Wednesday, May 20, 2020

TRUMP AND HIS SAUDIS CRONIES - Just follow the money!

Firing of State Department inspector general tied to Saudi arms deal

The firing last Friday of the US State Department’s inspector general, Steve Linick, may have been driven by his probe into the Trump administration’s declaration of a national emergency in a bid to push through $8 billion worth of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates without Congressional approval, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee charged on Monday.
The media had previously focused on reports of an investigation into US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s misuse of State Department resources and staff for his personal benefit, ordering aides to walk his dog and using government planes to fly himself and his wife to Kansas, where Pompeo has reportedly considered a run for the US Senate.
Linick, however, was investigating issues of a far more substantial character, involving a criminal US foreign policy and the Trump administration’s riding roughshod over the US Constitution and the separation of powers to achieve its objectives.
“I have learned that there may be another reason for Linick’s firing,” House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot Engel said in a statement Monday. “His office was investigating—at my request—Trump’s phony declaration of an emergency so he could send weapons to Saudi Arabia.”
Engel added, “We don’t have the full picture yet, but it’s troubling that Secretary Pompeo wanted Mr. Linick pushed out before this work could be completed.” He demanded that the administration turn over all records from the inspector general’s probe.
Senator Chuck Grassley, the most senior Republican in the Senate, sent a letter to the White House Monday demanding a “detailed reasoning” for the firing of Linick, while warning that the inspector general “should be free from partisan political interference from either the Executive or Legislative branch.”
Linick is the fourth inspector general to be fired by Trump in the last six weeks. While it is within the president’s power to appoint and remove such figures at will, doing so to cover up criminal activity would itself constitute a crime.
Pompeo claimed that he knew nothing of Linick’s investigation into his own activities, but had nonetheless asked Trump to fire the inspector general. “I went to the President and made clear to him that Inspector General Linick wasn’t performing a function in a way that we had tried to get him to, that was additive for the State Department ...” Pompeo had refused to meet with the State Department IG to discuss the national emergency declaration over the arms deals.
The action taken by the administration in May 2019 invoked a provision of the Arms Control Act allowing the White House to bypass the normal 30-day congressional notification period for arms sales if the president declares a national emergency. This ensured that Congress could not put a hold on any of the arms deals with the Persian Gulf oil monarchies.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations have for decades poured billions of dollars of arms into Saudi Arabia, aiding the monarchy in both suppressing domestic opposition and playing a role as a pillar of reaction and US imperialist domination in the Middle East.
However, the vicious October 2018 murder of the influential Saudi journalist and former regime insider Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, as well as unending reports of mass civilian casualties resulting from US-supplied Saudi warplanes dropping US-made bombs and missiles on Yemen, had created enough qualms in Congress to threaten at least a temporary snag in consummating the lucrative arms deals.
Concerns among both Democratic and Republican legislators stemmed from the fear that the blatant crimes of the Saudi regime, in torturing murdering and dismembering Khashoggi, and dropping bombs on funerals, school buses, hospitals and homes in Yemen, could hamper US efforts to cloak its imperialist interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere under the banners of “human rights” and “democracy.”
Legislation calling for an end to US support for the near-genocidal Saudi war against the people of Yemen, while winning support in both the House and Senate, was easily quashed by Trump, without sufficient votes in the Senate to override his veto.
Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen began in 2015 and was waged with the indispensable aid of the Obama administration, which not only pushed through multi-billion-dollar arms deals, but also provided key logistical support from the Pentagon, including the mid-air refueling of Saudi bombers and the deployment of US warships to enforce a blockade aimed at starving the country’s population into submission.
While arms sales during Obama’s second term in office rose to $36 billion a year, once the murderous war in Yemen was handed over to the Trump administration, it climbed to an average of $51 billion a year during his first three years in office.
The declaration of a national emergency one year ago to fast-track arms deals by precluding congressional oversight was justified in the name of countering Iran’s “malign activities” in the Middle East, while falsely casting Yemen’s Houthi rebels as an Iranian “proxy” force.
The determination to push through the arms deal at all costs was driven by both the profit interests of massive military contractors such as Raytheon, which has supplied most of the bombs that have killed Yemeni men, women and children, and the determination to strengthen the alliance with Saudi Arabia maintained by successive Republican and Democratic administrations as the centerpiece of an effort to build a common front between the Gulf oil monarchies, Israel and the US to isolate, destabilize and prepare direct military intervention against Iran.
The use of the fabricated “national emergency” to achieve these aims, along with the firing of the State Department inspector general for investigating these actions, lay bare the insoluble connection between the buildup to imperialist war abroad and the systematic dismantling of even the vestiges of democratic forms of rule at home.

Attorney General Barr Refuses to Release 9/11 Documents to Families of the Victims

The move comes after President Donald Trump promised to help families, who accuse Saudi Arabia of complicity in the attacks. Barr says he cannot even explain why the material must stay secret without putting national security at risk.
 April 15, 12:35 p.m. EDT
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Months after President Donald Trump promised to open FBI files to help families of the 9/11 victims in a civil lawsuit against the Saudi government, the Justice Department has doubled down on its claim that the information is a state secret.
In a series of filings just before a midnight court deadline on Monday, the attorney general, William Barr; the acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell; and other senior officials insisted to a federal judge in the civil case that further disclosures about Saudi connections to the 9/11 plot would imperil national security.
But the administration insisted in court filings that even its justification for that secrecy needed to remain secret. Four statements to the court by FBI and Justice Department officials were filed under seal so they could not be seen by the public. An additional five, including one from the CIA, were shared only with the judge and cannot be read even by the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Barr insisted to the court that public discussion of the issue “would reveal information that could cause the very harms my assertion of the state secrets privilege is intended to prevent.”
What the various security agencies are trying to hide remains a mystery.
Since the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit in federal district court in New York in 2017, their primary focus has been on the relationship between the hijackers and relatively low-level Saudi officials. Those include at least two Saudis who crossed paths in Southern California with the first two Al Qaeda operatives who were sent to the United States by Osama bin Laden in January 2000.
Yet the broad outlines of the hijackers’ connections to those two Saudi officials — a diplomat at the kingdom’s Los Angeles consulate and a suspected Saudi spy living as an exchange student in San Diego — have been publicly known for years. The FBI shared thousands of pages of its files on the plot with the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, which explored them in its 2004 report.
“The extraordinary lengths that they’re going to here suggest that there must be some deep, dark secret that they’re still trying very hard to hide after almost 20 years,” said a lawyer for the families, Steven Pounian. “But who are they protecting? Something might be a Saudi government secret. But how can these be secrets that still need to be kept from the American people after all this time?”
The Justice Department has declassified some information about the Saudi role in 9/11 and shared it with lawyers for the plaintiffs under a protective order that allows them to read it but not make it public. But the department has not asked the lawyers to obtain security clearances to view other material, as is fairly common in national security cases involving American and foreign citizens whose constitutional rights are at issue.
The chorus of senior national security officials who wrote in support of the Trump administration’s secrets claim appeared to respond in part to Justice Department guidelines set down by the Obama administration in 2009. Those rules were intended to restrain overly aggressive use of the privilege, which the administration of George W. Bush had often cited after 9/11 to block legal challenges to its policies on torture, extraordinary rendition and warrantless surveillance.
Barr cited those more restrictive guidelines in his statement to the district court, noting that they prohibited the government from asserting a state secrets claim in order to conceal illegalities or potential embarrassment. He assured the magistrate judge in the case, Sarah Netburn, that those guidelines had been met.
At a ceremonial gathering at the White House last Sept. 11, representatives of the families of those killed in the attacks repeatedly asked Trump for fuller access to the FBI’s secret files in the case. According to more than a half-dozen people who were at the meeting, he assured several of them he would help.
“He looked us in the eye on 9/11, he shook our hands in the White House and said, ‘I’m going to help you — it’s done,’” recalled one of those present, Brett Eagleson, a banker whose father was killed in the World Trade Center. “I think the 9/11 families have lost all hope that the president is going to step up and do the right thing. He’s too beholden to the Saudis.”

Operation Encore and the Saudi Connection: A Secret History of the 9/11 Investigation


Behind the scenes, a small team of FBI agents spent years trying to solve a stubborn mystery — whether officials from Saudi Arabia, one of Washington’s closest allies, were involved in the worst terror attack in U.S. history.
The White House press office did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment on the families’ characterizations of the meeting. One day after that encounter, Justice Department officials agreed to release the name of one mid-level Saudi religious official who had been tied to the case in an FBI document that had been partially declassified earlier. At the same time, however, Barr asserted the state secrets privilege to protect other FBI documents sought by the families. The latest flurry of statements supporting that claim responded to challenges from the plaintiffs.
Although the close alliance between the United States and the Saudi kingdom has survived countless moments of tension, it has frayed in recent months in ways that could prove helpful to plaintiffs in the 9/11 lawsuit.
In recent weeks, Republican senators from states that have been hard hit by the collapse of world oil prices have criticized the Saudi government with growing intensity. On March 25, before the Trump administration negotiated a cut in Saudi oil production, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska cited the law under which the 9/11 families were allowed to sue the Saudi government as one of the levers of pressure that the United States could use if the kingdom did not take account of American concerns.
In a letter on Monday, three other influential senators asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to examine in depth why the FBI has refused to disclose more information about Saudi connections to the plot in response to a subpoena filed by the 9/11 families in 2018.
Those senators, Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, and two Democrats, minority leader Charles Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, cited a recent investigative report by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine that raised new questions about the FBI’s inquiry into the Saudi role in the attacks.
“The September 11 attacks represent a singular and defining tragedy in the history of our Nation,” the senators wrote to the Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz. “Nearly 20 years later, the 9/11 families and the American public still have not received the full and transparent accounting of the potential sources of support for those attacks to which they are entitled.”

US sends 3,000 more troops to defend Saudi monarchy

 

The Pentagon confirmed Friday that 3,000 more US troops are being deployed to Saudi Arabia to defend the blood-soaked monarchy led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and prepare for war against Iran.
The deployment includes two fighter squadrons, one Air Expeditionary Wing (AEW), two more Patriot missile batteries, and one Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD).
According to a Pentagon statement Friday, the US Secretary of Defense phoned Crown Prince bin Salman (who also holds the post of Saudi minister of defense) to inform him of the coming reinforcements, which he said were meant “to assure and enhance the defense of Saudi Arabia.”
The Pentagon also acknowledged that the latest escalation brings the number of additional troops sent into the Persian Gulf region since May to 14,000. They have been accompanied by an armada of US warships and a B-52-led bomber task force. The Pentagon has also announced that an aircraft carrier-led battle group will remain in the Persian Gulf.
US soldiers deployed in the Middle East (U.S. Army by 1st Lt. Jesse Glenn)
While initiated as a supposed response to unspecified threats from Iran, the US buildup in the Persian Gulf region has constituted from its outset a military provocation and preparation for a war of aggression. This military buildup has accompanied Washington’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign of sweeping economic sanctions that are tantamount to a state of war. The aim, as the Trump administration has stated publicly, is to drive Iranian oil exports down to zero. By depriving Iran of its principal source of export income, Washington hopes to starve the Iranian people into submission and pave the way to regime change, bringing to power a US puppet regime in Tehran.
The latest military buildup was announced in the immediate aftermath of an attack on an Iranian tanker in the Red Sea, about 60 miles from the Saudi port of Jeddah.
The National Iranian Tanker Co. reported that its oil tanker, the Sabiti, was struck twice by explosives early Friday morning, leaving two holes in the vessel and causing a brief oil spill into the Red Sea.
While Iranian state news media blamed the damage on missile attacks, a spokesman for the company told the Wall Street Journal that the company was not sure of the cause.
Some security analysts have suggested that the fairly minor damage to the vessel could have been caused by limpet mines. Such mines were apparently used last June when two tankers—one Japanese and one Norwegian-owned—were hit by explosions in the Sea of Oman. At the time, Washington blamed the attacks on Iran, without providing any evidence. Tehran denied the charge, saying that it sent teams to rescue crew member of the damaged tankers.
The Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) quoted an unnamed Iranian government official as stating that the Iranian tanker had been the victim of a “terrorist attack.”
“Examination of the details and perpetrators of this dangerous action continues and will be announced after reaching the result,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said.
The National Iranian Tanker Co. issued a statement saying that there was no evidence that Saudi Arabia was behind the attack.
The incident raised the specter of an escalating tanker war that could disrupt shipping through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flows. News of the attack sent crude oil prices spiking by 2 percent.
In addition to the June attacks on the tankers in the Gulf of Oman, in July British commandos, acting on a request from Washington, stormed an Iranian super tanker, the Grace 1, in waters off the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. In apparent retaliation, Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized the British-flagged Stena Impero for what Tehran charged were violations of international maritime regulations as it passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Both tankers were subsequently released.
Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement charging that the Iranian super tanker, renamed the Adrian Darya 1, had offloaded its oil in Syria in violation of European Union sanctions and a pledge made by Tehran to the UK at the time of the vessel’s release. He demanded provocatively that “EU members should condemn this action, uphold the rule of law, and hold Iran accountable.”

The Trump administration, which in May of last year unilaterally and illegally abrogated the 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and the major powers has been pressuring the European signatories to the deal—Germany, France and the UK—to follow suit.
While the respective governments of the three countries have insisted that they still support the nuclear agreement, they have repeatedly bowed to Washington’s war drive, while failing to take any significant actions to counter the effects of the US “maximum pressure” campaign and deliver to Tehran the sanctions relief and economic normalization that it was promised in exchange for curtailing its nuclear program.
Most recently, the three European governments backed Washington in blaming Iran for a September 14 attack on Saudi oil facilities that temporarily shut down half of the kingdom’s oil production and sent crude prices spiraling by 20 percent—again without providing a shred of proof.
Washington is seeking to topple the Iranian regime or bully it into accepting complete subordination to US imperialist predatory interests in the energy-rich and geostrategically vital Middle East.
The US sanctions regime and military buildup have placed the entire region on a hair trigger for the outbreak of a catastrophic war that could engulf not only the Middle East, but the entire planet.
All of the regimes involved in the escalating conflict are gripped by crises that make the drive to war all the more explosive.
The impact of the sanctions on Iran’s economy has been devastating. It is estimated that oil exports last month fell to just 400,000 barrels per day (b/d), compared to 1.95 million b/d in September 2018. Left with little means of combating spiraling inflation and growing unemployment, Iran’s bourgeois-clerical regime is caught between intense pressure from imperialism on the one hand, and the growth of social opposition among Iranian workers and poor on the other.
The Saudi monarchy is confronting the debacle of its four-year-old and near genocidal war against the people of Yemen, made possible by the weapons and logistical aid provided by Washington, even as Prince bin Salman remains a global pariah for his ordering of the grisly assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year in Istanbul.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, incapable of forming a new government after two elections and confronting criminal indictments, has grown increasingly concerned over the apparent lack of appetite by the Persian Gulf Sunni monarchies for military confrontation with Iran and Washington’s failure to carry out military strikes after the downing of its drone in June and the attacks on the Saudi oil facilities last month. Clearly, Tel Aviv, which has cast Iran as its strategic enemy, would have a motive for attacking Iranian tankers in the hopes of provoking a response that could lead to US military action.
And then there is Trump. He has proclaimed his determination to halt the “endless wars” in the Middle East and provoked a political firestorm by pulling back a relative handful of US troops in Syria, allowing Turkey to launch a long-planned attack on the Pentagon’s erstwhile proxy force, the Kurdish-dominated YPG militia.
Faced with an escalating political crisis and growing social tensions within the US, along with an impeachment investigation by the Democrats in Congress that is focused entirely on the national security concerns of the CIA and the Pentagon, he has ample motive for launching a new war.
While the Democrats’ exclusive focus on Trump’s failure to pursue a sufficiently bellicose policy against Russia and prosecute the war for regime change in Syria has allowed the US president to absurdly posture as an opponent of war, the reality is that he has overseen a staggering increase in military spending designed to prepare for “great power” confrontations, particularly with China.
Meanwhile, whatever his political pretense, Trump has done nothing to end any of the wars in the Middle East. While he has ordered US troops to pull back, allowing the Turkish invasion, none of them have been withdrawn from Syria.

With the latest buildup of US forces in Saudi Arabia, Washington is preparing, behind the backs of the working class, to launch a catastrophic military conflict with Iran. The most urgent task posed by these developments is the building of a global antiwar movement led by the working class. This movement must be armed with a socialist and internationalist program to unify working people in the United States, Europe and the Middle East in a common struggle against imperialist war and its source, the capitalist system.


 TRUMP AND THE MURDERING 9-11 MUSLIM SAUDIS…
Why is the Swamp Keeper and his family of parasites up their ar$es??


WHAT WILL TRUMP AND HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???

JUST ASK THE SAUDIS!


JOHN DEAN: Not so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s charter. He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and 

Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy 

approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This 

is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---

- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER


PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES DONALD TRUMP: Pathological liar, swindler, con man, huckster, golfing cheat, charity foundation fraudster, tax evader, adulterer, porn whore chaser and servant of the Saudis dictators

THE TRUMP FAMILY FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will they see jail?
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a Democrat and is seeking millions of dollars in penalties. She wants Trump and his eldest children barred from running other charities.”


Opinion: Trump And Pompeo Have Enabled A Saudi Cover-Up Of The Khashoggi Killing

October 2, 201911:45 AM ET
AARON DAVID MILLER
RICHARD SOKOLSKY
In the weeks following the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump spent more time praising Saudi Arabia as a very important ally than he did reacting to the killing.
Hasan Jamali/AP
Aaron David Miller (@aarondmiller2) is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department Middle East analyst, adviser and negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations. He is the author most recently of the End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President.
Richard Sokolsky, a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, worked in the State Department for six different administrations and was a member of the secretary of state's Office of Policy Planning from 2005 to 2015.

It has been a year since Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi entered Saudi Arabia's Consulate in Istanbul where he was slain and dismembered. There is still no objective or comprehensive Saudi or American accounting of what occurred, let alone any real accountability.
The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's admission in a recent CBS interview that he takes "full responsibility," while denying foreknowledge of the killing or that he ordered it, sweeps under the rug the lengths to which the Saudis have gone to obscure the truth about their involvement in the killing and cover-up.
The Saudi campaign of obfuscation, denial and cover-up would never have gotten off the ground had it not been for the Trump administration's support over the past year. The president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not only refused to distance themselves from the crown prince, known by his initials MBS, but also actively worked to relegitimize him. The Saudis killed Khashoggi but Trump acquiesced in the cover-up and worked hard to protect the U.S.-Saudi relationship and soften the crown prince's pariah status. In short, without Trump, the attempted makeover — such as it is — would not have been possible.
The Saudis killed Khashoggi but Trump acquiesced in the cover-up and worked hard to protect the U.S.-Saudi relationship and soften the crown prince's pariah status.
Weak administration response
The administration's weak and feckless response to Khashoggi's killing was foreshadowed a year before it occurred. In May 2017, in an unusual break with precedent, Trump visited Saudi Arabia on his inaugural presidential trip; gave his son-in-law the authority to manage the MBS file, which he did with the utmost secrecy; and made it unmistakably clear that Saudi money, oil, arm purchases and support for the administration's anti-Iranian and pro-Israeli policies would elevate the U.S.-Saudi "special relationship" to a new level.
Predictably, therefore, the administration's reaction to Khashoggi's killing was shaped by a desire to manage the damage and preserve the relationship. In the weeks following Khashoggi's death, Trump spent more time praising Saudi Arabia as a very important ally, especially as a purchaser of U.S. weapons and goods, than he did reacting to the killing. Trump vowed to get to the bottom of the Khashoggi killing but focused more on defending the crown prince, saying this was another example of being "guilty before being proven innocent."
Those pledges to investigate and impose accountability would continue to remain hollow. Over the past year, Trump and Pompeo have neither criticized nor repudiated Saudi actions that have harmed American interests in the Middle East. Two months after Khashoggi's death, the administration, in what Pompeo described as an "initial step," imposed sanctions on 17 Saudi individuals implicated in the killing. But no others have been forthcoming, and the visa restrictions that were imposed are meaningless because none of the sanctioned Saudis would be foolish enough to seek entry into the United States.
What's more, the administration virtually ignored a congressional resolution imposing sanctions on the Saudis for human rights abuses and vetoed another bipartisan resolution that would have ended U.S. military assistance to Saudi Arabia's inhumane military campaign in Yemen.
The Saudis opened a trial in January of 11 men implicated in the killing, but the proceedings have been slow and secretive, leading the United Nations' top human rights expert to declare that "the trial underway in Saudi Arabia will not deliver credible accountability." Despite accusations that the crown prince's key adviser Saud al-Qahtani was involved in the killing, he's still advising MBS, has not stood trial and will likely escape punishment. A year later, there are still no reports of convictions or serious punishment.
Legitimizing Mohammed bin Salman
The Trump administration has not only given the crown prince a pass on the Khashoggi killing, but it has also worked assiduously to remove his pariah status and rehabilitate his global image. Barely two months after the 2018 slaying, Trump was exchanging pleasantries with the crown prince at the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires and holding out prospects of spending more time with him. Then this past June, at the G-20 in Osaka, Japan, Trump sang his praises while dodging questions about the killing. "It's an honor to be with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of mine, a man who has really done things in the last five years in terms of opening up Saudi Arabia," Trump said.
And you can bet that when Saudi Arabia hosts the G-20, scheduled to be held in its capital of Riyadh in November 2020, the Trump administration will be smiling as its rehab project takes another step in its desired direction.
What the U.S. should have done
Trump has failed to impose any serious costs or constraints on Saudi Arabia for the killing of a U.S. newspaper columnist who resided in Virginia or for the kingdom's aggressive policies, from Yemen to Qatar. In the wake of the Khashoggi killing, the administration should have made it unmistakably clear, both publicly and privately, that it expected a comprehensive and credible accounting and investigation. It should have suspended high-level contacts and arms sales with the kingdom for a period of time. And to make the point, the administration should have supported at least one congressional resolution taking the Saudis to task, in addition to triggering the Magnitsky Act, which would have required a U.S. investigation; a report to Congress; and sanctions if warranted.
Back to business as usual
The dark stain of the crown prince's apparent involvement in Khashoggi's death will not fade easily. But for Trump and Pompeo, it pales before the great expectations they still maintain for the kingdom to confront and contain their common enemy, Iran, as well as support the White House's plan for Middle East peace, defeat jihadists in the region and keep the oil spigot open.
Most of these goals are illusory. Saudi Arabia is a weak, fearful and unreliable ally. The kingdom has introduced significant social and cultural reforms but has imposed new levels of repression and authoritarianism. Its reckless policies toward Yemen and Qatar have expanded, not contracted, opportunities for Iran, while the Saudi military has demonstrated that, even after spending billions to buy America's most sophisticated weapons, it still can't defend itself without American help.
Meanwhile, recent attacks on critical Saudi oil facilities that the U.S. blames on Iran have helped rally more American and international support for the kingdom.
When it comes to the U.S.-Saudi relationship and the kingdom's callous reaction to Khashoggi's killing, the president and his secretary of state have been derelict in their duty: They have not only failed to advance American strategic interests but also undermined America's values in the process.


The U.S. Military is Sending Thousands of Troops and Even B-1 Bombers into Saudi Arabia (To Counter Iran)

The National InterestNovember 3, 2019
On October 6, around fifty U.S. commandos in northeastern Syria tasked with hunting down ISIS forces were withdrawn from territory near the Turkish border controlled by the Kurdish-Arab SDF faction.
The U.S. withdrawal was a prerequisite for a Turkish attack against the SDF which subsequently took place. The remaining hundreds of U.S. forces elsewhere in northeastern Syria were endangered in the crossfire and had to be withdrawn a few days later.
The U.S. withdrawal was post-hoc justified on the basis that they were no longer needed in the Middle East and it was time to “bring the troops home.” 
But in the weeks since, the United States has deployed over 3,000 more troops to the Middle East—including hundreds of National Guardsmen in Syria, and thousands of soldiers and airmen deployed to Saudi Arabia.
While a companion article looks at the deployment of a mechanized battalion to defend an oil field in southeastern Syria, this second part looks at the rapid buildup of U.S. forces in the wealthy Kingdom in response to intensifying clashes with Iran following the United State’s withdrawal from a nuclear deal with Tehran.
Return to the Kingdom
The deployments to Saudi Arabia marks a dramatic turn around from sixteen years earlier in 2003, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pulled out thousands of U.S. troops. Their presence had long been cited as a factor radicalizing Muslims across the planet who objected to the presence of foreign troops so close to the holy city of Mecca.
Apparently, these concerns have since faded, despite political headwinds from a U.S. Congress angered by Saudi Arabia’s grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its consulate in Istanbul.
The buildup has been prompted by Iranian harassment of shipping in the Persian Gulf, the shootdown of U.S. surveillance drone over the Persian Gulf in June, and a drone and missile attack on Saudi oil refineries in September that was almost certainly of Iranian origin but which Yemeni rebels took credit for.
First, following the loss of drones in June, that the Defense Department announced it was doubling troop deployment to the Kingdom from 500 to 1,000 personnel.

Saudi Slavery

An Islamically-sanctioned barbarity continues.
November 8, 2019 
Hugh Fitzgerald
As is well known, slavery was formally abolished in Saudi Arabia as late as 1962, and then only after terrific pressure had been applied to the Saudis by Western governments. And today, when we speak of slavery in the Muslim world, we think of Mauritania (with 600,000 slaves), as the report in the past hour discussed, Niger (600,000 slaves), Mali (200,000 slaves), and Libya (where slave markets have opened in nine sites during the last two years). Most of us assume that in Saudi Arabia, slavery is no longer tolerated.
But most of us are wrong.
Slavery may have been formally abolished, but the cruel and savage treatment of foreign domestic workers, their inability to free themselves from arduous work conditions because their employers keep their passports and other documents, amount to slavery in all but name.
A report on one group of domestic slaves — Vietnamese women — by reporter Yen Duong, who interviewed former workers who had made it back to Vietnam, was published last year in Al Jazeera here:
Overworked, abused, hungry: Vietnamese domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.
Women say they are forced to work at least 18 hours a day, denied food, assaulted and refused the right to return home.
Pham Thi Dao, 46, says she worked more than 18 hours a day and was given the same one meal to live on – a slice of lamb and plain rice.
Dao, 46, was a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia for more than seven months until she returned to Vietnam in April.
“I worked from 5am until 1am in the morning, and was allowed to eat once at 1pm,” Dao told Al Jazeera of her experience in the port city of Yanbu. “It was the same every day – a slice of lamb and a plate of plain rice. After nearly two months, I was like a mad person.”
According to statistics from Vietnam’s labor ministry, there are currently 20,000 Vietnamese workers in the kingdom, with nearly 7,000 working as domestic staff for Saudi families…
The same harsh conditions which Vietnamese have endured have also been reported by the Filipino, Indonesian, and Sri Lankan workers, in Saudi Arabia. And they have also been endured by domestic workers in the  the Emirates and Kuwait. In addition to the harsh working conditions, there is the persistent threat of sexual assault by their Arab masters. Some domestic workers have been raped and murdered by their Arab employers. Yet it has been almost impossible to bring employers to justice for such crimes.
Some who escaped have recounted slave-like working and living conditions.
“I understand that as [domestic] workers we need to get used to difficult working conditions,” said Dao, who is vocal on social media about her experience. “We didn’t ask for much, just no starvation, no beatings, and three meals per day. If we had that, we would not have begged for rescue.”…
“As soon as I arrived at the airport in Riyadh, they (employees from a Saudi company providing domestic workers) pushed me into a room with more than a hundred of others,” she said. “When my employer picked me up later, he took my passport and employment contract. Most women I’ve talked to here experience the same thing.”
By seizing the workers’ passports, the Saudi employers have complete control over them. They cannot leave the country, nor move about inside Saudi Arabia, nor go to work for another employer. And if they don’t have their employment contract, which has been seized by their employer, they have no way of knowing if the onerous conditions they endure violate the contract’s provisions. They are captives of their employer in every sense.
Like Dao, she said she was given one meal a day and worked 18-hour shifts.
Another domestic worker, who requested anonymity, showed Al Jazeera her contract stipulating a nine-hour working day – a standard given the contracts are composed by Vietnam’s labour ministry.
Dao shows notes from the Arabic lesson she took before her trip. Vietnamese domestic workers are entitled to classes on language, skills and culture but the sessions are poorly executed, say the workers.
When Linh asked to be moved to another family – a workers’ right according to their contracts – staff at the Vietnamese broker company shouted at her and tried to intimidate her.
She went on a hunger strike for three days until her employer agreed to take her back to the Saudi company…
Leaving an employment contract carries a hefty fine, plus the price of a ticket back to Vietnam, if the worker is unable to prove abuse at the hands of their employers.
The cost of quitting is usually between $2,500 and $3,500.
If workers get, at best, $388 per month, that means that if they manage to persuade their employer to give them back their passports and to let them leave, they will still have to come up with between seven and nine months of salary that must be paid back. And that assumes that they will be paid the highest amount ($388/month) and will have all other expenses, during that period of seven-to-nine months, paid by their employer.
Tuyet told her partner in Vietnam by phone that she is being abused by the family she works for in Riyadh.
Bui Van Sang’s partner, Tuyet, works in Riyadh.
He said she is being beaten and starved.
The Vietnamese broker company asked him for $2,155 for her return, but refused to put anything in writing, he claimed.
Her phone has been taken away and Sang is only able to contact her every two to three weeks, “when her employer feels like [allowing her]”.
These domestic workers are totally at the mercy of their Arab employers. They cannot even contact anyone in the outside world unless the employer “feels like [allowing her].” They are, essentially, prisoners whose brutal living and working conditions are set by the employer, who answers to no one. That constitutes slavery, whether or not it is called by that name.
By the time he had raised the $2,155, the Vietnamese broker company demanded double the payment, he said.
He travelled 1,500km from his southern Vietnamese home province of Tay Ninh to the capital, Hanoi, to beg the broker, but was turned away….
The Vietnamese brokers are akin to slave traders. They round up the “slaves” (domestic workers), hold out the promise of decent work and pay which, once those they traffic in arrive in Saudi Arabia, is simply ignored. The slaves have been delivered, the brokers paid by the  Saudi employers, and the living conditions, of 18-hour days, with one meal a day, are now the norm. For beatings and sexual assaults, there is no recourse for these Vietnamese domestics. Meanwhile, Saudi employers hold onto those passports without which these workers cannot leave the country.
There are no independent organisations in either Saudi Arabia or Vietnam which ensure the safety of domestic workers.
In the past few years, reports of abuse have prompted Saudi authorities to suggest amendments to existing labor regulations, but rights groups say they fall short.
Whatever regulations are talked about, Saudi employers still do pretty much what they want in setting the conditions of work for domestic helpers.
Workers and their relatives have to rely entirely on the Vietnamese broker companies for support.
Linh, the domestic helper in Riyadh, said when she contacted the Vietnamese company that brought her there, they told her the employment contract is only valid in Vietnam, not in Saudi Arabia.
In other words, the Vietnamese brokers, having been paid by the Saudi employers, have washed their hands of the Vietnamese workers sent to Saudi Arabia. The employment contracts on which these domestic workers were relying are, they now admit, worthless in Saudi Arabia. These women have no guarantee of any rights; whatever their Saudi employer wishes to impose is what they must accept. Hence the 18-hour days, seven days a week, and the single meal each day. How is this not akin to slavery?
“They [the Vietnamese companies] are supposed to protect our rights, but all they do is yell at us,” Linh said by phone. “Now I just want to leave the country. If I go to the police, at least they’d bring me to the detention centre, and I’d be deported and allowed to leave.”
She recently livestreamed a video detailing the treatment that she and many fellow Vietnamese domestic helpers face while working in Saudi Arabia.
The video has been viewed 113,000 times.
“Many women I know here just want the same thing – they just want to leave,” she said. “But they are afraid, threatened, and don’t even dare to speak out.”
Their fear is palpable. If they complain of their working conditions, will they be beaten by their employers? Will they be given even more unpleasant or difficult tasks? Will the 18-hour day become a 20-hour day, as one Vietnamese man reported his wife had had to endure, that is with only four hours of sleep allowed? Will even the one slice of meat they are now given be reduced still further, or will they perhaps not be given meat at all? Will they no longer be allowed to call home even twice a month? Not all Saudi employers are simon-legrees, but a great many appear to be. The point is that domestic workers ought to have rights enshrined in the Saudi law, but they do not. And the conditions which they endure are scarcely distinguishable from slavery.
The Saudis are not alone in such mistreatment of their domestic workers. The Kuwaitis and the Emiratis have been difficult masters, too, but the conditions of domestic workers appear to be especially harsh in Saudi Arabia. The mentality that lies behind this mistreatment rests on two things. First, there is the deep belief that slavery is legitimate, given that Muhammad himself owned slaves, and does not become illegitimate in Islamic societies just because Western pressure has led to its formal prohibition. The slave-owner mentality remains. Second, these domestic workers — Vietnamese, Filipino, Thai, Indonesian, Sri Lankan — are almost all non-Muslims, and the treatment they receive is commensurate with their description in the Qur’an, as  being “the most vile of creatures.” It would be interesting to compare the working conditions of the non-Muslim domestic workers in Saudi Arabia with those who, from Indonesia, are themselves Muslim. But that’s a subject for another occasion.

 

Tulsi Gabbard: U.S. Government ‘Is Hiding the Truth’ on 9/11 Terror Attacks

1 Nov 2019698
4:22
Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, reacted to the difficulties Chris Ganci and Brett Eagleson, two relatives of victims of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks were having in their quest to obtain more information about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11.
Gabbard accused the federal government of undermining efforts of achieving more transparency, which she said was being done at the behest of Saudi Arabia.
Partial transcript as follows:
CARLSON: This is one of those issues I don’t think is partisan. It doesn’t need to be. It shouldn’t be partisan in any sense.
GABBARD: Absolutely not.
CARLSON: It’s an American issue. Why would the U.S. government ever side with the Saudi Kingdom of all countries against our citizens?
GABBARD: This is the real question that’s at stake. This story that we’re hearing from the families of those who were killed on 9/11 pushes this issue to the forefront where, for so long, leaders in our government have said, well, Saudi Arabia is our great ally. They’re a partner in counterterrorism, turning a blind eye or completely walking away from the reality that Saudi Arabia time and again, has proven to be the opposite.
CARLSON: Yes.
GABBARD: They’re undermining our National Security interests. They are — as you said, they are the number one exporter of this Wahhabi extremist ideology.
CARLSON: Yes.
GABBARD: They’re a fertile recruiting ground for terrorists, like al Qaeda and ISIS around the world. They’re directly providing arms and assistance to al Qaeda, in places like Yemen, and in Syria.
And as we are seeing here, it is our government, our own government that is hiding the truth from Chris and Brett and the many other families of those who were killed on 9/11. For what? Where do the loyalties really lie?
CARLSON: So I was thinking in the commercial break that of the number of people I know personally, not abstractly, but have had lunch with in this city who are taking currently money from the Saudi Kingdom or their allies in the Emirates, the Gulf States, and I wonder if that maybe play some role, like a lot of people on their payroll here.
GABBARD: Yes. We talk about the foreign policy establishment in Washington.
CARLSON: Yes.
GABBARD: We talk about the political elite, the military-industrial complex. We hear things from some of those people, well, you know, hey, we sell a lot of weapons to Saudi Arabia. So you know, if we burn bridges with them, then who are we going to sell our weapons to? Where are we going to get that money from?
All of these excuses that have nothing to do with the interests of the American people, with our national security interests. And that’s — I’m proud and honored to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with these 9/11 families in demanding this truth because, yes, it is about truth and justice and closure for all of them now as we approach 20 years since that attack on 9/11. It’s also about our National Security.
CARLSON: Yes.
GABBARD: Safety and security of the American people.
CARLSON: I’ll never forget right after 9/11, living here in the City of Washington, our airports were closed. All airports were closed in this country.
GABBARD: Yes.
CARLSON: And learning that chartered flights of Saudi citizens had been allowed with U.S. government approval to take off and run back to Saudi Arabia without being questioned by authorities here and thinking you know, if I tried to do that, I’d be in prison. Why are we giving preference to Saudi citizens over our own citizens?
GABBARD: Exactly. It makes no sense if you think about what would happen if we actually had leaders who were putting the interests of our country above all else. You follow the money trail. It goes back to the military-industrial complex.
You look at how many of the think tanks here in Washington who send so-called experts to go and testify before Congress who are funded by Saudi Arabia to spout their talking points.
You saw how the legislation that we passed in Congress. I was proud to vote for legislation that allowed families like Chris and Brett’s to sue Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia trotted out all of their lobbyists to say why that would be so dangerous, so dangerous for our interests, for them to be allowed to seek justice for their families.
This is about standing up for our country. This is about standing up for our principles and our freedoms and for the truth.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

 


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