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Blackbox

Best of the Web: Alternative History of Al-Qaeda: Anwar al-Awlaki - jihadist, spy, or both?

Awlaki
Just another coincidence... Senior Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al Awlaki was clicking glasses together at the Pentagon with American military brass just months after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Also, "coincidentally," he had in fact met at least one of the several alleged hijackers. He also, just before being liquidated by a US drone attack in 2011, allegedly funded the terror cell responsible for the recent Paris shootings.
Anwar al Awlaki rose to notoriety in the 2000s as a leading internet jihadist whose lectures and videos were very popular among the emerging Islamist movement. But his history with Al Qaeda, and in particular his contacts with the 9/11 hijackers while under investigation by the FBI, pose serious questions. Was Awlaki a terrorist, or a spy, or both? Was he working for US intelligence while acting as a spiritual leader to several of the hijackers? In this episode we take a critical look at Awlaki, his life, his FBI file and why he became the first American to be killed in a US drone strike.


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Rocket

Best of the Web: Prove a negative: Politics trump intel in US-Russia nuke treaty pullout

Russia Missile
Russian missile development facilities, undisclosed location
The United States has a track record of asking nations to prove a negative when it comes to compliance with arms control agreements, and then holding them to account when they fail to do so. The deficit of integrity over U.S. claims against Iraq regarding weapons of mass destruction and Iran and its nuclear program speaks volumes about how corrupt America's policymaking apparatus has become. Now the United States is making the same mistake again by pulling out of the INF Treaty, which it claims Russia violated.

"A high degree of confidence is required before the United States will publicly charge another party with violation of an international agreement." Acting Deputy Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) Thomas Graham, Jr. delivered those remarks during testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 1994. At that time, the ACDA served as the lead agency regarding arms control compliance. The intelligence community supported the ACDA's mission of making firm compliance judgments by providing the necessary intelligence information and analysis.

ACDA was supported in this effort by the CIA's Arms Control Intelligence Staff, or ACIS. ACIS provided intelligence support tailored for the specific compliance monitoring and verification requirements stemming from arms control agreements such as the INF Treaty and the Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START). It brought a different skill set and mindset than the work being done by the CIA's Nonproliferation Center, or NPC, whose targets were less structured and far more nebulous and nuanced. It was one thing to assess that nation A was exporting technology capable of supporting nuclear enrichment to nation B; it was far different to determine that Russia had destroyed its silos to the depths mandated by a treaty.

For the former, there was far more latitude in interpreting data used to make assessments. The latter required a level of specificity that was unforgiving and often difficult to achieve.

Eye 2

Best of the Web: American Psycho: US 'conservative' congressman Marco Rubio posts tweet of Gaddafi's lynching as threat to Venezuela's Maduro

marco rubio gaddafi
US 'conservative' senator for Florida, Marco Rubio, reveals his inner landscape
US Senator Marco Rubio has posted a picture of the brutal murder of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in a less-than-subtle threat to Venezuela's Maduro. Twitter blasted Rubio as a manic warmonger... who has extremely poor taste.

The two pictures -one showing Gaddafi while still in power, the other showing the Libyan leader being tortured minutes before his brutal murder- were posted by Sen. Rubio (R-FL) on Twitter without any caption. Yet, given his open calls for an armed insurrection in the Latin American country to depose President Nicolas Maduro, the message was clear.

Openly threatening a head of a foreign country with a brutal death at the hands of US-propped militants was, apparently, just a tiny bit off: while a few Twitteratti supported Rubio's vision of Maduro's demise, the majority blasted the senator over an extreme lack of taste or decency.


Comment: What a deranged specimen.


Propaganda

Best of the Web: WaPo caught reporting fake attendance figures for Branson's Venezuelan PR stunt - stealth-edits article

richard branson fake attendance venezuela concert
© Los Manes el Drone
The Washington Post has stealth-edited all mention of Richard Branson's Venezuela aid concert in Cucuta, Colombia, after the paper originally claimed that the event "drew a crowd of more than 200,000 people Friday."

Branson hoped to attract 250,000 people to the concert and raise $100 million to "buy food and medicine for Venezuelans suffering widespread shortages."

The original version of the article, written by WaPo's South American bureau chief Anthony Faiola and two other journalists, can still be seen at the Mercury News, which aggregated it before the changes were made (including a headline change).

Comment:


Cheese

Best of the Web: Where are the 'empty shelves'? US journalist Max Blumenthal discovers well-stocked supermarkets in Caracas

venezuela blumenthal food shortages
© Youtube / Grayzone ProjectMax Blumenthal goes shopping in Venezuela
Corporate media grieve for the barren shelves and empty bellies in Venezuela, but are the alleged food shortages real? After touring a supermarket in Caracas, Max Blumenthal found plenty to buy - even craft beer.

"Grocery shelves lie empty as food becomes increasingly scarce" in Venezuela, the UK Independent weeps. The country's shops remain open but "sparsely stocked," The Guardian laments. Even "basic commodities" such as toothbrushes aren't available for purchase, CNN bemoans. "Hungry" Venezuelans must choose between "torture or starvation," Bloomberg grimly concludes. Mainstream media coverage of Venezuela gives the impression that President Nicolas Maduro is slowly starving his own people - a narrative which, as journalist Max Blumenthal found after surveying a massive supermarket in Caracas, is wildly deceptive.

Comment:


Light Saber

Best of the Web: Pepe Escobar meets Dugin in Moscow ahead of Putin's State of the Nation address: On Eurasianism, populism and multipolarity

Putin  address
© AFP / Alexander NemenovRussian President Vladimir Putin delivers his Putin of the nation address in Moscow on Wednesday.
President Putin's state of the nation address to the Federal Assembly in Moscow this week was an extraordinary affair. While heavily focused on domestic social and economic development, Putin noted, predictably, the US decision to pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and clearly outlined the red lines in regard to possible consequences of the move.

It would be naïve to believe that there would not be a serious counterpunch to the possibility of the US deploying launchers "suitable for using Tomahawk missiles" in Poland and Romania, only a 12-minute flight away from Russian territory.

Putin cut to the chase: "This is a very serious threat to us. In this case, we will be forced - I want to emphasize this - forced to take tit-for-tat steps."

Later that night, many hours after his address, Putin detailed what was construed in the US, once again, as a threat.

Megaphone

Best of the Web: Yellow Vests protests held across France for 15th week in a row

yellow vest
© Jean-Francois Monier / AFP"Yellow Vest" protest in front of the Chateau de Chambord.
The Yellow Vest movement staged anti-government protests for the 15th week in a row on Saturday, with thousands participating across France. Some minor clashes were reported during the generally peaceful day of action.

The French Interior Ministry estimates that a total of 41,500 people marched in streets around the country, a dwindling number compared to almost 300,000 at the peak of the movement's strength.

French authorities arrested 13 protesters in Clermont-Ferrand, with the police reporting the seizure of baseball bats, crowbars and other weapons.

A further six people were taken into custody in the capital, Paris, while in Nantes police deployed tear gas against the demonstrators.

Megaphone

Best of the Web: Everyone has fallen for the lies about Venezuela

venezuela
© Global Look Press / Roman Camacho
Socialism, ditching the dollar, and having natural resources are the three crimes that usually provoke the US into overthrowing a foreign government. And these are the reasons it's backing the coup in Venezuela.

There are three things I know for sure in this fanciful, sometimes inglorious experience we call life:
  • You will never have a safety pin when you need one, and you will have thousands when you don't need one.
  • Wild animals are breathtakingly majestic until they're crawling up your pant leg.
  • A US presidential administration will never admit that it invaded another country or backed a coup attempt in order to essentially steal the natural resources (oil) of said country.
This is why it was so very shocking last week when members of the Trump administration admitted they were backing a coup attempt in order to essentially steal the natural resources (oil) of another country.

That country is Venezuela. I'll get back to this in a moment.

Attention

Best of the Web: German cover-up: Govt deported Moroccan secret agent to hide his ties to Christmas attacker Anis Amri

anis amri attack memorial
© picture alliance/dpa/B. Pedersen
The German Interior Ministry deported a Moroccan secret agent to hide his involvement in the December 2016 Christmas market attack in Berlin, according to an internal document leaked to the German magazine Focus.

However, sources within German security forces have since told public broadcaster ARD that they had no evidence that Ammar worked for any foreign intelligence agency, and were angered at the suggestion that German authorities may have protected him.

Bilel Ben Ammar, himself considered a radical Islamist who was once believed to be planning a separate attack in Berlin, was an associate of Anis Amri, the Tunisian man who drove a stolen truck into a crowded Christmas market in central Berlin. The attack killed 12 people and injuring 60 more, while Amri himself was killed by police a few days later in Italy.

According to the document seen by Focus, Ammar met Amri a day before the attack, and took photos of the market in its aftermath, which he sent to an unknown phone number two hours later.

Ammar may even have helped the attacker to escape; CCTV footage mentioned in the document showed a man "with the appearance of Ben Ammar" hit a man on the head with a piece of wood in order to clear a path for the escaping attacker. The man is still in a coma now, Focus reported.

All this would be new evidence for the parliamentary committee tasked with investigating the attack, whose members have no knowledge of the video, though they did not rule out that it exists.

Comment: If it isn't clear by now that there is more than a passing relationship between Islamist terrorists and Western intelligence sources, you haven't been paying attention. The counterterrorist forces are plagued by both extreme incompetence (which leads to cover-ups to avoid embarrassment) and criminal collusion with the very groups the West is supposed to be at war with. Pardon the phrase, but heads have to roll. The security services are not working in the best interests of their citizens.


Better Earth

Best of the Web: Warsaw and Munich: Whistling past NATO's graveyard

Angela Merke Mike Pence
© AP Photo/Matthias SchraderGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel, right, welcomes United States Vice President Mike Pence, left, for a bilateral meeting during the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, Saturday, Feb. 16, 2019.
If the Anti-Iran conference in Warsaw was the opening act, the annual Munich Security Conference was the main event. Both produced a lot of speeches, grandstanding and virtue-signaling, as well as a lot of shuffling of feet and looking at the ground.

The message from the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia was clear, "We are still committed to the destruction of Syria as a functional state to end the growing influence of Iran."

Europe, for the most part, doesn't buy that argument anymore. Germany certainly doesn't. France is only interested in how they can curry favor with the U.S. to wrest control of the EU from Germany. The U.K. is a hopeless has-been, living on Deep State inertia and money laundered through City of London.

The Poles just want to stick it to the Russians.

Everyone else has a bad case of, "been there, done that, ain't doin' it again."

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