Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features delta blues singer Robert Wilkins. Enjoy!

“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”

-- George Orwell

News and Opinion

Chris Hedges: War With Iran

The assassination by the United States of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The existing mayhem, violence, failed states and war, the result of nearly two decades of U.S. blunders and miscalculations in the region, will become an even wider and more dangerous conflagration. The consequences are ominous. ... The strike may temporarily bolster the political fortunes of the two beleaguered architects of the assassination, Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it is an act of imperial suicide by the United States. There can be no positive outcome. It opens up the possibility of an Armageddon-type scenario relished by the lunatic fringes of the Christian right.

A war with Iran would see it use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, mines and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20% of the world’s oil supply. Oil prices would double, perhaps triple, devastating the global economy. The retaliatory strikes by Iran on Israel, as well as on American military installations in Iraq, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead. The Shiites in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would turn in fury on us and our dwindling allies. There would be an increase in terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would renew attacks on northern Israel. War with Iran would trigger a long and widening regional conflict that, by the time it was done, would terminate the American Empire and leave in its wake mounds of corpses and smoldering ruins. Let us hope for a miracle to pull us back from this Dr. Strangelove self-immolation. ...

Iraq after our 2003 invasion and occupation has been destroyed as a unified country. Its once-modern infrastructure is in ruins. Electrical and water services are, at best, erratic. There is high unemployment and discontent over widespread government corruption that has led to bloody street protests. Warring militias and ethnic factions have carved out competing and antagonistic enclaves. At the same time, the war in Afghanistan is lost, as the Afghanistan Papers published by The Washington Post detail. Libya is a failed state. Yemen after five years of unrelenting Saudi airstrikes and a blockade is enduring one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The “moderate” rebels we funded and armed in Syria at a cost of $500 million, after instigating a lawless reign of terror, have been beaten and driven out of the country. The monetary cost for this military folly, the greatest strategic blunder in American history, is between $5 trillion and $7 trillion.

So why go to war with Iran? ... The generals and politicians who launched and prosecuted these wars are not about to take the blame for the quagmires they created. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, including at least 200,000 civilians, and the millions driven from their homes into displacement and refugee camps cannot, they insist, be the result of our failed and misguided policies. The proliferation of radical jihadist groups and militias, many of which we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone else’s fault. The generals, the CIA, the private contractors and weapons manufacturers who have grown rich off these conflicts, the politicians such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, along with all the “experts” and celebrity pundits who serve as cheerleaders for endless war, have convinced themselves, and want to convince us, that Iran is responsible for our catastrophe. The chaos and instability we unleashed in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant country in the region. Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse its mistake other than to attack Iran.

Trump and Netanyahu, as well as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, are mired in scandal. They believe a new war would divert attention from their foreign and domestic crises. But they have no more rational strategy for war with Iran than they did for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria. ... A war with Iran would be seen throughout the region as a war against Shiism. But these are calculations that the ideologues, who know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate, cannot fathom. Attacking Iran would be no more successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that militant group. The Israeli bombing did not pacify 4 million Lebanese. ... The United States, like Israel, has become a pariah that shreds, violates or absents itself from international law. We launch preemptive wars, which under international law is defined as a “crime of aggression,” based on fabricated evidence. We, as citizens, must hold our government accountable for these crimes. If we do not, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that would have terrifying consequences. It would be a world without treaties, statutes and laws.

Trump’s Killing of Qassem Soleimani Means “Rules of the Game Have Totally Changed” in Middle East

An excellent article by Jeremy Scahill. Here's a bit to get you started:

With Suleimani Assassination, Trump Is Doing the Bidding of Washington’s Most Vile Cabal

While the media focus for three years of the Trump presidency has centered around “Russia collusion” and impeachment, the most dangerous collusion of all was happening right out in the open - the Trump/Saudi/Israel/UAE drive to war with Iran.

On August 3, 2016 — just three months before Donald Trump would win the Electoral College vote and ascend to power — Blackwater founder Erik Prince arranged a meeting at Trump Tower. For decades, Prince had been agitating for a war with Iran and, as early as 2010, had developed a fantastical proposal for using mercenaries to wage it. At this meeting was George Nader, an American citizen who had a long history of being a quiet emissary for the United States in the Middle East. Nader, who had also worked for Blackwater and Prince, was a convicted pedophile in the Czech Republic and is facing similar allegations in the United States. Nader worked as an adviser for the Emirati royals and has close ties to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince.

There was also an Israeli at the Trump Tower meeting: Joel Zamel. He was there supposedly pitching a multimillion-dollar social media manipulation campaign to the Trump team. Zamel’s company, Psy-Group, boasts of employing former Israeli intelligence operatives. Nader and Zamel were joined by Donald Trump Jr. According to the New York Times, the purpose of the meeting was “primarily to offer help to the Trump team, and it forged relationships between the men and Trump insiders that would develop over the coming months, past the election and well into President Trump’s first year in office.”

One major common goal ran through the agendas of all the participants in this Trump Tower meeting: regime change in Iran. Trump campaigned on belligerence toward Iran and trashing the Obama-led Iran nuclear deal, and he has followed through on those threats, filling his administration with the most vile, hawkish figures in the U.S. national security establishment. After appointing notorious warmonger John Bolton as national security adviser, Trump fired him last September. But despite reports that Trump had soured on Bolton because of his interventionist posture toward Iran, Bolton’s firing merely opened the door for the equally belligerent Mike Pompeo to take over the administration’s Iran policy at the State Department. Now Pompeo is the public face of the Suleimani assassination, while for his part, the fired Bolton didn’t want to be left out of the gruesome victory lap:

Congratulations to all involved in eliminating Qassem Soleimani. Long in the making, this was a decisive blow against Iran's malign Quds Force activities worldwide. Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran.

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) January 3, 2020

Trump, who had no idea who Qassim Suleimani was until it was explained to him live on the radio by conservative journalist Hugh Hewitt in 2015, didn’t seem to need many details to know that he wanted to crush the Iranian state. Much as the neoconservatives came to power in 2001 after the election of George W. Bush with the goal of regime change in Iraq, Trump in his bumbling way assembled a team of extremists who viewed him as their best chance of wiping the Islamic Republic of Iran off the map.

Soleimani’s Death Could Galvanize Shia Coalitions Against One “Foreign Aggressor” — The U.S.

We need to get out of Iraq and Syria now. That is the only way that we're going to prevent ourselves from being dragged into this quagmire, deeper and deeper into a war with Iran. #WWIII #TrumpsWar #StandWithTulsi pic.twitter.com/nb8mLfiywq

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) January 3, 2020

Iran ends nuclear deal commitments as fallout from Suleimani killing spreads

Iran has announced that it will no longer abide by any of the limits imposed by the unravelling 2015 nuclear deal, and Iraq’s parliament urged its leaders to expel troops from the US-led coalition, as the aftershocks of the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani reverberated through the Middle East.

In a statement broadcast on state TV late on Sunday, the Iranian government said the country would no longer observe limitations on uranium enrichment, stockpiles of enriched uranium or nuclear research and development. But the statement noted that the steps could be reversed if Washington lifted its sanctions on Tehran. ...

The Iraqi parliament’s call to expel US troops was another clear sign of blowback from the assassination – and was quickly hailed by Suleimani’s supporters as a major step towards one of his main goals. Though the Iraqi debate that called for the US exit is not binding, and would require a one-year notice period, the fact that the move was led by a prime minister regarded as a US ally showed just how divisive the killing has become, and how quickly US interests in the region could unravel as a result.

Adel Abdul Mahdi, who stepped down as leader last November and now serves in an acting capacity, said “urgent procedures” were needed to start a US exit, which he described as necessary to restore “our national sovereignty”. ...

Shortly after Abdul Mahdi’s statement, the US announced that it was suspending operations against the Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq and a five-year-old training mission to equip local forces. A US statement claimed the suspension was a reaction to rocket attacks on US bases, carried out in recent weeks by Shia militia members.

Qassem Soleimani represented a 'culture that cannot be assassinated'

Trump is apparently ready to kill more than 1.6 million Iraqis for being "unfriendly."

Trump threatens to slap sanctions on Iraq ‘like they’ve never seen before’

President Donald Trump threatened Sunday to slap sanctions on Iraq after its parliament passed a resolution calling for the government to expel foreign troops from the country. ...

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, the U.S. president said: “If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.”

“We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it,” Trump said.

The president added that “If there’s any hostility, that they do anything we think is inappropriate, we are going to put sanctions on Iraq, very big sanctions on Iraq.”

“The Iraqi government must work to end the presence of any foreign troops on Iraqi soil and prohibit them from using its land, airspace or water for any reason,” read the resolution passed by the Iraqi parliament, which convened in an extraordinary session on Sunday.

Trump’s march to war on Iran aided by Democrats’ weakness on sanctions, nuclear deal

Gosh, Tim Kaine, you decide to act now because the problem has "reached a boiling point?"

Wow, 30 days, huh? Maybe that War Powers Act should be reconsidered since it allows an unhinged executive too much time and latitude to make a mess, eh?

Sen. Tim Kaine Files War Powers Resolution to Stop Trump From 'Stumbling Into a War With Iran'

Saying the situation in the Persian Gulf had now reached "a boiling point," Sen. Tim Kaine introduced a War Powers resolution on Friday in an effort to stop the Trump administration from waging war on Iran.

"For years, I've been deeply concerned about President [Donald] Trump stumbling into a war with Iran," said Kaine (D-Va.). "We're now at a boiling point, and Congress must step in before Trump puts even more of our troops in harm's way. We owe it to our servicemembers to have a debate and vote about whether or not it's in our national interest to engage in another unnecessary war in the Middle East."

The Senate is obligated to vote on the legislation, as War Powers resolutions are privileged.

The measure, which has Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) as a co-sponsor, says that the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs) provide no authorization for waging war against Iran and calls for the president to remove troops from engaging in hostilities against Iran within 30 days "unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force."

The first thing Congress should do when we get back to Washington next week is pass Sen. Sanders and my bill to block funding for a war in Iran.

It’s time for us to act on the powers the founders gave us. pic.twitter.com/TNxK2kiQCG

— Rep. Ro Khanna (@RepRoKhanna) January 4, 2020

U.S. may target more Iranian Ieaders, Pompeo threatens

The U.S. military may strike more Iranian leaders if the Islamic Republic retaliates for the Trump administration’s killing of Tehran’s most powerful general last week by attacking Americans or American interests, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday. ...

Trump continued issuing warnings to Iran by tweet. “These Media Posts will serve as notification to the United States Congress that should Iran strike any U.S. person or target, the United States will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner,” he wrote Sunday afternoon. “Such legal notice is not required, but is given nevertheless!” ...

Pompeo declined to say whether he had sought to communicate with Iran since Friday. He stressed the U.S. resolve to hold Iran accountable for its interventions in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Mideast.

Pompeo said the Obama administration had tried to “challenge and attack everybody who was running around with an AK-47 or a piece of indirect artillery. We’ve made a very different approach. We’ve told the Iranian regime, ‘Enough. You can’t get away with using proxy forces and think your homeland will be safe and secure.’ We’re going to respond against the actual decision-makers, the people who are causing this threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Fastest way to unify all political factions in Iran against you is to assassinate the general who led Iran’s fight against ISIS.

Fastest way to unify Iranians of all walks of life against you is to threaten to destroy their cultural heritage.

Trump did both this week.

— Negar Mortazavi (@NegarMortazavi) January 5, 2020

Trump vows to hit 52 sites 'very hard' if Iran retaliates over Suleimani killing

Donald Trump has threatened to hit 52 Iranian sites “very hard” if Iran attacks Americans or US assets in retaliation for the drone strike that killed the Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani and an Iraqi militia leader.

The US president made the threat in a tweet hours before Suleimani’s body arrived in Iran for burial and ramifications of the killings were reverberating across a nervous region, where many believe the aftermath could spark a new era of bloodletting and instability. ...

Trump tweeted that Iran “is talking very boldly about targeting certain USA assets” in response to Suleimani’s death. He said the US had “targeted 52 Iranian sites” and that some were “at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD”.

“The USA wants no more threats!” Trump said, adding that the 52 targets represented the 52 Americans who were held hostage in Iran for 444 days after being seized at the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979. ...

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said Trump’s threats breached international law. “Having committed grave breaches of int’l law in Friday’s cowardly assassinations, realdonaldtrump threatens to commit again new breaches,” he tweeted. “Targeting cultural sites is a war crime; – Whether kicking or screaming, end of US malign presence in West Asia has begun.”

This is a war crime.

Threatening to target and kill innocent families, women and children - which is what you’re doing by targeting cultural sites - does not make you a “tough guy.”

It does not make you “strategic.”
It makes you a monster. https://t.co/IjkNO8BD07

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 5, 2020

AOC Condemns Killing of Soleimani: This Was An Act of Aggression Committed by the United States

Pepe Escobar: US Kick Starts Raging ’20s Declaring War on Iran

It does not matter where the green light for the U.S. targeted assassination in Baghdad of Quds Force commander Major General Qassem Soleimani and the Hashd al-Shaabi second-in-command Abu Madhi al-Muhandis came from. This is an act of war. Unilateral, unprovoked and illegal. ...

According to my best Southwest Asia intel sources, “Israel gave the U.S. the coordinates for the assassination of Qassem Soleimani as they wanted to avoid the repercussions of taking the assassination upon themselves.” ...

And there cannot be a more startling provocation against Iran — in a long list of sanctions and provocations — than what just happened in Baghdad. Iraq is now the preferred battleground of a proxy war against Iran that may now metastasize into hot war, with devastating consequences. ...
I met al-Muhandis in Baghdad two years ago — as well as many Hashd al-Shaabi members. Here is my full report. The Deep State is absolutely terrified that Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces), a grassroots organization, are on the way to becoming a new Hezbollah, and as powerful as Hezbollah. Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the supreme religious authority in Iraq, universally respected by Shia, fully supports them.

So, the American strike also targets Sistani — not to mention the fact that Hash al-Shaabi operates under guidelines issued by the Iraqi Prime Minister Abdel Mahdi. That’s a major strategic blunder that can only be pulled off by amateurs.

Major General Soleimani, of course, humiliated the whole of the Deep State over and over again — and could eat all of them for breakfast, lunch and dinner as a military strategist. It was Soleimani who defeated ISIS/Daesh in Iraq — not the Americans bombing Raqqa to rubble. Soleimani is a super-hero of almost mythical status for legions of young Hezbollah supporters, Houthis in Yemen, all strands of resistance fighters in both Iraq and Syria, Islamic Jihad in Palestine, and all across Global South latitudes in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

There’s absolutely no way the U.S. will be able to maintain troops in Iraq, unless the nation is re-occupied en masse via a bloodbath. And forget about “security”: no imperial official or imperial military force is now safe anywhere, from the Levant to Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf.

Hezbollah leader vows bloody retaliation for US killing of Iranian general

Suleimani killing the latest in a long, grim line of US assassination efforts

The US government is no stranger to the dark arts of political assassinations. Over the decades it has deployed elaborate techniques against its foes, from dispatching a chemist armed with lethal poison to try to take out Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in the 1960s to planting poison pills (equally unsuccessfully) in the Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s food. But the killing of Gen Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite military Quds force, was in in a class all its own. Its uniqueness lay not so much in its method – what difference does it make to the victim if they are eviscerated by aerial drone like Suleimani, or executed following a CIA-backed coup, as was Iraq’s ruler in 1963, Abdul Karim Kassem? – but in the brazenness of its execution and the apparently total disregard for either legal niceties or human consequences. ...

There has been no shortage of US interventions over the past half-century that have attempted – and in some cases succeeded – in removing foreign adversaries through highly dubious legal or ethical means. The country has admitted to making no fewer than eight assassination attempts on Castro, though the real figure was probably much higher. William Blum, the author of Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, points to a litany of American sins from invasions, bombings, overthrowing of governments, assassinations to torture and death squads. “It’s not a pretty picture” is his blunt conclusion.

The CIA was deemed to have run so amok in the 1960s and 70s that in 1975 the Church committee investigated a numerous attempted assassinations on foreign leaders including Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem and, of course, Castro. In the fallout, Gerald Ford banned US involvement in foreign political assassinations. The ban didn’t last long. Since 1976 the US has continued to be engaged in, or accused of, efforts to eradicate foreign leaders. ...

Obama inherited Bush’s widespread use of drone killings and increased their frequency tenfold, while seeking to give them a veneer of legal respectability with the secret internal “targeted killing memos”. Those documents argued that drone assassinations were justified under international law as self-defense against future terrorist attacks – a rationale that has been widely disputed as a misreading of the UN charter. ...

“Since Obama there has been a steady dilution of international law,” Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international law at the University of Notre Dame, said. “Suleimani’s death marks the next dilution – we are moving down a slope towards a completely lawless situation.”

Iranian-Americans Reportedly Detained, Asked About Political Views at US Border

Reports that dozens of Iranian-Americans were detained at the U.S.-Canada border on Saturday and questioned about their "political views and allegiances" were met with alarm by lawmakers and rights groups, particularly given the soaring military tensions between Iran and the U.S. brought on by the Trump administration.

On Sunday, the Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said it is "assisting more than 60 Iranians and Iranian-Americans of all ages who were detained at length and questioned at the Peace Arch Border Crossing in Blaine, Wash." Those detained, according to CAIR, were returning from an Iranian pop concert that took place Saturday in Vancouver, Canada.

CAIR, citing an anonymous source from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), alleged that "the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a national order to CBP to 'report' and detain anyone with Iranian heritage entering the country who is deemed potentially suspicious or 'adversarial,' regardless of citizenship status."

An individual CAIR identified as Crystal, a 24-year-old American citizen and medical student, said she was detained and interrogated for more than 10 hours at the Washington-Canada border before her release Sunday morning. "The vast majority of people being held last night were American citizens," Crystal said. "We kept asking why we were being detained and asked questions that had nothing to do with our reason for traveling and was told 'I'm sorry this is just the wrong time for you guys.'"

Masih Fouladi, executive director of CAIR-WA, said in a statement that the reports of detentions are "extremely troubling and potentially constitute illegal detentions of United States citizens."

US Selective Service website crashes amid panic over military draft

In the aftermath of the US drone strike that killed the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad, the phrase “World War III” began trending on social media. More startlingly, a US government agency which registers young men for a potential military draft saw its website crash.

“Due to the spread of misinformation,” the Selective Service System (SSS) tweeted on Friday, “our website is experiencing high traffic volumes at this time … We appreciate your patience.”

It added that it was “conducting business as usual” and emphasised that a return to the draft is not imminent: “In the event that a national emergency necessitates a draft, Congress and the president would need to pass official legislation.”

On Saturday, as Twitter panic subsided, the SSS website was up and running, if slowly.

Why US Leadership Stinks and Drone Assassination Doesn’t Matter

The assassination strategy the US pursues is interesting, not in what it says about the US’s foes, but what it says about the American leaders. Al-Qaeda’s “No. 2 Man” has been “killed” so often that it’s a running joke, and Taliban leadership is regularly killed by assassination. Bush did this, Obama really, really did this. Probably a lot of these stories are BS, but it’s also probably safe to assume that a lot of leadership has been killed.

The Taliban is still kicking the coalition’s ass.

Leadership isn’t as big a deal as people make it out to be–IF you have a vibrant organization in which people believe. New people step up, and they’re competent enough. Genius leadership is very rare, and a good organization doesn’t need it, though it’s welcome when it exists. As long as the organization knows what it’s supposed to do (kick Americans out of Afghanistan), and everyone’s motivated to do that, leadership doesn’t need to be especially great, but it will be generally competent, because the people in the organization will make it so.

American leaders are obsessed with leadership because they lead organizations in whose goals no one believes. Or rather, they lead organizations for whom everyone knows the leadership doesn’t believe in its ostensible goals. Schools are led by people who hate teachers and want to privatize schools to make profit. The US is led by men who don’t believe in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Police are led by men who think their jobs are to protect the few and beat down the many, not to protect and serve. Corporations make fancy mission statements and talk about valuing employees and customers, but they just want to make a buck and will fuck anyone, employee or customer, below the C-suite. They don’t have a “mission” (making money is not a mission, it’s a hunger if it’s all you want to do); they are parasites and they know it.

Making organizations work if they’re filled with people who don’t believe in the organization, or who believe that the “leadership” is only out for themselves and has no mission beyond helping themselves, not even enriching the employees or shareholders, is actually hard. ... So American leaders, in specific, and Westerners, in general, think that organizations will fall apart if the very small number of people who can actually lead, stop leading. But that’s because they think that leading the Taliban, say, is like leading an American company or the American government. They think it requires a soulless prevaricator who takes advantage of and abuses virtually everyone and is still able to get people to, reluctantly, do their jobs.

Functioning organizations aren’t like that. They suck leadership upwards. Virtually everyone is being groomed for leadership and is ready for leadership. They believe in the cause, they know what to do, they’re involved. And they aren’t scared of dying, if they really believe. Oh sure, they’d rather not, but it won’t stop them from stepping up.

Well now, this could be interesting. Or it could be yet another propaganda campaign. The Guardian quoting the intel-agent-for-hire Christopher Steele like he might be working in the public interest is a dead giveaway that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak.

Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’

An explosive leak of tens of thousands of documents from the defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica is set to expose the inner workings of the company that collapsed after the Observer revealed it had misappropriated 87 million Facebook profiles. More than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries that will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on “an industrial scale” are set to be released over the next months.

It comes as Christopher Steele, the ex-head of MI6’s Russia desk and the intelligence expert behind the so-called “Steele dossier” into Trump’s relationship with Russia, said that while the company had closed down, the failure to properly punish bad actors meant that the prospects for manipulation of the US election this year were even worse.

The release of documents began on New Year’s Day on an anonymous Twitter account, @HindsightFiles, with links to material on elections in Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil. The documents were revealed to have come from Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, and to be the same ones subpoenaed by Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. ... The documents were retrieved from her email accounts and hard drives, and though she handed over some material to parliament in April 2018, she said there were thousands and thousands more pages which showed a “breadth and depth of the work” that went “way beyond what people think they know about ‘the Cambridge Analytica scandal’”. ...

Kaiser said the Facebook data scandal was part of a much bigger global operation that worked with governments, intelligence agencies, commercial companies and political campaigns to manipulate and influence people, and that raised huge national security implications.

'We can't trust Google': former executive says company has lost its way

A former Google executive claims he was pushed out of the company over his advocacy of human rights, alleging in a public blogpost that the company is increasingly putting profits over people.

Ross LaJeunesse, the former head of international relations at Google and now a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Maine, said he was forced to leave the company after reporting discriminatory practices, and that his work to combat censorship was at odds with Google’s desires to expand into a growing market in China.

“In reality, I don’t think we can trust Google,” he told the Guardian. “It has been shown time and time again, whether in how it handles personal data to when it’s asked to address violent content online, that we cannot take Google at its word any more.”

LaJeunesse spearheaded a 2010 decision to stop censoring Google search results in China and worked to establish a company-wide human rights program – efforts that were challenged when Google returned to the Chinese market with a censored search product code-named Dragonfly in 2017.

Schaston Hodge, black man killed by white Texas troopers, was shot 16 times

The autopsy report of a man who was shot dead by two state troopers after a traffic stop in Dallas shows he had 16 gunshot wounds, including shots to the head, front and back torso and both legs. Schaston Hodge, 27, was shot dead by the troopers Joshua Engleman and Robert Litvin on 17 August, following what police described as a short pursuit after the troopers attempted to stop Hodge for failing to use a turn signal. ...

Engleman and Litvin were working in Dallas as part of Texas governor Greg Abbot’s decision to send troopers to help city police during an increase in violent crime. Both troopers involved in the shooting are white. Hodge was black.

Lt Lonny Haschel, a spokesman for the Texas department of public safety (DPS), said Texas Rangers investigated the shooting and turned a report over to the Dallas county district attorney’s office. A grand jury declined to indict the troopers. ...

The Texas department of public safety (DPS) has declined to release videos of the shooting.

Poll shows Bernie leading in Iowa, New Hampshire

As Sanders and Warren Vow to Block War With Iran, Biden and Buttigieg Offer Better-Run Wars

The legacy of the Iraq war, and the prospect of a bloody sequel sparked by Donald Trump’s assassination of a senior Iranian official in Baghdad this week, has the potential to transform the Democratic primary, offering voters radically different visions of how the next commander-in-chief proposes to deal with the ongoing chaos caused by the 2003 invasion.

Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren described the drone strike ordered by Trump as a dangerous escalation and promised to end American wars in the Middle East. Joe Biden, the former vice president, and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, offered more muted criticism, suggesting that the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani might have been justified if a more responsible commander-in-chief was in charge.

We must do more than just stop war with Iran.

We must firmly commit to ending U.S. military presence in the Middle East in an orderly manner.

We must end our involvement in the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen.

We must bring our troops home from Afghanistan.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 3, 2020

Warren, who faced criticism from the left for initially prefacing her alarm at the threat of “another costly war” with the statement that Suleimani was “a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans,” amplified Sanders’s anti-war message more clearly on Friday. “Donald Trump is dangerous and reckless,” she wrote. “He’s escalated crises and betrayed our partners. He’s undermined our diplomatic relationships for his own personal, political gain. We cannot allow him to drag us back into another war. We must speak out.”

Biden also criticized the killing of the general as needlessly provocative, but issued a statement that embraced the Trump administration’s argument that Suleimani, who orchestrated deadly attacks on U.S. soldiers during the post-war occupation of Iraq, “deserved to be brought to justice for his crimes against American troops.” The former vice president ... was critical mainly of what he called Trump’s failure to explain his “strategy and plan to keep safe our troops and embassy personnel” and Trump’s lack of a “long-term vision” for the U.S. military’s role in the region. ... Buttigieg’s initial statement also endorsed Trump’s claim that killing an Iranian general who supported Iraqi militias that oppose the ongoing presence of U.S. troops in their country was in line with the commander-in-chief’s responsibility “to protect Americans and our national security interests.” “There is no question that Qassim Suleimani was a threat to that safety and security, and that he masterminded threats and attacks on Americans and our allies, leading to hundreds of deaths,” Buttigieg wrote. “But there are serious questions about how this decision was made and whether we are prepared for the consequences.” ...

"Yeah but what's your strategy?" is the safest, lamest, most DC criticism possible. Trump's Iran policy is foolish, dangerous, and driven by hardline ideologues who've been pushing for war for years. Who cares what the strategy is for achieving it. The policy needs to change.

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) January 4, 2020

In the aftermath of Trump’s strike on Iran’s leading military figure, Biden and Buttigieg, egged on by conservative commentators, appear to be vying for the mantle of John Kerry 2.0 as each man argues that his prior experience with national security makes him the best alternative to Trump in the general election. ... Biden told voters in Iowa on Friday that he doubts that Trump is capable of handling Iran’s likely retaliation.

Zaid Jilani: Will anyone make Biden pay for his Iraq war vote?

Bernie Sanders addresses Iran tensions after killing of top Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani: "This is a dangerous escalation that brings us closer to another war in the Middle East." https://t.co/WcUzjDHTea pic.twitter.com/R6uYrw4eEE

— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 3, 2020

When I return to Washington next week along with the U.S. Senate, I believe the first course of action is for the Congress to take immediate steps to restrain President Trump from plunging our nation into yet another endless war. pic.twitter.com/dSDeFMmEYT

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 4, 2020

Impeachment: Warren accuses Trump of 'wag the dog' strike on Suleimani

Elizabeth Warren has suggested Donald Trump ordered the drone assassination of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani to distract the American public from his own impeachment, taking the country “to the edge of war” for his own political purposes.

“We know Donald Trump is very upset about this upcoming impeachment trial,” the Massachusetts senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination told NBC’s Meet the Press. “But look what he’s doing now. He is taking us to the edge of war.”

Observers were quick to say Warren was accusing Trump of “wag the dog” tactics, meaning an attempt to distract public attention by launching a military strike. A 1997 film satire starring Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman used the phrase as its title and similar charges were levelled against Bill Clinton in 1998, when he ordered strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan while embroiled in the scandal which led to his own impeachment. ...

On Sunday Iran called Trump a “terrorist in a suit” and told US media outlets retaliation would hit US military targets.

Warren told CNN’s State of the Union it was “reasonable” to ask if the strike was meant to be a distraction, “particularly when the administration, immediately after having taken this decision, offers a bunch of contradictory explanations for what’s going on. “There was a reason that he chose this moment, not a month ago, not a month from now, not a less aggressive, less dangerous response.”

Ryan Grim: If Bernie wins, this will be why

Michael Bloomberg Is Spending ‘Insane’ Money to Own Trump Online

When Google users typed “Trump” into their search bars Thursday, an unexpected result might have popped up: a message from Michael Bloomberg.

“Trump Has Betrayed Us and Broken His Promises,” read an ad above any Trump-related news articles, images, and other links. “Enough is Enough.”

The temporary takeover of the president’s turf was a particularly aggressive move by a campaign that has tried to gobble up every inch of media real estate. Bloomberg has spent millions buying Google ads in recent weeks, many of them similarly targeting other search keywords, like “impeachment,” “gun control,” and various climate-related terms.

The approach mirrors the way the campaign has thrown seemingly endless piles of money at other crucial advertising platforms like Facebook and the more expensive TV. Flooding the zone has allowed Bloomberg to spread his message, bring voters to his website, and — maybe most importantly — drive up prices for every other candidate who doesn’t have a $55 billion personal fortune at their fingertips. “When you have more people bidding on keywords and are willing to spend higher and higher amounts, that’s going to move the market,” said Steve Johnston, COO of the GOP digital firm Flexpoint Media and a former staffer on Google’s elections team. “It’s going to be notable when he [Bloomberg] comes into conflict with his competitors. That includes other Democrats and also President Trump.”

Since jumping into the race in late November, the former New York mayor has outgunned the vaunted Trump digital team on Facebook, $6 million to $3.5 million, more than tripled Sen. Bernie Sanders’ spending, and more than quadrupled that of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

'Virtually Unstoppable' Blazes, Record Heat, and Mass Evacuations as Australia Wildfires Intensify

Powerful winds and sweltering heat on Saturday combined to intensify catastrophic bushfires across Australia, forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate their homes as firefighters struggled to contain the "virtually unstoppable" blazes ravaging large swaths of the continent.

At least two dozen people and an estimated half a billion animals have been killed by the fires, which have scorched more than six million hectares of land since September.

Australian authorities said Saturday and Sunday are likely to be two of the worst days since the fire season began late last year. "We are still yet to hit the worst of it," warned New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

As the Associated Press reported Saturday, "the fire danger increased as temperatures rose to record levels across Australia on Saturday, surpassing 43 degrees Celsius (109 Fahrenheit) in Canberra, the capital, and reaching a record-high 48.9 C (120 F) in Penrith, in Sydney's western suburbs."

According to CNN, three fires in the Omeo region in Victoria state combined overnight "to form a single blaze bigger than the New York borough of Manhattan."

Angus Barners, an incident controller at the Rural Fire Service in Moruya, NSW, told CNN that "we can't stop the fires, all we can do is steer them around communities."

"The entire sky has been turned this deathly shade of orange"

The BBC's Phil Mercer reports from a dust storm in New South Wales - the high winds are making conditions perilous for firefighters tackling Australia's bushfireshttps://t.co/gXPAKxtGGt pic.twitter.com/R63XQvAuik

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) January 4, 2020

Prime Minister Scott Morrison—who has faced fierce criticism from residents for failing to take sufficient action to confront the blazes—announced the 3,000 Australian Defense Force Reserve troops Saturday to help fight the devastating fires.

Defense Minister Linda Reynolds told reporters that it is the first time reservists have been called up "in this way in living memory and, in fact, I believe for the first time in our nation's history."

Australian bushfires ease as government commits two billion dollars to recovery effort

Falling ash, skies of blood – and now Australia’s anger smoulders

The sky over Cobargo in New South Wales was still tainted yellow on Thursday afternoon when Australia’s prime minister arrived. For the past month, the country had been ablaze, and the village 240 miles south of Sydney and home to 776 people, had been hit hard. Standing in the crowd, Zoey Salucci McDermott, 20, eyed Scott Morrison coolly. She and her young daughter had lost her home in the fires, so when he extended his hand in greeting, she did not reciprocate. “I’ll only shake your hand if you give more funding to the RFS [Rural Fire Service],” McDermott said, holding back tears. “So many people here have lost their homes. We need more help.” The prime minister turned away. ... As the flames retreated, a white hot anger smouldered. “You’re not welcome, you fuckwit,” a man yelled after Morrison as he retreated under a barrage of insults. ...

The scale of the destruction is hard to overstate. When the Amazon rainforest caught fire last January, 906,000 hectares burned. And last July, 2.6 million hectares were turned to ash across the Siberian steppe. Since the first fires began in Australia in August, more than 5 million hectares have been set aflame, fanned by unusual weather patterns and lower-than-usual humidity that has allowed firefronts to spread rapidly across a bone-dry landscape. The country’s volunteer firefighting forces are exhausted, outgunned and overwhelmed. ...

Former New South Wales fire chief Greg Mullins and 22 other former emergency services chiefs wrote to Morrison outlining the potential crisis and asking for more specialised equipment to deal with hotter and longer bushfire periods. They were ignored. Emergency services have been asking for resources since 2016, when the National Aerial Firefighting Centre asked for a “national large air-tanker fleet” to support firefighting operations but were rebuffed. The consistent refusal to stump up the cash or even engage with a chorus of experts warning about a crisis has defined the conservative government’s policy since it took power under Tony Abbott in 2013. Now, as the country faces one of the worst natural disasters in its history, a short-term, transactional austerity politics has collided with the long arc of climate change in a way that is clearly visible on the ground. Firefighters in some areas have been forced to crowdfund for basic equipment while until recently the federal government remained steadfast in its refusal to back-pay volunteers for their time, even as the prime minister praised their “spirit”. It took sustained public pressure to drag the government to compensate volunteers, with Morrison announcing last Saturday that they would receive up to $6,000.

The denial of reality was seemingly reinforced on New Year’s Day, when Morrison held a reception for a professional cricket team at Kirribilli House, the official residence. ... In a throwback to an earlier scandal when Morrison was photographed on holiday in Hawaii as the first homes were lost in New South Wales, as the country burned, the prime minister was pictured playing backyard cricket.

Counting Whales From Space: scientists and engineers plan hi-tech effort

An aquarium and an engineering firm in Massachusetts are working on a project to better protect whales – by monitoring them from space. The New England Aquarium, based in Boston, and Draper, a firm based in nearby Cambridge, say new and higher-tech solutions are needed in order to protect whales from extinction. So they are using data from sources such as satellites, sonar and radar to keep a closer eye on how many whales are in the ocean.

A project involving complex data and surveillance has an easy to understand name: Counting Whales From Space. But John Irvine, chief scientist for data analytics at Draper, said that was the only simple thing about the project. “If whales are moving out of one area and into another,” Irving said, “what’s the reason for that? Is it due to ocean warming? Is it changes in commercial shipping lanes? These are all questions we’ll be able to start answering once we have the data.”

The work will involve gathering data from sources ranging from European space agencies to amateur radio operators, in order to create a probability map of where in the ocean the whales might be, Irvine said. Conservation groups will then be able to monitor whales and their movements, he said. The aquarium and Draper have committed a combined $1m to the project, which is expected to develop over several years. ...

Project members said their goal is to develop new technology that uses specially designed algorithms to process data and monitor whales. Exactly what the final product could look like is a work in progress, Irvine said, but the goal is a “global watch on whale movement”.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Can the Bernie Sanders Campaign Alter the Course of the Democratic Party?

'If You Are Wondering Who Benefits': Weapons Makers See Stocks Surge as Trump Moves Closer to War With Iran

Oil prices rise 3.6% on threat of retaliation for Suleimani killing

US Empire’s Passion For Iraqi Democracy Magically Disappears

Lawrence Wilkerson: I Saw the March to War in 2003. I’m Seeing the Same Thing with Iran Now

“We Do Not Seek War,” Says President Who Just Started A War

The US Government Lies Constantly, And The Burden Of Proof Is On The Accuser

Thousands Take to Streets in More Than 70 Cities Across US to Protest Trump's "Reckless Acts of War" Against Iran

VIPS Memo: Doubling Down Into Yet Another ‘March of Folly,’ This Time on Iran

Turkish troops deploy to Libya to prop up embattled government

The Doomsday Machine Returns: Citibank Has Sold Protection on $858 Billion of Credit Default Swaps

'He was sent to us': at church rally, evangelicals worship God and Trump

Rising: Journalist recounts harrowing escape from Australia wildfires

Iowa: Sanders, Biden and Buttigieg in three-way tie as caucuses loom

Krystal Ball: UNBELIEVABLE stat reveals why Bernie is more electable than Biden

Rising: Castro endorses Warren, AOC distances herself from Biden

Saagar Enjeti: How military industrial complex is duping us into Iran war

Jimmy Dore: Trump Kills #1 Enemy Of Isis In Iran, WTF?

Jimmy Dore: U.S. News Coverage Of Iran Laughably Horrible

Jimmy Dore: Democrats Pretend To Oppose Iran Attack They Enabled

Jimmy Dore: Veteran Speaks At "No War On Iran" Rally Los Angeles

Krystal and Saagar: BOMBSHELL REPORT raises new questions about Epstein's death

A Little Night Music

Rev. Robert Wilkins - In Heaven, Sitting Down

Robert Wilkins - Dirty Deal Blues

Robert Wilkins - Alabama Blues

Robert Wilkins - New Stock Yard Blues

Robert Wilkins - That's No Way To Get Along

Robert Wilkins - Rolling Stone

Robert Wilkins - Nashville Stonewall

Rev. Robert Wilkins - Streamline 'Frisco Limited

Rev. Robert Wilkins - Don't You Let Nobody Turn You Round

Rolling Stones - Prodigal Son