predicted a similar fate for Netanyahu and his long-dominant, conservative Likud party.

 

The moment this war ends, so does Netanyahu's career. My prediction: Bibi will attack Gaza with a full-scale ground invasion and this war will drag on for as long as it needs to. He won't listen to Biden. He certainly won't listen to China and the BRICS nations, warning very loudly that such a ground invasion and occupation will have a price.

Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip have gone "beyond the scope of self-defense," China's foreign minister has said, as the encroaching possibility of an Israeli ground attack threatens to further endanger Palestinian civilians who have been caught up in the fighting.

Protecting "the basic needs of the people in Gaza" is a priority and "China opposes and condemns all acts that harm civilians," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said during a call with Saudi Arabia Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud in remarks reported by Chinese media.

Remember, the expanded roster of BRICS nations into next year includes Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Iran. Needless to say, if Netanyahu decides he wants to stay in power no matter what the price is, these are four Middle Eastern countries that can impose a staggering cost, with Russia and China backing them up.

Pray Biden can help Bibi come down to Earth and face the consequences, or "Much larger Middle Eastern War" is on the menu.

[UPDATE] It's not looking good for Biden's trip at all. Both Jordan's King Abdullah and Egypt's President al Sisi are telling Biden to go pound sand.

Jordan has cancelled a summit it was to host in Amman on Wednesday with U.S. President Joe Biden and the Egyptian and Palestinian leaders to discuss Gaza, Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said.

Safadi said the meeting would be held at a time when the parties could agree to end the "war and the massacres against Palestinians", blaming Israel with its military campaign for pushing the region to "the brink of the abyss."

Jordanian and Egyptian officials are pissed about the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital massacre. Hell, at this point I don't know if Bibi will even bother holding off the ground assault until after Biden leaves.

This was already bad. It's now starting to look way, way worse.

Last Call For Israeli Getting Serious Out There, Con't

As I've said, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, having now survived three attempts to reform a government without him, is using last weekend's Hamas assault as proof that Israel doesn't have time to try to oust him again. Whether or not that works, we'll see. Vox's Zack Beauchamp:

 

In the past 24 hours, two reports out of Israel have pointed to a striking conclusion: that the failure to prevent Hamas’s murderous assault on southern Israel rests in significant part with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

First, the Washington Post’s Noga Tarnopolsky and Shira Rubin wrote a lengthy dispatch on the many policy failures that allowed Hamas to break through. They find that, in addition to myriad unforgivable intelligence and military mistakes — especially shocking given Israel’s reputation in both fields — there were serious political problems. Distracted by both the fight to seize control over Israel’s judiciary and their effort to deepen Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Netanyahu and his cabinet allowed military readiness to degrade and left outposts on the Gaza border in the south unmanned.

“There was a need for more soldiers, so where did they take them from? From the Gaza border, where they thought it was calm ... not surprising that Hamas and Islamic Jihad noticed the low staffing at the border,” Aharon Zeevi Farkash, the former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence, said in comments reported by the Post.

Second, a columnist at Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper unearthed evidence that Netanyahu has intentionally propped up Hamas rule in Gaza — seeing Palestinian extremism as a bulwark against a two-state solution to the conflict.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” the prime minister reportedly said at a 2019 meeting of his Likud party. “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

These exact comments have not yet been confirmed by other sources. But the Times of Israel’s Tal Schneider wrote on Sunday that Netanyahu’s reported words “are in line with the policy that he implemented,” which did little to challenge and in some ways bolstered Hamas’s control over the Gaza Strip. Moreover, Schneider notes, “the same messaging was repeated by right-wing commentators, who may have received briefings on the matter or talked to Likud higher-ups and understood the message.” Some Netanyahu confidants have said the same thing, as have outside experts.

Put together, these two pieces tell a larger story: that the strategic vision of Netanyahu’s far-right government is a failure.

The notion that Israel can deliver security for its citizens by dividing and conquering Palestinians, crushing them into submission as a kind of colonial overlord, is both immoral and counterproductive on its own terms. Recognizing this reality will be crucial to formulating not only a humane response to Hamas’s atrocity, but an effective one.

 

America failed to recognize this over two decades ago. What should have been the end of the political careers of anyone named Bush or Cheney turned into a second term and a second war that took two decades to extinguish, only for Israel to basically decide that planned incompetence was the way to go to save Bibi's neck when it should be his downfall.

 

Of course, Hamas did decide to butcher several hundred Israeli civilians and take several hundred more as hostages, so it's not like they are blameless here. But it's looking more and more like Bibi opened this particular gateway to hell and then deliberately looked the other way as the monsters came through.

 

You'd think it would cost him his job. Instead it's looking like we could be in for a major war in the Middle East again.

President Biden seems mostly on board.

President Biden said Tuesday that Americans were among the hostages being held by Hamas, in addition to 14 U.S. citizens who have been killed, and he vowed that the United States would stand by Israel as it responds forcefully to the surprise attack on its soil.

Biden, who did not provide a number of U.S. hostages, added that Israel has not only a right but a “duty” to respond to the onslaught by Hamas, which has left hundreds dead. His speech was the first official confirmation that Americans were being held captive, although officials had earlier suggested that was likely to be the case.

“As president, I have no higher priority than the safety of Americans being held hostage around the world,” Biden said. “Like every nation in the world, Israel has the right to respond and indeed has a duty to respond to these vicious attacks.”

Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said that the administration could not confirm the number of hostages but that at least 20 Americans were missing. Sullivan stressed that did not necessarily mean there were 20 or more U.S. hostages.

Overall, between 100 and 150 people are being held in Gaza, according to an Israeli official, and Hamas has threatened to execute civilian hostages if Israeli airstrikes continue.

Biden, delivering remarks from the State Dining Room in White House, flanked by Vice President Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, spoke in unusually vivid terms about the assault itself.

“There are moments in this life when pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed in this world,” he said, referring to “stomach-turning reports of babies being killed” and “women raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.”

These are not exactly the words of a man seeking peace, folks.  Luckily the House GOP clown show may actually be to some benefit here for once as if they can't get their crap together and elect a Speaker, there's not going to be much additional military aid to Israel.  It might slow down the war train a bit.

We'll see.

Last Call For Lordy, There Are Tapes

Ladies and gentlemen, here's audio evidence that Donald Trump committed a federal crime.

CNN has exclusively obtained the audio recording of the 2021 meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, where President Donald Trump discusses holding secret documents he did not declassify.

The recording, which first aired on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” includes new details from the conversation that is a critical piece of evidence in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump over the mishandling of classified information, including a moment when Trump seems to indicate he was holding a secret Pentagon document with plans to attack Iran.

“These are the papers,” Trump says in the audio recording, while he’s discussing the Pentagon attack plans, a quote that was not included in the indictment.

In the two-minute audio recording, Trump and his aides also joke about Hillary Clinton’s emails after the former president says that the document was “secret information.”

“Hillary would print that out all the time, you know. Her private emails,” Trump’s staffer said.

“No, she’d send it to Anthony Weiner,” Trump responded, referring to the former Democratic congressman, prompting laughter in the room.

Trump’s statements on the audio recording, saying “these are the papers” and referring to something he calls “highly confidential” and seems to be showing others in the room, could undercut the former president’s claims in an interview last week with Fox News’ Bret Baier that he did not have any documents with him.

“There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” Trump said on Fox. “And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”

Trump pleaded not guilty earlier this month to 37 counts related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents kept at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

The audio recording comes from a July 2021 interview Trump gave at his Bedminster resort for people working on the memoir of Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff. The special counsel’s indictment alleges that those in attendance – a writer, publisher and two of Trump’s staff members – were shown classified information about the plan of attack on Iran. 

 

If you still want to know why Republicans are trying to invent a Joe Biden "bribery scandal" out of smoke and mirrors where nobody can actually come up with the tapes proving anything at all happened, it's because these tapes proving Trump is a crook actually exist.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The mountain of evidence against Donald Trump that the intelligence information contained in the classified documents he took and kept after he left office were shown to foreign nationals continues to grow exponentially.

 

Federal prosecutors have obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything.

The recording indicates Trump understood he retained classified material after leaving the White House, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation. On the recording, Trump’s comments suggest he would like to share the information but he’s aware of limitations on his ability post-presidency to declassify records, two of the sources said.

CNN has not listened to the recording, but multiple sources described it. One source said the relevant portion on the Iran document is about two minutes long, and another source said the discussion is a small part of a much longer meeting.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Justice Department investigation into Trump, has focused on the meeting as part of the criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of national security secrets. Sources describe the recording as an “important” piece of evidence in a possible case against Trump, who has repeatedly asserted he could retain presidential records and “automatically” declassify documents.

Prosecutors have asked witnesses about the recording and the document before a federal grand jury. The episode has generated enough interest for investigators to have questioned Gen. Mark Milley, one of the highest-ranking Trump-era national security officials, about the incident.

The July 2021 meeting was held at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with two people working on the autobiography of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows as well as aides employed by the former president, including communications specialist Margo Martin. The attendees, sources said, did not have security clearances that would allow them access to classified information. Meadows didn’t attend the meeting, sources said.

Meadows’ autobiography includes an account of what appears to be the same meeting, during which Trump “recalls a four-page report typed up by (Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency.”

 

The NY Times backing up the CNN story:

 

The tape was made during a meeting Mr. Trump held in July 2021 with people helping his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, write a memoir of his 10 months in the White House, according to the people briefed on the matter. The meeting was held at Mr. Trump’s club at Bedminster, N.J., where he spends summers.

Until now, the focus of the documents investigation has been largely on material Mr. Trump kept with him at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, rather than in New Jersey.

Mr. Meadows did not attend the meeting, but at least two of Mr. Trump’s aides did. One, Margo Martin, routinely taped the interviews he gave for books being written about him that year.

On the recording, Mr. Trump began railing about his handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, who was described in media accounts at the time as having guarded against Mr. Trump’s striking Iran in the final days of the presidency, according to the people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Trump then began referencing a document that he had with him, saying that it had been compiled by General Milley and was related to attacking Iran, the people briefed on the matter said. Among other comments, he mentioned his classification abilities during the discussion, one person briefed on the matter said. Mr. Trump can be heard handling paper on the tape, though it is not clear whether it was the document in question.

The Justice Department obtained the recording in recent months, a potentially key piece in a mountain of evidence that prosecutors have amassed under the special counsel, Jack Smith, since he was appointed in November to oversee the federal investigations into Mr. Trump.

Ms. Martin was asked about the recording during a grand jury appearance, according to two of the people briefed on the matter.

 

This alone, in a just world, would be the end of Trump.  We do not live in anything close to a just world, but we do live in one where Trump cannot keep his damned mouth shut.

Hopefully we'll see charges soon. We have to maintain that hope, or we're lost.

Last Call For The Original October Surprise

With former President Jimmy Carter receiving palliative care at home at age 98, a long-time GOP political operator has come forward to confirm that Reagan's campaign sabotaged Carter's Iran hostage rescue efforts on purpose to win the 1980 election.

 

It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.

It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.

His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.

What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.

Mr. Carter’s camp has long suspected that Mr. Casey or someone else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.

Mr. Connally did not figure in those investigations. His involvement, as described by Mr. Barnes, adds a new understanding to what may have happened in that hard-fought, pivotal election year. With Mr. Carter now 98 and in hospice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record.

“History needs to know that this happened,” Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of several interviews, his first with a news organization about the episode. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”

Mr. Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility, like some of the characters who fueled previous iterations of the October surprise theory. He was once one of the most prominent figures in Texas, the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and later lieutenant governor. He was such an influential figure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that Mr. Barnes would become president someday.

Confirming Mr. Barnes’s account is problematic after so much time. Mr. Connally, Mr. Casey and other central figures have long since died and Mr. Barnes has no diaries or memos to corroborate his account. But he has no obvious reason to make up the story and indeed expressed trepidation at going public because of the reaction of fellow Democrats.

Mr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years: Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation; Tom Johnson, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson (no relation) who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN; Larry Temple, a former aide to Mr. Connally and Lyndon Johnson; and H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian.

All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago. “As far as I know, Ben never has lied to me,” Tom Johnson said, a sentiment the others echoed. Mr. Brands included three paragraphs about Mr. Barnes’s recollections in a 2015 biography of Mr. Reagan, but the account generated little public notice at the time.

Records at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum confirm part of Mr. Barnes’s story. An itinerary found this past week in Mr. Connally’s files indicated that he did, in fact, leave Houston on July 18, 1980, for a trip that would take him to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel before returning to Houston on Aug. 11. Mr. Barnes was listed as accompanying him.

 

Holy shit.

 

The original, old-school October Surprise really was a Reagan dirty trick designed to sabotage a sitting president's re-election campaign and it worked, and they basically got away with it for my entire lifetime, and the only reason we know what we know now is that Jimmy Carter is facing his final days and the guilt was too much for one of the assholes to bear.

 

We all knew it was, the Iranians released the hostages literally minutes after Reagan was sworn in on January 20, 1981.

And yet when I told Zandardad about this, a man who was proud to vote for Carter then and met him in person years later, he said little would come of this, and that he'd still prefer Reagan to the current GOP.

God help me, he's not wrong.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

As many have suspected, the stolen classified documents Trump kept in his Mar-a-Lago pool closet contained sensitive national security information about both Iran and China.

Some of the classified documents recovered by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club included highly sensitive intelligence regarding Iran and China, according to people familiar with the matter. If shared with others, the people said, such information could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the United States wants to keep hidden from the world.

At least one of the documents seized by the FBI describes Iran’s missile program, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. Other documents described highly sensitive intelligence work aimed at China, they said.

Unauthorized disclosures of specific information in the documents would pose multiple risks, experts say. People aiding U.S. intelligence efforts could be endangered, and collection methods could be compromised. In addition, other countries or U.S. adversaries could retaliate against the United States for actions it has taken in secret.

The classified documents about Iran and China are considered among the most sensitive the FBI has recovered to date in its investigation of Trump and his aides for possible mishandling of classified information, obstruction and destruction of government records, the people said. The criminal probe is unfolding even as the Justice Department and a district attorney in Georgia investigate alleged efforts by Trump and others to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and as a House select committee has subpoenaed the former president seeking documents and testimony related to those allegations.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in having the documents at Mar-a-Lago, claiming in a recent television interview that he declassified any documents in his possession, and that a president can declassify information “even by thinking about it.” National security lawyers have derided those claims.

A spokesman for the former president did not respond to requests for comment Friday morning. But after this article published online, Trump posted on social media, decrying what he called leaks “on the Document Hoax” and suggesting that the FBI and the National Archives and Records Administration were trying to frame him.

“Who could ever trust corrupt, weaponized agencies, and that includes NARA,” Trump wrote. “ … Also who knows what NARA and the FBI plant into documents, or subtract from documents — we will never know, will we?”

 

Foreign agents certainly have seen these documents. There's no way they were kept secure with known Chinese, Russian, and Saudi nationals running around the place as Trump's guests, and probably even more infiltrating the resort as staff.

Even if Trump didn't sell these documents to the highest bidder, he almost certainly showed them off to brag. Trying to blame this on the FBI is just silly.

Trump is in real trouble, and even he knows it.

Last Call For Iran, Iran, So Far Away Con't

The largest protests against the Iranian government in more than a dozen years have spread to a number of Iranian cities as the repressive crackdowns of the government of hard-liner President Ebrahim Raisi have triggered a massive response in return.

 

The largest anti-government protests in Iran since 2009 gathered strength on Saturday, spreading to as many as 80 cities, even as the authorities escalated a crackdown that has reportedly killed at least 50 people and brought the arrests of dozens of prominent activists and journalists, according to rights groups and news media reports.

Internet access — especially on cellphone apps widely used for communication — continued to be disrupted or fully blocked, affecting Iranians’ ability to communicate with one another and the outside world. News from Iran has trickled out with many hours of delay.

While the 2009 protests erupted over an election widely condemned as fraudulent, the current demonstrations seemed focused on the Iranian security forces, with reports of vicious beatings of security officers and firebombings of the local headquarters of the notorious morality police.

In many cities, including Tehran, the capital, security forces responded by opening fire on the crowds. On Boulevard Ferdous and at the Shahrak Ekbatan apartment complex in Tehran, officers fired at windows; in the city of Rasht, they threw tear gas into apartments, according to witnesses and videos on social media.

Iranian state media said Friday that at least 35 people had been killed in the unrest, but human rights groups said on Saturday that the number is likely to be much higher. A previous death toll of 17 issued by the state news media included at least five members of the security services.

The videos posted online and the scale of the response from the authorities are difficult to independently verify, but video and photographs sent by witnesses known to The New York Times were broadly in line with the images being posted widely online.

Deep resentments and anger have been building for months, analysts say, particularly among young Iranians, in response to a crackdown ordered by the country’s hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, that has targeted women.

That comes on top of a litany of complaints over the years over corruption, mismanagement of the economy, inept handling of Covid and widespread political repression. The problems have persisted under Mr. Raisi, who came to power in an election in which any potential contenders were eliminated before the vote, particularly those from the reformist faction.

During the tenure of Mr. Raisi’s predecessor, the moderate Hassan Rouhani, the morality police had been discouraged from enforcing Iran’s often draconian laws against women, particularly the requirement that they wear the hijab in public in the “proper” fashion. But Iran’s powerful supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is now said to be resting in bed after emergency surgery, engineered the ascent of Mr. Raisi, eliminating an important outlet for the frustrations of Iran’s younger generation.

Those frustrations are now boiling over. The small Kurdish city of Oshnavieh reportedly fell to protesters when local security forces retreated after days of intense fighting, the editor of a Kurdish news site said.

“Since last night, Oshnavieh has been governed by the people,” a Kurdish official, Hussein Yazdanpana, said in an interview, adding that women had thrown off their mandatory head scarves in celebration.

“The liberation has far-reaching consequences for other cities,” he said, describing the town as a gateway to other Kurdish areas of Iran.

Ammar Golie, an Iranian Kurd based in Germany who edits the news site NNS Roj, has been in regular contact with residents of Oshnavieh, which is in West Azerbaijan Province and has a population of 40,000 ethnic Kurds. He said the residents had set up roadblocks at the gateway to the city’s only two roads.

Videos posted on social media show large crowds marching in the streets of Oshnavieh, many wearing traditional Kurdish garb, and chanting, “Freedom.” Another video shows intense gunfights over control of the city’s Police Headquarters.

Mr. Golie said local contacts had told him that an army battalion and a unit of the Revolutionary Guards Corps from the nearest city, Oroumiyeh, had been deployed to crush the protests and take Oshnavieh back.

“We are expecting blood to be spilled,” Mr. Golie said. “It’s an extremely tense situation.”

The nationwide uprising was ignited by the death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, in the custody of the morality police on Sept. 16. Ms. Amini was arrested on accusations of violating the hijab mandate. Women have led the past week’s demonstrations, some ripping off their head scarves, waving them and burning them as men have cheered them on.

For seven days and nights, Iranians have taken to the streets, facing bullets, tear gas, beatings and arrests to send a message to the clerics who have led the nation for 43 years. They have chanted for an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule, according to witnesses and videos shared on social media.

 

You mean a government willing to use "religious freedoms" in order to control women and ethnic and religious minorities in a theocratic police state may not be able to maintain popularity for long without having to constantly resort to lethal force?

 

There's a lesson here for those to choose to learn it.

Last Call For What Real Censorship Looks Like

A horrific reminder this weekend to the whiny incel neckbeard kids on the right: having a death sentence over your head for three decades because of your writings and being stabbed and critically wounded on stage is what actual persecution of your free speech looks like.

“The Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie was taken off a ventilator and able to talk Saturday, a day after he was stabbed as he prepared to give a lecture in upstate New York.

Rushdie remained hospitalized with serious injuries, but fellow author Aatish Taseer tweeted in the evening that he was “off the ventilator and talking (and joking).” Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, confirmed that information without offering further details.

Earlier in the day, the man accused of attacking him Friday at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education and retreat center, pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault charges in what a prosecutor called a “preplanned” crime.

An attorney for Hadi Matar entered the plea on his behalf during an arraignment in western New York. The suspect appeared in court wearing a black and white jumpsuit and a white face mask, with his hands cuffed in front of him.

A judge ordered him held without bail after District Attorney Jason Schmidt told her Matar, 24, took steps to purposely put himself in position to harm Rushdie, getting an advance pass to the event where the author was speaking and arriving a day early bearing a fake ID.

“This was a targeted, unprovoked, preplanned attack on Mr. Rushdie,” Schmidt said.

Public defender Nathaniel Barone complained that authorities had taken too long to get Matar in front of a judge while leaving him “hooked up to a bench at the state police barracks.”

“He has that constitutional right of presumed innocence,” Barone added.

Rushdie, 75, suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye, Wylie said Friday evening. He was likely to lose the injured eye.

The attack was met with shock and outrage from much of the world, along with tributes and praise for the award-winning author who for more than 30 years has faced death threats for “The Satanic Verses.”

Authors, activists and government officials cited Rushdie’s courage and longtime advocacy of free speech despite the risks to his own safety. Writer and longtime friend Ian McEwan called Rushdie “an inspirational defender of persecuted writers and journalists across the world,” and actor-author Kal Penn cited him as a role model “for an entire generation of artists, especially many of us in the South Asian diaspora toward whom he’s shown incredible warmth.”

 

I hope Mr. Rushdie is able to recover and it looks promising, but he's also a 75-year-old man who suffered grievous injury and has been man wanted dead by Iran for a third of a century now.  Your Trumpian bleating about how everyone is mean to you because the civilized universe thinks you're a fart in the wind is not "persecution". This is.

Iraq Back In The News

Iraqi PM Mustafa al-Kadhimi survived an attempted drone strike assassination attempt as the post-US future of the Middle East continues to reshape itself in violence.

A drone targeted the residence of Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Baghdad early Sunday, the army said, signaling a major escalation as Iran-linked groups contest the results of last month’s elections.

“I am fine,” Kadhimi posted in a message to Twitter, thanking God and calling for restraint. The military described the attack as a “failed assassination attempt” and said that security forces were taking the “necessary measures” to follow up.

The explosion, as well as follow-up gunfire, was heard throughout central Baghdad. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

A source close to Kadhimi said that several members of his security detail had suffered light injuries in Sunday’s attack, but they did not provide a full accounting of the damage.

The drone attack came hours after Iraqi supporters of Iran-linked militia groups held a funeral march for a man killed by security forces Friday when crowds tried to storm the Green Zone — which houses Iraqi government offices and Western embassies — from two sides.

More than 125 people were wounded in those clashes, most of them members of the security forces, as militia supporters decried Iraq’s Oct. 10 parliamentary elections as fraudulent.

Although broadly accepted as legitimate by international observers, the results have sparked growing tensions in the country. As populist cleric Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr emerged with the biggest share of the country’s parliamentary seats, the Iran-linked Fatah alliance saw its share cut by around two-thirds, despite winning the largest numbers of votes.

Iran-linked armed groups have been blamed for dozens of rocket and drone strikes on the Green Zone and other U.S.-linked military targets in recent years, with the pace often increasing during sensitive political moments.

Iraqi and U.S. officials have grown increasingly alarmed over the recent use of small fixed-wing drones that have evaded detection systems around military bases and diplomatic facilities. Military officials and diplomats say that the drones sometimes fly too low to be picked up by defensive systems.

The U.S. State Department condemned the attack as “an apparent act of terrorism” and said it was in contact with the Iraqi security forces and had offered assistance in the investigation.

The spike in tensions here over the weekend followed indications that Sadr may be pushing ahead with the formation of a government that marginalizes Fatah. The Iran-backed alliance has lost popularity in Iraq in recent years, after its militias participated in the slaying of hundreds of young men and women who joined an anti-government uprising in 2019. The demonstrations began as a cry against corruption but swiftly morphed into a revolt against the entire political system.

Kadhimi came to power in May of last year, after those demonstrations toppled his predecessor Adel Abdul Mahdi. The Oct. 10 elections were held early as a concession to the demonstrators, but most Iraqis chose not to vote in the end, citing deep disillusionment in the possibility for elections to change what they see as a largely unaccountable political system forged in the wake of America’s 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

 

Ironically, the attempt on al-Kadhimi might be more of a warning than an assassination.

Most analysts saw the attack as a warning to Mr. al-Kadhimi and his allies rather than as an assassination attempt. The prime minister has remained in power by balancing Iraqi relations between Iran and the United States, and he is seeking another term.

“What we’ve seen in the past is the use of violence, not necessarily to assassinate, but to warn that, ‘We’re here,’” said Renad Mansour, head of the Iraq Initiative at the think tank Chatham House. “I think this would also be a warning perhaps gone wrong because you can gain a bit more popularity and sympathy as the prime minister who survived an assassination attempt.”

The attack, though, significantly complicates efforts to form a government. Such efforts rely on forging alliances among parties, some of them with armed wings, to form the biggest bloc in Parliament.

 

So in other words, the use of violence to greatly impede the formation of a duly elected new government.

 

Now, in which country have we seen that performed in this year?

Last Call For And Iran, Iran So Far Away, Con't

President Biden is making good on his threat last week that Tehran would pay a price for Iranian suicide drone attacks in Iraq, and Biden followed through with airstrikes late last night.

President Joe Biden's decision to conduct airstrikes against Iran-backed militia groups on the Iraq-Syria border Sunday night follows a recent spate of attacks against US military assets in Iraq by a new class of Iranian-made drones that US officials say can evade US surveillance and defenses. 

The latest of these attacks occurred earlier this month when an armed drone detonated at a dining facility at a key entry point in the Baghdad airport used by American soldiers and diplomats, a US military official told CNN. In April, a drone damaged a CIA drone hanger near Erbil. 

The American airstrikes Sunday night hit operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one in Iraq, according to the Pentagon, targets that were "selected because these facilities are utilized by Iran-backed militias that are engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq." 

For months, US intelligence and military personnel in Iraq have been raising alarms about the risk to American forces from these newer, more sophisticated Iranian-made drones. Rather than being guided by a pilot from a remote location, some of these small, fixed-wing drones use GPS navigation, making them far less visible to US surveillance systems and impervious to jamming. 

"Suffice it to say the (CIA) is now paying a great deal of attention to this issue, because those things tend to wake you up a little bit," said one former intelligence official with experience in the region. 

While rocket attacks against US personnel in Iraq have become almost routine, these new Iranian-made drones, so-called suicide drones, are viewed by US intelligence and military personnel as a clear escalation by Iran — and a worrying signal to intelligence officials that the US no longer enjoys autonomy in the skies over Iraq. 

Packed with explosives, the new drones come in varying sizes -- anywhere from a five-foot wingspan to a 12 to 15 feet, according to one US military official -- with the larger iterations carrying up to 30 kilograms of explosives. 

That's far smaller and less lethal than the American-made MQ-9 Reaper drones. But current and former officials say these new Iranian-made drones pose a unique threat in part because Tehran has no deniability -- since no one else is known to have the technology. 

Unlike the more commonly-available Katyusha rockets often fired at US troops in Iraq, US officials say there's no question that Iran is providing them to the complex web of militia groups who seek to oust the United States from Iraq. 

They are also substantially more dangerous, these sources say. 

"Someone could get killed, and more so than in the past, because things are accurate," said one US military official who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity. "We think they're actually aiming them -- and the warheads on these things are pretty substantial."    

 

Cool, so the US war in the Middle East will continue, as-is. I didn't expect Biden to change much, other than not hurtling towards a full-on war like Trump was, but we're unable to win a land war in Europe or Asia right now, and frankly, everyone knows it.

More diplomacy, please.

Last Call For The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

Jared Kushner is headed to Saudi Arabia for any number of nefarious purposes in the wake of an Iranian nuclear scientist being assassinated last week.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is headed to Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week for talks in a region simmering with tension after the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist.

A senior administration official said on Sunday that Kushner is to meet the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the Saudi city of Neom, and the emir of Qatar in that country in the coming days. Kushner will be joined by Middle East envoys Avi Berkowitz and Brian Hook and Adam Boehler, chief executive of the US International Development Finance Corporation.

The visits would focus on resolving a dispute between Qatar and a Saudi-led alliance, the Wall Street Journal reported, but a number of issues could be on the agenda.

Kushner and his team helped negotiate normalization deals between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan since August. The official said they would like to advance more such agreements before Donald Trump hands power to president-elect Joe Biden on 20 January.

US officials believe enticing Saudi Arabia into a deal with Israel would prompt other Arab nations to follow suit. But the Saudis do not appear to be on the brink of reaching such a landmark deal and officials in recent weeks have been focusing on other countries, with concern about Iran’s regional influence a uniting factor.

Kushner’s trip comes after the killing on Friday of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Tehran by unidentified assailants. Western and Israeli governments believe Fakhrizadeh was the architect of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Days before the killing, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, travelled to Saudi Arabia and met with Prince Mohammed, an Israeli official said, in what was the first publicly confirmed visit by an Israeli leader. Israeli media said they were joined by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.

 

When I said earlier this month that there's any number of ways that the Trump regime could badly sabotage the incoming Biden administration during the lame duck period, this is exactly what I mean.  Jared's been Trump's bag man in the Middle East for years, and Netanyahu, still facing his own bribery and corruption trial scandal which keeps getting mysteriously delayed, is certainly not going to be a fan of Biden after the way he treated Obama for years.

Some sort of last-minute deal between MBS and Netanyahu that ties Biden's hands is exactly what I expect following this meeting, especially something that involves Iran.

Don't be surprised if Trump hands Biden a new Middle East war to deal with in his first 30 days.

 

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

The FBI threw together a hasty press conference tonight to announce that both Iran and Russia have US voter registration information in hand, and that they are using it to run disinformation operations against US voters. Iran in particular was running an operation where Democratic voters in states like Florida and Alaska received emails from a group purporting to be white supremacist terrorist group Proud Boys, stating that if they did not vote for Trump, that the group would "come after" them.

The U.S. government has concluded that Iran is behind a series of threatening emails arriving this week in the inboxes of Democratic voters, according to two U.S. officials.

Department of Homeland Security officials told state and local election administrators on a call Wednesday that a foreign government was responsible for the online barrage, according to the U.S. officials and state and local authorities who participated in the call, all speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. A DHS officials also said they had detected holes in state and local election websites and instructed those participating to patch their online services.

The emails claimed to be from the Proud Boys, a far-right group supportive of President Trump, but appeared instead to be a deceptive campaign making use of a vulnerability in the organization’s online network.

First identified on Tuesday by local law enforcement and elections officials in Florida and Alaska, the emails were soon turned over to federal authorities, according to U.S. officials.

The messages appeared to target Democrats using data from digital databases known as “voter files,” some of which are commercially available. They told recipients the Proud Boys were “in possession of all your information” and instructed voters to change their party registration and cast their ballots for Trump.

By suggesting the group had gained access to privileged data, and also possibly penetrated electronic systems to detect how people were voting, the emails seemed designed to create the appearance of an election breach, said cybersecurity researchers. Such a move may serve to undermine confidence in the integrity of the democratic process without posing a genuine risk to the election, these researchers said.

“You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you,” warned the emails, which by Tuesday night were said to have reached voters in as many as four states, three of them hotly contested swing states in the coming presidential election.

The domain enlisted for the misleading operation, officialproudboys.com, was recently dropped by a hosting company that uses Google Cloud services, according to Google Cloud spokesman Ted Ladd. Without a secure host, the domain stood vulnerable to exploitation, cybersecurity experts said. Voters using Comcast, Yahoo and Gmail accounts were affected.

In addition to reports from Florida and Alaska, a voter in Pennsylvania told The Washington Post she had received one such email, though she suspected it may have been linked to her previous registration in Alaska. The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office had not received reports about the messages, a spokesman, Mark Shade, said Wednesday.

In the worlds of the great Peter Falk as Detective Columbo, "Just one more thing..."

And that thing is this: acting Director of National Intelligence John Ratliffe actually spent the press conference seemingly trying to both clear the "good name" of the Proud Boys and to pin the email attacks on Iran as targeting Trump, when Democratic voters were the ones targeted.

That seems wildly fishy to me. FBI Director Chris Wray followed up at the press conference with news that Russia also was running operations to "influence public opinion" as he put it. Now, Russia would greatly benefit from, say, hacking the Proud Boys domain and sending out these emails to 1) hurt Democrats and 2) allow the Trump regime to pin the blame on Iran.

I don't trust either Ratliffe or Wray. Ratliffe is a known liar, and Wray, in case we've all forgotten, was Chris Christie's lawyer on BridgeGate.

No, this all reeks to high heaven. Keep a weather eye out for the rest of this story. It involves Russia and the Proud Boys, I'm sure of it.

As for Wray himself, well, there are bigger problems.

President Trump and his advisers have repeatedly discussed whether to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray after Election Day — a scenario that also could imperil the tenure of Attorney General William Barr as the president grows increasingly frustrated that federal law enforcement has not delivered his campaign the kind of last-minute boost that the FBI provided in 2016.

The conversations among the president and senior aides stem in part from their disappointment that Wray in particular but Barr as well have not done what Trump had hoped — indicate that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, or other Biden associates are under investigation.

  

Wray won't pull a Comey, Barr was completely AWOL from this conference, and he's vanished for weeks actually, ever since Trump contracted COVID-19 earlier this month. The next two weeks could be as fateful in American history as they come.

Sunday Long Read: Spies Like Us, Con't

An Iranian materials scientist with family in the US was made an offer by the Trump regime that he couldn't refuse: spy for the US as an informant in Tehran or spend time in federal prison as a enemy of the state. When he did refuse, the regime was ruthless.

In the spring of 2017, an Iranian materials scientist named Sirous Asgari received a call from the United States consulate in Dubai. Two years earlier, he and his wife, Fatemeh, had applied for visas to visit America, where their children lived. The consulate informed him that their requests had finally been approved. The timing was strange: President Donald Trump had just issued an executive order banning Iranians from entering the U.S. on the very kind of visa that Asgari and his wife were granted. Maybe applications filed before the visa ban had been grandfathered through, or some career State Department official wanted to give families like his a last chance to reunite.

Asgari, who was then fifty-six years old, considered the U.S. a second home. In the nineties, he had attended graduate school at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, and he came to like America’s commonsense efficiency. His daughter Sara was born in the U.S., making her an American citizen. His two older children, Mohammad and Zahra, had attended American universities and stayed on. Asgari was now a professor at Sharif University of Technology, in Tehran, and former graduate students of his worked in top American laboratories; his scientific research, on metallurgy, sometimes took him to Cleveland, where he had close colleagues at Case Western Reserve University.

Asgari and Fatemeh boarded a flight to New York on June 21, 2017. They planned to see Mohammad, who lived in the city, and then proceed to California, where they would visit Zahra and meet the man she had married. But when the Asgaris stepped off the jet bridge at J.F.K. two officials accosted them.

The officials whisked the Asgaris into a room, where a phalanx of F.B.I. agents awaited them. Asgari was under arrest, the agents told him, accused of serious charges in a sealed indictment whose contents they couldn’t reveal at the airport. He could go with them to a hotel and look over the indictment, or he could go to a local detention center, and then be transferred to Cleveland, for an arraignment. In the turmoil of the moment, he barely registered that nobody had stamped his visa or returned his passport.
Asgari was fluent in English, but the word “indictment” was new to him. He’d never had a problem with the law. He was a high-spirited man accustomed to middle-class comforts, a professor’s lectern, and an easy repartee with people in authority. Surely, he figured, he was the subject of some misunderstanding, and so he would go to the hotel and quickly clear it up.

At the hotel, the agents handed Asgari a twelve-page indictment. It charged him with theft of trade secrets, visa fraud, and eleven counts of wire fraud. To Asgari, the indictment read like a spy thriller. It centered on a four-month visit that he had made to Case Western four years earlier, which the document presented as part of a scheme to defraud an American valve manufacturer of its intellectual property in order to benefit the Iranian government. The punishment, the agents made clear, could be many years in prison. Their evidence had been gathered from five years of wiretaps, which had swept up his e-mails before, during, and after the visit in question.

The charges were nonsense, Asgari said. The processes he’d studied at Case Western were well known to materials scientists—they were hardly trade secrets. If the government really meant to prosecute him, it would inevitably lose in court.

“We haven’t lost a case,” one agent told Asgari.

“This will be your first,” he replied.

Asgari didn’t realize it, but a vise was closing around him. He had never seen his visits to America through the prism of its tensions with Iran. “Science is wild and has no homeland,” an Iranian philosopher had once said, and Asgari believed this to be so. His scientific community spanned the globe, its instruments and findings universally accessible. That national boundaries and political intrigue should interfere with intellectual exchange seemed to him unnatural. He had confidence in the capacity of cool rationality to set matters right.

If he could just make the F.B.I. agents understand the science, Asgari told himself, they would see their mistake. He described the relationships and the laboratory equipment that had attracted him to Case Western, and explained how the properties of a material emanated from the arrangement of its atoms, and could be altered by engineers who understood that structure. But even as he talked he began to have a sinking feeling that an indictment was not something he could dissipate with words.

That night, Fatemeh went home with Mohammad, and two guards stayed in Asgari’s hotel room as he slept. In the morning, the agents drove Asgari to Cleveland, his wife and son following behind.

He was arraigned at the federal courthouse and delivered to the Lake County Adult Detention Facility, a maximum-security jail in Painesville, Ohio. For the first of the seventy-two days he would spend in that facility, Asgari occupied an isolated cell. Lying on his bed, he could hear other inmates screaming.

And there Asgari started his journey into hell, a hell created by a vindictive, white supremacist government that wanted to make an intelligence asset out of him...or an example.

Last Call For Operation Mindbender

Last month when Trump was on the brink of a shooting war with Iran, Tehran attacked an Iraqi base where US soldiers were housed.  At the time, we were told that US personnel had been evacuated and that there were no casualties.  But like every single thing this regime tells us, it was a lie and American troops are now suffering from brain injuries from the attack...over 100 such cases.

The U.S. military is preparing to report a more than 50% jump in cases of traumatic brain injury stemming from Iran’s missile attack on a base in Iraq last month, U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of an announcement, said there were over 100 cases of TBI, up from the 64 previously reported last month.

The Pentagon declined to comment, but in the past had said to expect an increase in numbers in the weeks after the attack because symptoms can take time to manifest and troops can sometimes take longer to report them.

No U.S. troops were killed or faced immediate bodily injury when Iran fired missiles at the Ain al-Asad base in Iraq in retaliation for the U.S. killing of Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike at the Baghdad airport on Jan. 3.

The missile attacks capped a spiral of violence that had started in late December. Both sides have refrained from further military escalation, but the mounting number of U.S. casualties could increase pressure on the Trump administration to respond, perhaps non-militarily.

Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last month that the service members suffering from traumatic brain injuries had been diagnosed with mild cases. He added the diagnosis could change as time went on.

Symptoms of concussive injuries include headaches, dizziness, sensitivity to light and nausea.

Pentagon officials have repeatedly said there has been no effort to minimize or delay information on concussive injuries. But the disclosures following Tehran’s attack has renewed questions over the U.S. military’s policy regarding how it internally reports suspected brain injuries and whether they are treated publicly with the same urgency as loss of limb or life.

U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to play down the brain injuries last month, saying he “heard that they had headaches and a couple of other things” following the attack, prompting criticism from lawmakers and a U.S. veterans group.

These are serious injuries that can lead to major future problems.  Trump is treating this like it was these troops getting a migraine headache.  Our troops deserve a better Commander-in-Chief, that's for damn sure.

The Drums Of War, Con't

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia thinks his Iran War Powers act actually has a chance in the Senate because the briefing last week by the State Department and Pentagon went so badly that several GOP senators are considering handcuffing Trump on further action against Tehran.

“There were a couple of other problems I thought about that briefing,” Kaine added. “Without getting into classified information, many of us were underwhelmed by the evidence of imminence. Not everybody was, some thought it was fine, but many of us were underwhelmed by that.”

Several legislators left that briefing last week infuriated with what they considered evasive or dismissive answers on a question of war and peace. Memorably, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, a close ally of the president, laced into the briefers—Pompeo, CIA Director Gina Haspel, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire—for “telling us that we need to be good little boys and girls and run along and not debate this in public.” Several others predicted to The Daily Beast that it would cost the administration congressional support over Iran ahead of the upcoming war-powers votes.

Since last week, Kaine has been in talks with GOP senators—including Lee, Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Todd Young (R-IN)—about shaping the text of his resolution in hopes of it garnering as much Republican support as possible. Those negotiations, Kaine said, have yielded compromise—including mutual support of striking text from the resolution that specifically mentions President Trump. “We’re trying to make it as palatable as we can for everybody,” he said.

Such efforts have proven fruitful so far. Young told reporters on Tuesday that he’d be backing Kaine’s resolution—and with Lee and Paul already supportive, only one more GOP senator is needed to support the measure in order for it to pass the Senate.

Kaine said he wasn’t sure how large the pool of possible GOP ‘yes’ votes is. “Probably a dozen, but I could be surprised,” he said. Lee, meanwhile, predicted to reporters that it would probably be close to the bloc of seven who voted with Democrats on the Yemen resolution.

But of course, making it palatable means making it toothless.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a similar Iran war powers resolution by a 224 to 194 margin. That resolution, led by Michigan Democrat Elissa Slotkin, is unlikely to receive a Senate vote, however. It is what’s known as a “concurrent” resolution—which, owing to obscure parliamentary procedure, doesn’t provide an obvious mechanism for senators to get it onto the floor for a vote.

Slotkin’s measure, as a concurrent resolution, also doesn’t require a presidential signature to pass. House Democratic leadership considered that a strength, since it avoids a presidential veto—something Trump exercised when Congress voted to get the U.S. out of the Yemen war. But avoiding a veto has an upside for Trump, argued Matt Duss, the chief foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT).

“If Trump wants to veto the second War Powers Resolution of his presidency and assert a unilateral right to escalate conflicts as he’s sending thousands more troops to the Middle East, he can do that, but it will just further reveal that he’s lying when he says he wants to end our country’s endless wars,” Duss told The Daily Beast.

Does anyone here think Trump gives a damn about that should the measure survive a near guaranteed filibuster?

Last Call For The Drums Of War, Con't

One of the hard and fast rules of this regime is when Trump outright lies to the American people, that reality is whatever Dear Leader says it is, and when you fail in that aspect of covering for him on national TV, it's going to go badly for you, as Defense Secretary Mark Esper is about to find out.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said he "didn't see" specific evidence that top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani was planning attacks on four U.S. embassies, but said he believed such attacks would have occurred.

"The president didn't cite a specific piece of evidence. What he said was he believed," Esper said Sunday on "Face the Nation." "I didn't see one, with regard to four embassies. What I'm saying is that I shared the president's view that probably — my expectation was they were going to go after our embassies. The embassies are the most prominent display of American presence in a country."

The president and his top officials have said the strike that killed Soleimani, the leader of Iran's elite Quds Force, was justified because there was an "imminent" threat to American service members and diplomats. Members of Congress, however, have raised questions as to the nature of the threat following briefings on the strike that the administration conducted with all members of the House and Senate.

Congressional Democrats have argued the intelligence they were presented did not demonstrate there was an "imminent" threat to U.S. personnel in the region, while some Republicans said the Trump administration was justified in killing Soleimani.

Mr. Trump told Fox News in an interview Friday that "it would've been four embassies" that were attacked, seemingly revealing more information about the nature of the threat.

Esper said he agreed that the embassies probably would've been targeted by Soleimani.

"What the president said was he believed that it probably and could've been attacks against additional embassies," he said. "I shared that view. I know other members of the national security team shared that view. That's why I deployed thousands of American paratroopers to the Middle East to reinforce our embassy in Baghdad and other sites throughout the region." 

Intelligence and analysis doesn't matter.  What Trump publicly says he believes matters, and in America in 2020, only that matters.  Trump killed Suliemani because he believed it would help him politically, period.  At some point, somebody on his national security team mentioned embassies and that became the justification after the fact.

House Democratic Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff makes that clear in response to Esper.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, accused President Trump and top administration officials of "fudging" intelligence to justify the strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran's powerful Quds Force.

"When you hear the president out there on Fox, he is fudging the intelligence," Schiff said Sunday on "Face the Nation," referencing an interview the president conducted with Fox News last week. "When you hear the [defense] secretary say, 'Well, that wasn't what the intelligence said, but that's my personal belief,' he is fudging. When Secretary Pompeo was on your show last week and made the claim that the intelligence analysis was that taking Soleimani out would improve our security and leaving him in would make us less safe, that is also fudging. That is not an intelligence conclusion, that's Pompeo's personal opinion."

After three full years of lying to the American people on a daily basis, people don't believe Trump and it's hurting him.

The poll, conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News, using Ipsos' Knowledge Panel, asked Americans about their attitudes on two unfolding challenges for the Trump presidency -- escalating tensions with Iran and the impending impeachment trial in the Senate.

Overall attitudes about Trump and the consequences of his actions against Iran largely were driven by Independents, a critical target for both parties in electoral politics. The poll showed a majority of Independents, 57%, and all U.S. adults, 56%, disapproving of Trump's handling of the situation with Iran, with 43% of both Independents and U.S. adults approving.

Respondents also were asked about the fallout of the strike against Qassem Soleimani, the second-most-important official in Iran's government behind Ayatollah Khamenei, which marked a major escalation in months of tension between the U.S. and Iran, which launched retaliatory missile strikes on American bases in Iraq.

In the aftermath of the U.S. strike, only 28% of Independents, and 25% of Americans, said they felt more safe, while just over half, 51% of Independents and 52% of U.S. adults, said they felt less safe.
When it comes to attitudes on the conflict with Iran, partisanship drives opinions. An overwhelming 87% of Republicans approved of Trump's handling of Iran, and 54% say they feel safer. Among Democrats, 90% disapproved and 82% felt less safe.

Still, when asked about concerns over the possibility of the United States getting involved in a full-scale war with Iran, Democrats are more united in expressing concern than Republicans.

A net total of 94% of Democrats, and 52% of Republicans, are either very concerned or somewhat concerned about the possibility of entering into another war in the Middle East, compared with 6% of Democrats and 48% of Republicans who said they were not so concerned or not concerned at all.

Iran is not going to save Trump's presidency.