Narratology: Jared the Spy

Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters via The Times (UK).

I realize there's an awful lot to think about at the moment, but this week-old piece by the estimable Vicky Ward (author of the 2019 Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump), really shouldn't be allowed to wash away in the flood.

It offers a very plausible account, based on Ward's own sources, of exactly what the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund was paying for with their $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner's new investment firm, in the context of a power struggle that had been going on in the kingdom since early 2015, when King Salman, who had been king for just three months, appointed his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef (MbN) as crown prince, and his own son, Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) as deputy crown prince; namely, alleging that Kushner conspired with MbS to get him named crown prince and MbN thrown in prison in 2017, including by passing him classified material to which he had access thanks to the security clearance Trump insisted on giving him.

Which would make him guilty of more than just a Foreign Agents Registration Act violation, if true (Kushner has denied passing classified material to anybody)—like espionage, or the "espionage lite" of Section 951, in which

Note on Yemen: Joe Did What?

Old City of Sanaa, 2019, screenshot by France 24.

I'm enjoying the same sense of relief as everybody else at waking up not asking myself what Trump has done today, but at the same time excitement, anticipating what the new guy may have come up with, and lovely surprises every damn day, like the announcement on Thursday that the US is withdrawing support from the Saudi war of attrition on the civilians of Yemen, not only canceling the $478-million sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia that the State Department approved last December over Congressional objections, which was expected, but also halting the US direct assistance to the Saudis with targeting data and logistical support, which goes back to 2015 and the Obama administration (I referred to it in October 2016 as "the worst single failure of Obama foreign policy"). 

Not that this is going to end the war! But it puts the US in a far better position to help with this terrible catastrophe (still the world's worst humanitarian disaster after six years) it we detach ourselves from the party that has the airplanes:

Trust me, Clinton wouldn't have done this

MBS couldn't stop himself from cracking up during his March visit as Trump bragged on the "deal" he'd made with the cheesy visual aids his staff prepares for him. "Look! Airplanes!" Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP. Don't believe Saudi Arabia is America's generous pal. And his claim that MBS is giving the United States $110 billion worth of business is bullshit, as you probably know by now. As Yglesias writes today, Saudis are far more dependent on the US than the other way around; this special relationship has been out of date for many years.

A couple of years ago, during the presidential campaign, America was all exercised about the fact that the Saudi Arabian government seemed to have made donations, some of them possibly while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of state, totaling over $10 million, conceivably as much as $25 million, to the charitable organization run by Clinton's husband and daughter, where the money would be used for things like buying AIDS drugs for patients in impoverished countries, microcredit for poor business owners, and programs to empower women and girls, which never seemed to get a mention in the news stories, along with the fact that Norway had put in approximately the same amount, and other countries donating smaller but still big sums included not just the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Qatar and Morocco and Algeria but also Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, UK, and Germany.

They did sometimes mention that Clinton's opponent, Donald Trump, was also vaguely rumored to have some funky business relationships with some other countries, as in this 20 August 2016 story by Amy Chozick (remember her?) and Steve Eder:

Emperor heads to the front

After the first Saudi airstrikes in March 2015. AP photo via Al Jazeera.

#EmperorTrump schedules first foreign trip to Saudi Arabia https://t.co/4LXRmFTpKi Who says he hates fundamentalist Muslims? Not rich ones!

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 4, 2017

Can now be revealed that's why #EmperorTrump eventually turned against Iraq War: he learned Saddam Hussein was rich af. Same with Qadhafi.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 4, 2017

"If you want to kill a bunch of Arabs why don't you go kill those Yemenis? They don't go to golf clubs!"

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 4, 2017

As I've been telling you for quite a while, US engagement in the Saudi war on the people of Yemen may look ugly and is not cheap, but the intention under the Obama administration really was to save lives. That's clearer now that the Trump administration is showing us what really collaborating with the Saudis is like:

The emperor at war: Update

Via Indian Express.

Yep, that Yemen raid was a clusterfuck:

U.S. military officials told Reuters that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations. As a result, three officials said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.

It was what the rest of us call carnage, a horrible scene. Probably 30 killed, including at least 10, maybe 15, women and children, among them that 8-year-old Nara al-Awlaki. "A White House official" insists that the Obama administration had vetted the operation thoroughly, but there's no reason to think he's telling the truth. (I'm guessing right here that it's Spicer, who allows himself to be quoted by name boasting about how successful the mission was.) It's not funny, but everything Trump does has the structure of classic comedy, in which the hubristic villain trips on the banana peel of his own cruelty and vanity. It's just that in real life so many of the good people whose lives he affects are damaged and crushed.

Meanwhile Flynn is threatening Iran with some kind of red line the nature of which he doesn't specify very clearly, Trump is threatening to send a punitive expedition to take care of "bad hombres" in Mexico, and he's apparently managed to enrage the prime minister of Australia, America's most loyal ally over the past century. Just doubled down on that on the Twitter machine:

Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017

They're also not thousands of illegal immigrants but 1700 boat people refugees entitled to asylum (mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan) who somehow got lost in the South Pacific, generally held in horrible prison camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

Steve M will tell us this isn't going to cost him anything with his base, and he's right as usual, but I don't think his base can really help him out much at this point. I think his base is going to be crawling back into their woodchuck holes and we're going to be hearing a little less from them, unless it's when they're protesting against the taking away of their Obamacare. And the Republican establishment will happily throw him under the bus if they think he's not helping them, which I can tell you is just going to get clearer every day. It's going to be awful, but hideously entertaining.

The emperor at war

Wreckage of the downed Osprey (had a "hard landing"), after the crew destroyed it, via Defence-Blog.

That US bombing raid in Yemen on Sunday, first military action of the Trump presidency, killing at least 14 people including an 8-year-old girl who happens to be an American citizen, not that I care what kind of passport she was carrying (or who her father was), and a US commando as well, made me wonder if we were already seeing some kind of collapse in our military's ability to do anything right, akin to what happened to it when George W. Bush was president. It just seemed like a much worse cock-up than anything they'd perpetrated in recent months or years, correct me if I'm wrong. Central Command denies that any civilians were killed.

Sure enough, reporting in the Guardian (Spencer Ackerman, Jason Burke, and Julian Borger) makes it clear that it was an action the Obama administration had refused to approve, for whatever reasons:

Semantics: Update

Damage done to the HSV Swift, leased by United Arab Emirates, in a missile attack that the Houthi rebels admitted to the week before. Via USNI News.

There was another much more important Yemen event last week that the Times hardly seems to have covered, let alone NPR, that should have figured into the way I wrote the previous post: after the horrifying attack of October 8 when the Saudis bombed a Yemeni funeral party, killing 140 people and wounding several hundreds more, the US announced that it was going to do a big review of the policy of giving assistance to KSA.

I was aware of this for about five minutes—

US will review its policy on Saudi Arabia war against Yemeni people https://t.co/H8nF1GHQES via @sharethis late, but better than never

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 9, 2016

—but forgot it as the Trump continues to occupy larger and larger swaths of our overtaxed brains.

Juan Cole seems to have bypassed it too, but it turns out that the review is ongoing, and serious, at least according to anonymous officials quoted in Missy Ryan's story in the Washington Post:

Semantics, how does it work?

Update: I'm as annoyed with NPR as ever on this, but the US position looks a lot better to me in the light of some neglected Yemen news.

The port of Aden, 1876, via Qatar National Library.

Bizarre exchange on NPR Thursday morning in reference to the Navy attack on missile installations held by "rebels" in Yemen that (very ineptly) attacked a US ship:

TOM BOWMAN: Well, there's a civil war going on in Yemen right now. The Houthi rebels are aligned with the former president of the country, fighting the current president. And the U.S. is providing support to Saudi Arabia, who's fighting to keep the current president in power. The U.S. is providing air refueling capability, intelligence capability as well. And they've refueled as many as 5,000 bombing flights over Yemen.

And a concern here, Renee, is that there have been a lot of civilians killed here in this effort to support the Saudis, as many as 4,000 civilians killed. And there was one incident last week where 140 civilians were killed at a funeral. So this is the first time the U.S. has actually been involved militarily here.

RENEE MONTAGNE: Right. I mean, that's a key here, that the U.S. is actively supporting these Saudi airstrikes. It's not a passive sort of support. And this funeral has really kicked up a big controversy there, a lot of resistance. What is that doing to - what kind of problem is that for the U.S.?

Where Bowman says the US has never previously been militarily involved, and Montagne agrees that, yes, we have been very seriously involved. And then Bowman comes back to say that in fact with this strike we are also not involved, disagreeing not so much with Montagne as, weirdly, with himself:

Note on Yemen

African youngster in Aden, undated image, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Well, well, look what's happened in the old port of Aden in southern Yemen:

A powerful car bomb killed the provincial governor and at least four of his bodyguards in the southern Yemeni port of Aden early Sunday, according to the head of local security, raising new doubts about the ability of a Saudi-led military coalition to secure one of Yemen’s most important cities.

Hours after the blast, the Islamic State extremist group claimed responsibility for the bombing in a statement distributed on social media sites, saying it had killed eight bodyguards.

I hope nobody's too shocked by this development.

West of Eden, and hopefully on the way north

Aylan Kurdi alive, apparently threatening the cultural integrity of Mr. Orbán's continent, though I don't quite see that. Photo via The Independent.

I've heard of governments hating foreign refugees so much they'd seal the border with a razor-wire fence, or a Great Wall as the case may be, so they can't get in, but I've never heard of one like the Hungarian Fidesz regime that won't let them out either.

Why are there 500 Syrians stuck on a train in the town of Bicske, and thousands more haunting the central station in Budapest? When crypto-fascist* prime minister Viktor Orbán says,

“Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims,” he said. “This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity.

“Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders.”

Not because the migrants want to be the guests of such a narrow-minded and unwelcoming government. They're just passing through on their way to Germany, which has agreed to take on 800,000 refugees. Hungary is holding them under the theory that they are legally required to herd them into camps.

Note on Yemen

Image by Noa Angel, via Digital Journal.

Emptywheel noted yesterday:

Eid Mubarak. Today Ramadan ends, a big celebration in the Muslim community.

Saudi Arabia chose to celebrate by doing what they’ve been doing for over a hundred days: bombing Yemen....

That’s particularly notable given that according to the formal readouts, every conversation the President has had with Gulf allies about the Iran deal has also included some discussion of Yemen... 

Given the way the Obama Administration has tied some solution to Yemen with the Iran deal, I think it fair to ask whether there has been some kind of understanding that even as Obama pursues this deal, the US will continue to facilitate Saudi Arabia’s efforts to extend its hegemony at the expense of Shias (in Yemen, but also in Syria).

I think it's certainly fair to ask what the administration is offering KSA (and Israel) in the effort to persuade them to shut up about the agreement having "worse consequences than the failed agreement with North Korea" according to Prince Bandar, and so on, if you also note that it certainly hasn't worked until now.

But if she thinks Obama is giving KSA Yemen like a new pony ("C'mon, Dad, Iran got one, am I adopted or something?"), then she's certainly misreading the situation.

Note on Yemen

Photo by NAIYF RAHMA/REUTERS via Al Jazeera.

That was weird yesterday. NPR was telling me about how Saudi Arabia had finished its operations in Yemen on the radio, while the Times was claiming online that they'd already started bombing again. Both, as it eventually turned out, were true: KSA continues to insist it has won:

Note on Yemen

Updated 3/28/2015

The Main Bazaar in Old Aden, 1930s. Wikimedia Commons.

Iran Daily did a remarkably good Shorter for their dek text, though it's hard to see how they could have been doing it on purpose:

US Republican Senator John McCain has applauded the offensive launched by Saudi Arabia and its allies against Yemen, speculating that the “conflict will probably escalate” into a regional war in the Middle East.

C'mon folks, let's put your hands together and give it up for regional war! One can only hope, huh, Uncle John?

Not that he can't find something to have a sad over:

The Eeyore Caucus

[Update: Revised toward the end for clarity 2/1/2015.]

Via StopMeBeforeIVoteAgain.

Vivid piece by Jeff Stein at Newsweek about the Israeli-style assassination of the Hezbollah terror architect Imad Mugniyah in Damascus in February 2008, which turns out not to have been Israeli at all but our own CIA.

Mugniyah was apparently a very dangerous and bad man, too, the alleged planner of the 1983 bombings of the US barracks and embassy in Beirut and many other bombings, murders, and kidnapings, including the bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994. On the other hand, his involvement in these things has never been proven, and it's not clear that he was up to anything at the time of the killing other than visiting one of his wives, and the assassination looks very much like one of those bad things of which Obama is always being accused, an extrajudicial execution without trial.

But a curious detail of the story, noted by Laura Rozen, is that Bush's DCI, Michael Hayden, was worried himself that the strike might be illegal:

The curious case of the penitent president. II

Obama's other little signal to the beleaguered but believing left came in an earlier, and more famous Times article, this one by Scott Shane and Jo Becker, portraying the president as he agonizes over his "nominations" to the Kill List of people to be drone-bombed in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

Because he doesn't just kill people, we learned*; he has a very thorough and responsible procedure for making sure he only kills the right people. It's not quite due process the way we studied it in middle school, where they never mentioned this extrajudicial type of due process, but it's extremely due, so to speak. He studies their portraits and biographies, flanked by

"I'll be judge, I'll be jury," said cunning old Fury...

his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the “just war” theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict. [jump]

 *It's the CIA in Pakistan that does that, not to mention going after those who try to rescue the victims, or march in their funerals. Whatever you say about the president, he clearly does a better job in his three countries than they do in their one.

A little intelligence

As we know, President Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, has backed down a little from his claim a year ago that there had been no civilian deaths in drone strikes since 2010:

Brennan was asked about his claim last June that for almost a year “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”

On Sunday, he appeared to qualify his statement. "Well, what I said was that over a period of time before my public remarks that we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant, being killed," he said. (Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2012)

Now we've learned from the New York Times how they manage to avoid the information: [jump]

Water-ordeal. From Wikipedia.