Month: January 2020

Loose lips move markets

I’m sure none of the random people Trump told, much less his cronies and families, would have used this valuable inside information illegally, right?

In the five days prior to launching a strike that killed Iran’s most important military leader, Donald Trump roamed the halls of Mar-a-Lago, his private resort in Florida, and started dropping hints to close associates and club-goers that something huge was coming. 

According to three people who’ve been at the president’s Palm Beach club over the past several days, Trump began telling friends and allies hanging at his perennial vacation getaway that he was working on a “big” response to the Iranian regime that they would be hearing or reading about very “soon.” His comments went beyond the New Year’s Eve tweet he sent out warning of the “big price” Iran would pay for damage to U.S. facilities. Two of these sources tell The Daily Beast that the president specifically mentioned he’d been in close contact with his top national security and military advisers on gaming out options for an aggressive action that could quickly materialize.
“He kept saying, ‘You’ll see,’” one of the sources recalled, describing a conversation with Trump days before Thursday’s strike.

There’s no way to prove that anyone used this information but observers note that oil and military stocks made some unusual gains before the strike took place on Thursday. Maybe they just saw the writing on the wall.But maybe not. The braggart Donald Trump can’t keep his mouth shut so it’s almost certain he told some people who were in a position to take advantage of the news.

Eric Trump put out this tweet on New Years eve and it was quickly deleted. In context it appeared he was talking about the deployment of troops that was announced in the wake of the embassy protests, and Snopes declared it to be false that he was talking about the impending assassination. But now you have to wonder. Trump was running his mouth to a lot of people. It’s entirely possible that Eric WAS talking about the Suleimani attack. The fact tht he deleted it quickly suggests it was.

Check out who else he was hanging with while making this decision:

“I would describe the President’s mood as very focused,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, a top Republican ally who spent Thursday evening with Trump, during an interview on Fox News. “I think he was really dialed into the ways in which Soleimani was planning to kill Americans, to harm our diplomats and to throw the entire region into civil war.”

Only the best people.

Why did he do it  Part II. Please. It’s obvious.

The twitter thread by Rukmini Callimachi that Tom highlights below is worth laying out for posterity:

I’ve had a chance to check in with sources, including two US officials who had intelligence briefings after the strike on Suleimani. Here is what I’ve learned. According to them, the evidence suggesting there was to be an imminent attack on American targets is “razor thin”.

In fact the evidence pointing to that came as three discrete facts: a) A pattern of travel showing Suleimani was in Syria, Lebanon & Iraq to meet with Shia proxies known to have an offensive position to the US. (As one source said that’s just “business as usual” for Suleimani)

More intriguing was b) information indicating Suleimani sought the Supreme Leader’s approval for an operation. He was told to come to Tehran for consultation and further guidance, suggesting the operation was a big deal – but again this could be anything.

And finally, a) and b) were read in the context of c) Iran’s increasingly bellicose position towards American interests in Iraq, including the attack that killed a U.S. contractor and the recent protest outside the American embassy.

But as one source put it a) + b) + c) is hardly evidence of an imminent attack on American interests that could kill hundreds, as the White House has since claimed. The official describes the reading of the intelligence as an illogical leap.

One official described the planning for the strike as chaotic. The official says that following the attack on an Iraqi base which killed an American contractor circa Dec. 27, Trump was presented a menu of options for how to retaliate. Killing Suleimani was the “far out option”

Trump chose a more moderate option which involved the Dec. 29 strikes on the positions of an Iranian-backed militia. Then came the protest at the gates of the US embassy in Baghdad:

It was after the embassy protests that the president, according to one US official, chose the Suleimani option, but the problem at that point in time is that American intelligence did not know his precise whereabouts. They scrambled to locate him, says the official.

According to the official, the strike on Suleimani was pulled together so quickly that initially the US was not sure PMF leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was in the convoy. He was also killed and is also viewed as an Iranian proxy

Since the strike, Iran has convened its national security chiefs. Chatter intercepted by American intelligence indicates they’re considering a range of options. Cyberattacks, attacks on oil facilities and American personnel and diplomatic outposts have all been cited so far.

But among the “menu options” that I had not heard before were: (1) kidnapping and execution of American citizens. (This might explain why the State Department has ordered the evacuation of all US citizens in Iraq, not just government and embassy employees).

Another is attacks on American diplomatic and military outposts not just in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, but as far afield as UAE and Bahrain. The official I spoke to was particularly concerned for American troops stationed in Iraq, some of whom are co-located with Shia militias

How does this impact the war against ISIS? I turned to
@Mikeknightsiraq for insight. He’s studied Iraq since the 1990s. What he told me is that months before the strike that killed Suleimani, the tensions with Iran had already degraded America’s ability to fight ISIS in Iraq:

In 2019, America has been denied airspace and access to operations in Iraq to go after ISIS at the behest of Iran-backed groups. The US has also been told to stop communicating with Sunni tribes. These are important setbacks that have already weakened the US’ posture in Iraq

“It’s all been downhill,” @Mikeknightsiraq told me, in terms of America’s access to the ISIS battlespace in recent months due to Iranian pressure on Iraqi officials. One upshot? US special operations forces have been on the offensive in Diyala, Nineveh and Kirkuk provinces

A likely outcome of the recent strike is that small, out-of-the-way outposts for special operations forces will be deemed too vulnerable and will be eliminated. Fighting ISIS is no longer the priority if the outer wall of the US embassy is being attacked.

Before I go back to the pool let me just say the obvious: No one’s trying to downplay Suleimani’s crimes. The question is why now? His whereabouts have been known before. His resume of killing-by-proxy is not a secret. Hard to decouple his killing from the impeachment saga.

I’ll just add a tweet of my own to that last comment:

So people are buying that it’s a coincidence Trump decided to kill Suleimani when he’s being impeached? Seriously?

Even he admits the guy could have been taken out for years.

But he decided to do it now.

In the middle of his impeachment. #wagthedogneverfails

— digby (@digby56) January 4, 2020

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Pod people
by Tom Sullivan

Still image from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

“Starve a cold, feed a cold?” says the bleary cold sufferer misremembering the old adage.

Our acting president’s explanation for his assassination-by-drone of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani brought back dialogue from an old TV commercial.

“We took action last night to stop a war, we did not take action to start a war,” Donald Trump told reporters on Friday.

Stop a war, feed a war?

It doesn’t make sense. In the Trump administration, nothing has to make sense. Spokesmen at the State Department were not in a mood to even try.

“Officials gave differing and incomplete accounts of the intelligence they said prompted Trump to act,” reports the Washington Post. (I first read that as “dithering.”)

“Soleimani was planning imminent attacks against American diplomats and our armed forces members in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and in the region,” State Department officials said in a press briefing.

But we went down this road in 2003, a reporter observed, asking administration officials to show their work. What evidence did they have for that statement? Officials simply got argumentative:

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: No, no. I’m saying there’s been so many presidential terms —

QUESTION: Well —

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: — in between then and now. It’s just – it’s a failed analogy.

QUESTION: I’m not asking you the analogy. It’s – the question is —

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: You just made the analogy.

QUESTION: — the administration – the administration then said “believe us,” so why should we now believe you when you say “believe us”? What was this intelligence? Can you be a bit more specific?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: You’re saying because another administration made one claim, why should we believe in a different administration this claim? It just – it doesn’t make any sense. It’s entirely separate.

QUESTION: Let’s limit it to this —

MODERATOR: Ah, ah, ah, that’s not what we’re doing today. Matt, you can finish.

But won’t the Iranians retaliate? a reporter asked. Iranians had already escalated by attacking our embassy, the official replied, saying, “And so this was a – this was a defensive action, but it is also to de-escalate, because Qasem Soleimani was escalating.”

QUESTION: So you do expect them to retaliate or not?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: When I hear these questions it’s like you’re describing Belgium for the last 40 years. It’s the Iranian regime. We’ve got 40 years of acts of war that this regime has committed against countries in five continents.

QUESTION: So you expect additional acts of war on their part?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: No, I don’t.

QUESTION: Well, why don’t you?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: I’m just saying that weakness invites more aggression. Timidity will invite more aggression.

QUESTION: Why don’t you? Why do you think they will be deterred? When you said, “I don’t,” why don’t you expect retaliation?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: Because we’re speaking in a language the regime understands.

“This entire transcript is a nightmare,” tweeted Adam Mount, Director of the Defense Posture Project of the Federation of American Scientists. “Deluded soundbites substitute for reason and rationality, antagonism for transparency. There is no indication here these officials have thought seriously about the potential consequences of the action.”

Theirs is not to reason why. Or to reason at all.

Elsewhere, the Trump cult gathered to anoint him with the laying on of hands and evangelical vibrato.

Yikes. Major cult energy at Trump’s evangelical event in Miami. pic.twitter.com/dH2SQGiEX6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 3, 2020

Lou Dobbs of the Fox Business channel slathered on the praise even thicker.

Lou Dobbs says Trump has already set a standard “for presidents that most mortals won’t be able to meet,” saying he “out-works them, he out-thinks, he is remarkably resourceful, he’s bright, his judgment is second to none” pic.twitter.com/Mi2iJbLnS4

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) January 4, 2020

This is all pretty disorienting. It’s not as if these people weren’t already acting like beings from another planet. It’s just that, as in “Body Snatchers,” it seems increasingly difficult to know if the person in front of you went to sleep next to a pod.

That’s only apparent, of course. The result of too much time on Twitter and cable news. The truth is the cult’s size is self-limited. Trump’s base has held steady for years. But even as he works to shore up their support, there are signs he’s losing ground there. Watch that (outer) space.

Update: A fresh thread on possible Soleimani fallout from the NYT’s Rukmini Callimachi.

Last week, on a frigid night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, bus driver Jamie Grabowski was driving back to the station at the end of her shift when something on the roadside caught her eye. 

There, shivering and unattended, were two lost, frightened dogs in the freezing cold.

Grabowski knew she had to stop.

“It turns out that the dogs had somehow gotten out of their family’s yard two-and-a-half miles away from where Jamie found them,” transit officials wrote. “Jamie, an avid animal lover who jokes that she’s a ‘dog whisperer,’ said she is happy she was in the right place at the right time to help the two ‘very good boys.'” 

Thanks to her, the dogs were safely returned to their family — just in time for Christmas.

🙂

Why did Trump do it? Part I.

There is no mystery. No mystery at all. He telegraphed his thinking long ago:

Trump on Nov. 16, 2011:

“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective. So the only way he figures that he’s going to get reelected — and as sure as you’re sitting there — is to start a war with Iran.” pic.twitter.com/usZFLiHnBw

— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) January 3, 2020

And now for something completely crazy

Last year, right-wing “journalist” and Trump–worshiping conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin publicly declared that if the mass arrests long promised by those promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory didn’t materialize by the end of 2019, she was going to “bow out” of the movement.

“I’m sick of talking about it,” Crokin said last January. “It’s so depressing and I’m just over it. I’m going to have to move on because it’s just taken such a big toll on me and my health that I don’t think I can stay in this fight if it continues to drag on for years and years and if these mass arrests don’t happen this year.”

Oh yeah, she’s still at it:

She posted a video on New Year’s Eve in which she predicted that actor Tom Hanks will soon be among the first of the high-profile figures arrested for his supposed involvement in satanic pedophilia.

That’s right. Tom Hanks:

<iframe title=”vimeo-player” src=”https://player.vimeo.com/video/382426030″ width=”640″ height=”360″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Crokin went on to predict that Hanks “would be the first big name unsealed indictment” because the person behind the Q account has frequently used the word “big” in its posts and Big is the name of one of Hanks’ most successful films.

“Tom Hanks was in a movie—Big—and, of course, the movie is based off of basically pedophilia because he’s a little kid in a grown man’s body that ends up having a sexual relationship with a grown woman,” Crokin said. “So a lot of anons are theorizing that he could be the first big name unsealed indictment. I think it’s a really good theory.”

This is the QAnon mentality, the people who believe that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile sex ring out of a pizza parlor in DC. (They are obsessed with pedophilia.) There are thousands of them all over the country.  And they are all certifiably nuts.

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Get ready for more pardons of war criminals

According to the Daily Beast, Trump is yearning to let some more monsters out on the streets. One of his aides explained that “there are more warriors out there who he believes have been treated unfairly and whose [cases] need another look.” Not all of them are military war criminals.

The Daily Beast has learned that Trump is still quietly weighing pardoning at least one employee of the private army Blackwater, Nicholas Slatten. Convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, Slatten, a former U.S. Army sniper, took part in the contractor’s infamous 2007 massacre at the Nisour Square traffic circle in Baghdad. Blackwater was founded by Trump ally Erik Prince, who has insisted for over a decade that the company was railroaded after Nisour Square by an American left gone insane.

Pardoning that monster who was convicted of participating in the murder of 10 men, two women and two boys who were unarmed and simply going to work. It’s one of the most famous cases of murdering civilians in cold blood during the Iraq war.

Gary Solis, a retired Marine judge advocate, ex-West Point law professor and Vietnam combat veteran, said there “can be no good reason, legal or humanitarian, for exercising clemency in a case like Nisour Square and those who were involved in it.” Solis said Trump “knows nothing about these individuals, or what goes on on the battlefield. We’re talking about a multiple 4F-er,” referencing Trump’s Vietnam draft deferments, “and yet he wants to play the general and the Fox News hero.”

He got that right.  It may be that the impending middle east war will compel Trump to put these pardons of war criminals on the back burner for now. On the other hand, he may just be so stimulated by the power that he does it anyway.  I don’t think anyone can say it would surprise them if he did.

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Hannity and Manafort, sittin’ in a tree

Buzzfeed received the latest batch of documents from the Mueller Investigation and while I haven’t had a chance to go through them thoroughly, I did find this little tid-bit to be quite interesting. Paul Manafort told investigators that Fox News host Sean Hannity sent backchannel messages from President Donald Trump while he was under federal investigation. Oopsie:

Among the several hundred pages of memos published by BuzzFeed News on Thursday, which contain summaries of FBI interviews with key Trump administration and campaign officials, the Fox News anchor’s alleged role as an unofficial messenger between the president and his former campaign chairman comes into sharp focus. 

According to the release, Manafort did not speak to Trump or anyone closely associated with the president or his legal team besides Hannity around the time that The New York Times and other outlets reported on a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner and a lawyer linked to the Kremlin. Manafort described Hannity as a close friend and “certainly a backchannel” to Trump, saying that he understood Hannity was in communication with the president.

It’s pretty obvious that he was right. Hannity was a go-between between the president and his criminal former campaign chairman and he apparently carried messages that sound a lot like pardon dangles. The memos say that “Manafort knew Hannity was speaking to Trump because Hannity would tell Manafort to hang in there, that he had been talking to Trump, that Trump had his back, and things like that.”

We knew that Hannity and Manafort were tight. Last year, a federal judge released dozens of pages of private text messages between them. They were quite the mutual admiration society:

In one instance, Hannity insisted to Manafort that the host was “NOT a fair weather friend,” and declared that they were “all on the same team.” Manafort returned the favor, telling Hannity that “in a fair world, you would get a Pulitzer prize for your incredible reporting.”

What we didn’t know was that Hannity was also sending messages to the prisoner from the president telling him he had his back.

Hannity sure is a player in the Trump sagas, isn’t he? He was Michael Cohen’s other client as well, remember?  He’s deep inside Trumpworld.

What’s he going to do if Trump is defeated?

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Did they goad him with “Real Men Go To Tehran?”

Ever since Trump started running for president I’ve been convinced that the idea he wouldn’t start a war seemed ludicrous. The man’s personality is obvious. If he can be convinced that he will “win” he can’t wait to do it.

A man like him is dying to play with all those expensive military toys and be seen as a Big Tough Leader. It’s just that he’s a bit of a coward and he knows on some level that he’s in over his head. So he’s been reluctant to unleash the beast.

But now, under pressure from the impeachment and the upcoming election he’s acting reckless and a little desperate. He gave the order to assassinate the most revered General in Iran and a popular Shiite militia leader. It will be a miracle if this doesn’t escalate in the worst way imaginable.

I wrote about the “Trump Doctrine” (such as it is) many times over the past few years. Back in 2018, when Trump backed out of the Iran deal I wrote this piece, worrying that we were entering a new and even more unstable era in the region.
And last May when the New York Times reported that he had been presented with plans to send 120,000 troops there if necessary I grew even more concerned. After the aborted attack last June I wrote this:

Trump’s credibility is nonexistent around the globe so nobody believes him no matter what he says. Russia, North Korea, China and Iran are all starting to circle, flex their muscles and poke at the beast to see what it will do. And here we are.

Jacob Heilbrun, writing in the Spectator USA, points out that Trump really doesn’t want war with Iran but observes that he’s unknowingly assembled a war Cabinet:

If Trump stumbled into war, he would resemble Kaiser Wilhelm during World War I, who backed Austria, only to be sidelined by his generals once the conflict began. Trump would be utterly at sea in trying to preside over a war in the Persian Gulf that could easily spiral out of control. If Trump can’t even appoint a permanent defense secretary, why would anyone imagine he has the competence to conduct a war against Tehran?

It’s very unclear if his war hawks are any more competent than he is. Heilbrun notes that Pompeo has even been advancing “loopy theories, reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration’s folderol on the eve of the second Gulf War, that the Iranians are in cahoots with al-Qaeda.”


In response to that fatuous argument, which was clearly designed to make the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force against al-Qaida apply to these planned military strikes, the House voted to end the AUMF. (That legislation will die in the Senate, of course.) But Pompeo should have checked with the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, Attorney General William Barr, who would have told him there’s never any need for congressional authorization for military action. That’s what he told President George H.W. Bush when he was contemplating launching the first Gulf War. (In Bush’s defense, he didn’t buy it, asked the Congress and the UN for a vote and pulled together a global coalition.)


As many of you no doubt remember, back during the crazed days after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, these arguments were flying all over the place. George W. Bush got a vote in Congress with no problem but couldn’t get global buy-in because his rationale for invading Iraq was nonsensical and everyone knew it. It was well known that certain hard-right war hawks were hoping that it would be just the first step. As Paul Krugman noted at the time:

It’s a matter of public record that this war with Iraq is largely the brainchild of a group of neoconservative intellectuals, who view it as a pilot project. In August a British official close to the Bush team told Newsweek: ”Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” In February 2003, according to Ha’aretz, an Israeli newspaper, Under Secretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq the United States would ”deal with” Iran, Syria and North Korea.

Remember, allegedly reluctant warrior Donald Trump is the one who hired that guy to be his national security adviser. He also hired Pompeo. And he is almost certainly listening to his good buddy, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who’s been advising him that he needs to get “points on the board,” meaning he must use military force somewhere in order to be taken seriously. (Graham was pushing for a Venezuela invasion, but Trump has lost interest in that one, so Iran will have to do.)


I suspect that argument carries some weight. But Trump really only cares about one thing: re-election. If they want to convince him to let the bombs fly to prove he’s got brass, his hawks are going to have to convince him that his base will love it. They will, of course. They are America’s most fervent supporters of military action and if Trump does it they’ll love him all the more.


Shh. Don’t anybody tell him about Republican voters’ love of war. His ignorance of that fact is the only thing keeping the peace.

It looks like someone told him. And they are reacting exactly as we knew they would.

I don’t know what comes next. But I’m pretty sure that the White House is even more clueless. Everything may end up staying status quo for the time being but Americans are going to be in much more danger in the middle east and around the world because of this even if we avoid all-out war.

Trump just radicalized a whole bunch of new would be terrorists for what it likely to be very little return if any at all. Terrorism is cheap and it has a life of its own.

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Bill Barr, crusader