Millions Face Starvation In Yemen Due To US-Ally Saudi Arabia"s Blockade

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Two years ago, German intelligence warned the world of the unique risks Saudi Arabia posed to the region.

I covered it at the time in the post, German Intelligence Warns – Saudi Arabia to Play “Destabilizing Role” in the Middle East. Here’s an excerpt:

Saudi Arabia is at risk of becoming a major destabilizing influence in the Arab world, German intelligence has warned.

 

Internal power struggles and the desire to emerge as the leading Arab power threaten to make the key Western ally a source of instability, according to the BND intelligence service.

 

“The current cautious diplomatic stance of senior members of the Saudi royal family will be replaced by an impulsive intervention policy,” a BND memo widely distributed to the German press reads.

 

Saudi Arabia has previously been accused of supplying arms and funding to jihadist groups fighting in Syria, including Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

At the core of this intelligence warning was none other than crown prince Mohamed bin Salman, or MBS.

I’ve been warning about the specific dangers presented by his brazen and sociopathic personality for years, and the recent purge finally threw it all into the spotlight for everyone to see.

MBS has already wreaked havoc on portions of the region with his reckless and failed polices with respect to both Yemen and Qatar. Today’s post will focus on the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Yemen, courtesy of the Saudi crown prince.

The New York Times reported last week:

Saudi Arabia’s three-day-old blockade of entry points to Yemen threatens to plunge that war-ravaged country into a famine that could starve millions of people, the top relief official of the United Nations said Wednesday.

 

The Yemen crisis has worsened since the Saudis imposed the blockade on Monday after a missile was fired deep into their territory by the Iran-backed Houthi rebel group, which has been warring with a Saudi-led military coalition for nearly three years.

 

Despite Saudi Arabia’s assurances that the measure was temporary while it reviews inspection procedures, virtually all humanitarian deliveries to Yemen have been halted, including at least three United Nations airplanes full of emergency supplies.

 

Mr. Lowcock said the Saudis must immediately allow the entry of food and medicine at all seaports, permit the immediate resumption of air services to the cities of Sana and Aden, and provide an “assurance of no further disruption to these services.”

 

Without such steps, he said, Yemen will suffer “the largest famine the world has seen for many decades, with millions of victims.”

 

The World Food Program, the anti-hunger agency of the United Nations, which has been feeding seven million people a month in Yemen, is now unable to do so, Mr. Lowcock said. “What we need is a winding down of the blockade to save the lives of those people.”

 

The country is struggling with an acute hunger crisis that has affected at least 17 million people, more than a third of them considered close to famine. Yemen also suffering a cholera scourge that has sickened nearly one million.

 

“Humanitarian supply lines to Yemen must remain open,” said Robert Mardini, the Red Cross’s regional director for the Near and Middle East. “Food, medicine and other essential supplies are critical for the survival of 27 million Yemenis already weakened by a conflict now in its third year.”

Since then, the Saudis have opened the port of Aden and a crossing at Wadea, but this is woefully inadequate.

As Al Jazeera notes:

On Friday, the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian aid, OCHA, said the coalition was still blocking desperately needed UN aid deliveries to Yemen, despite the reopening of Aden and Wadea.

 

“Humanitarian movements into Yemen remain blocked,” said OCHA spokesman Russell Geekie.

 

“The reopening of the port in Aden is not enough. We need to see the blockade of all the ports lifted, especially Hodeida, for both humanitarian and for commercial imports.”

 

UN aid chief Mark Lowcock told the Security Council this week that unless the blockade is lifted, Yemen will face “the largest famine the world has seen for many decades, with millions of victims”.

 

Stylianides echoed Lowcock’s concerns.

 

Yemen “is suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with more than two-thirds of its population in need of humanitarian assistance”, he said in a statement.

 

“The EU shares the concerns expressed by… Lowcock and calls for full and unrestrained access to be restored immediately, to avoid Yemen suffering the largest famine in decades,” Stylianides said.

What we’re looking at here is potentially the worst famine in decades, and it’s important for decent U.S. citizens from across the political spectrum to admit our government’s hands are soaked in blood.

As The Intercept reported:

Saudi Arabia relies heavily on the U.S. military for intelligence sharing, refueling flights for coalition warplanes, and the transfer of American-made cluster bombs, rockets, and other munitions used against targets in Yemen.

 

Congress, however, has never authorized U.S. support for the war, which has caused 10,000 civilian deaths and has spiraled in recent months into one of the worst humanitarian crises of the century. For two years, Saudi Arabia and its allies have imposed a sea and air blockade around Yemen. Now, more than 7 million Yemenis face starvation and thousands, mostly children, are dying from cholera. Coalition warplanes have repeatedly struck crowded markets, hospitals, power plants, and other civilian targets.

 

Several members of Congress indicated an interest in the issue, noting that the Obama and Trump administrations’ reliance on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force to justify U.S. involvement in the conflict is absurd. That authorization, after all, was designed to fight the terrorist groups responsible for the September 11 attacks, not to intervene in Yemen’s civil war.

 

For 16 years, the executive branch has pointed to the AUMF as legal justification for its involvement in conflicts across the Middle East and Africa, a strategy that is legally questionable. But the use of the AUMF in the Yemeni context is especially bizarre given that the AUMF’s target is Al Qaeda, and the group AQAP — Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula –is fighting alongside the U.S.-Saudi coalition against the Houthi rebels.

 

One bipartisan legislative attempt to force a vote on authorization for the war, H.Con.Res.81, faced a major setback last week after appearing to gain political momentum. On November 1, lawmakers stripped the bill of its privileged status, meaning the bill no longer maintains a fast-track to a floor vote. The legislation was designed to invoke the War Powers Act of 1973 to terminate U.S. involvement in the Yemen War.

 

Because the bill is no longer privileged, it will head back to the the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which is led by Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., a lawmaker who has expressed deep support for the Saudi-led military campaign. Few expect the legislation to move forward now that it is back in Royce’s domain. In April, the representative read a statement of support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen and entered into the congressional record an opinion column written by a Saudi general.

 

The move to crush H.Con.Res.81 was apparently negotiated by Democratic and Republican leadership. As part of a compromise, there will be some congressional debate over the war, though no on-the-record vote for authorization. As The Intercept previously reported, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the Democratic whip, was among the Democratic leaders opposed to invoking the War Powers Act to bring U.S. involvement in the war to an end.

 

Still, sponsors of the legislation are hoping to force a debate and an on-the-record vote over the war.

 

“Our national security interests in Yemen are unclear, yet we are giving money and military assistance to Saudi Arabia so they can continue to wage war in Yemen,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., one of 43 co-sponsors. “This military action was never authorized by Congress and the American people deserve an open debate by their elected officials.”

 

Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., also a co-sponsor of the resolution, expressed frustration that House Speaker Paul Ryan has refused to allow a vote on the war and disappointment that the compromise solution negotiated by congressional leadership will not include a binding vote.

 

“This is part of my frustration about the fact Congress does not meet its constitutional responsibility when sending young men and women to die for this country, and we have a constitutional duty that we must debate war,” Jones said. “The vote to go to war in Yemen, we can’t even get a vote on this resolution. To me this is the way Congress does not work. We don’t work because we do not uphold the constitution.”

Meanwhile, many of the cretins in Congress can’t be bothered to answer questions about Yemen.

Unconstitutional war that could create the worst famine in decades? Meh, I’m too busy trying to figure out how to provide tax breaks to oligarchs.

After all, who cares, there’s just too much money to be made from war.

From The Washington Post:

BERLIN — As U.N. and international humanitarian agencies raise the alarm over the Saudi blockade of aid deliveries to Yemen, European and American officials have remained mostly silent. The few remarks coming out of Western capitals in recent weeks have hardly been messages of support for the Yemenis in the midst of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis — in fact, quite the opposite.

 

Two weeks ago, Britain’s then-Defense Minister Michael Fallon offered a blunt assessment of the government’s view on the controversy. “I have to repeat, sadly, to this committee that obviously other criticism of Saudi Arabia in this Parliament is not helpful,” Fallon told the parliamentary defense committee, to which he defended the planned sale of several fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. (Fallon has since resigned over sexual harassment allegations.)

 

In response to a missile attack from Yemeni territory targeting Saudi Arabia — which triggered the most recent escalation of the crisis — President Trump similarly ignored the plight of civilians in the war-torn country and instead went on to praise U.S. weapons sold to Saudi Arabia.

 

Both the United States and Britain have been making more money with arms sales to Saudi Arabia in recent years than ever before. Human rights critics fear that Saudi Arabia has not only bought their weapons but their acceptance for its policies.

 

 

Of course Saudi Arabia’s attractiveness to Western countries is not just about arms sales. On Thursday, Downing Street said it would provide Saudi energy giant Aramco with credit guarantees of $2 billion to facilitate trade between the two countries. Britain and the United States are both trying to persuade Aramco to hold its much anticipated IPO (valued at hundreds of billions of dollars) on the London and New York stock exchanges, with President Trump tweeting that such move would be “Important to the United States!”

 

In the United States, the Obama administration similarly suspended the sale of precision guided munitions to Riyadh last year. However, the Trump administration is believed to be working on the resumption of such sales. A separate major U.S. arms export deal to the kingdom was struck in May, and Trump has voiced increasingly strong support for the Saudi leadership ever since. Similarly, Germany is still exporting military equipment to the kingdom, although it now appears to be refraining from direct arms deliveries.

If that’s not MAGA, then I don’t know what is.

If E.U. politicians were determined to implement an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia, parliamentarians would have to persuade the governments of all member states to agree to such a ban. With more than a dozen nations profiting from arms and military equipment exports to the kingdom, the chances of such an embargo being implemented anytime soon are virtually nonexistent.

 

Attempts by nongovernmental organizations to force governments into committing to an embargo enforced by courts have so far also been blocked. Campaigners suffered a major defeat this summer, when London’s high court ruled that Britain was not complicit in alleged war crimes in Yemen by allowing the Saudi military to use its arms.

 

The court refused to say how it came to its conclusion, however, and barred the public from accessing the key evidence.

It always makes sense when you follow the money.

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"Not The Russians" - British MPs Blame Iran For "Brute Force" Hack

Yet another purported example of Russia-linked hackers infiltrating the email accounts of powerful government officials    has been conclusively debunked.

The Guardian is reporting that a June incident where the accounts of dozens of UK ministers of parliament were infiltrated by shadowy hackers has been traced back to Iran. The UK intelligence community’s initial conclusion – that the attacks originated in Russia – has been refuted by an as-yet-unpublished report on the incident compiled by British intelligence.

Indeed, the intelligence community’s initial assumption appears to be another example of investigators jumping to a conclusion before a thorough analysis of the evidence has been completed. In a way, it echoes the response by several US states last month to the revelation that hackers had attempted to compromise their voting systems. Some states, including California and Wisconsin, apparently assumed the attacks were linked to Russia, until DHS informed them that it had found no evidence to support this conclusion.

The June 23 cyberattack affected the accounts of dozens of MPs, including Prime Minister Theresa May and several senior other senior ministers. The network that was compromised is used by every MP for interactions with constituents, the Guardian reported.

Initially, UK intelligence determined that hackers had attempted to gain access to accounts protected by weak passwords – despite repeated warnings to choose strong, hard-to-crack passwords.

An anonymous “security source” cited by the Guardian said the hackers used unsophisticated “brute force” attacks where the hackers use specifically designed programs to test out hundreds of thousands of different passwords combinations. “It was a brute-force attack. It appears to have been state-sponsored. The nature of cyber-attacks means it is notoriously difficult to attribute an incident to a specific actor.”

Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen added that the attack “absolutely” could leave some people open to blackmail. “Constituents want to know the information they send to us is completely secure,” he said.

Initially, suspicion had fallen upon foreign governments such as Russia and North Korea, both of which have been accused of orchestrating previous hacking attempts in the UK.

Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, said the incident reinforced the notion that MPs need to take extra precaution when securing their data.

“We know that our public services are attacked, so it is not at all surprising that there should be an attempt to hack into parliamentary emails,” he said. “And it’s a warning to everybody, whether they are in parliament or elsewhere, that they need to do everything possible to maintain their own cybersecurity.”

Given the furor that erupted after DHS ordered US government agencies to immediately remove security software designed by Russia-based firm Kaspersky Labs, the revelation about Iran’s involvement in the UK hacks should give intelligence agencies – not to mention lawmakers who seemingly blame Russia for every incidence of cyber meddling uncovered by US intelligence – pause. After the WSJ reported that Kaspersky’s software was essentially being leveraged by the Russian government to create an international spy network, German intelligence announced that they had found no evidence to support this claim.

And while many have blamed Russia-linked hackers for last year’s hack of DNC emails, including emails sent by Hillary Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange is reportedly offering President Donald Trump conclusive evidence that he says would debunk this claim.

However, Chief of Staff John Kelly has rebutted one Congressman’s attempts to bring the deal to President Trump. But as the multiple investigations into whether Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to sway the election in the president’s favor have apparently hit a wall, Assange’s evidence might be the key to silencing these suspicions, which have cast an unsubstantiated pall of illegitimacy over Trump’s first term in office.
 

'New York Times'-Praised-"Pacifist" Imam Arrested On Terror Charges

Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

• Several months after the New York Times published its hagiography of Shashaa, he was arrested for physically assaulting his third wife, who was hospitalized with a broken nose and shoulder. "The attack was obviously very brutal," a hospital spokesperson said at the time. "What a man does with his wife does not concern the authorities," Shashaa said.


• Spanish High Court Judge Eloy Velasco ordered Shashaa — who lives in a 10,000 square meter (108,000 square foot) mansion in Teulada-Moraira, a small coastal town on Spain"s Mediterranean coast, with his four wives and 18 children — to be held in prison without bail.


• Spanish authorities are now investigating the source of Shashaa"s wealth. His mosque in Munich was shuttered in October 2015 due to financial difficulties, while the mansion he purchased in Spain in February 2015 is said to be worth more than half a million euros.


• More than two weeks after Shashaa was arrested, the New York Times still has not reported on the fate of its poster boy for Salafist pacifism.

Spanish authorities have arrested a Muslim cleric - whom the New York Times once praised for his efforts to fight radicalization within Germany"s Islamic community - for alleged ties to the Islamic State.

Hesham Shashaa (aka Abu Adam), a 46-year-old Egyptian-Palestinian, was detained near Alicante in southeastern Spain on April 26 on charges of aiding the Islamic State, extolling terrorism and promoting Salafi-jihadism.

The Spanish Interior Ministry said that Shashaa had facilitated the travel to Spain of Islamic State jihadists from Syria and Iraq by providing them with money, refuge and fake documents.

Most recently, Shashaa had made arrangements for two jihadists — who are the subjects of international arrest warrants for their membership of the Islamic State — to travel from Turkey to Spain by providing them with false passports.

In addition, Shashaa fraudulently tried to obtain for two jihadists letters of invitation with the aim of facilitating their travel from Egypt to Spain.

According to the Spanish Interior Ministry, Shashaa has also been charged with disseminating Islamic State propaganda:

"The detainee took advantage of his privileged position within the Islamic Community of the province of Alicante to spread content extolling attacks committed by the terrorist organization Islamic State and cruelly disparaging their victims. In addition, he used social networks as a tool to generate hate by publishing videos in which terrorist leaders indoctrinate their followers to engage in violent jihad."

Jijona, in Alicante Province, Spain. (Image source: Getty Images)

On April 29, Spanish High Court Judge Eloy Velasco ordered Shashaa — who lives in a 10,000 square meter (108,000 square foot) mansion in Teulada-Moraira, a small coastal town on Spain"s Mediterranean coast, with his four wives and 18 children — to be held in prison without bail. Velasco ruled that Shashaa was a flight risk and that there was a danger he would repeat his criminal behavior (reiteración delictiva).

Shashaa settled in Spain in 2012, shortly after the New York Times published a glowing profile of his moderation while he was an imam at the Darul Quran mosque in Munich, Germany. The story, entitled "Munich Imam Strives to Dilute the Elixir of Radical Islam," stated:

"A growing number of imams in Europe and the Middle East have denounced suicide missions and terrorist acts. Many of these imams, however, still view Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or Hamas as legitimate resistance movements, while Mr. Shashaa openly declares that they are violating the tenets of Islam.

"He travels to mosques and madrasas throughout Europe, as well as the Middle East and Pakistan, telling young Muslims that fighting against American troops and other forces is a violation of their religion. He condemns militant recruiters in his sermons, urges worshipers at Friday Prayer to call the police if they hear about plans for an attack and readily talks with law enforcement officials about the reasons for radicalization and the best way to combat it."

In an interview with the Times, Shashaa portrayed himself as a pacifist:

"They [the militants] use the religion for their personal aims and declare war on Jews and Christians, but I want people to follow what Islam really says. We cannot just sit down and let other people hijack our religion."

The Times also quoted a senior German security official, who said:

"We know that he speaks and works against terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and that is important. He is the only example of someone who is doing it in this way here in Germany, and in this sense he is effective."

Shashaa told the Times that he ended up in Germany after he lost his briefcase there on a 2000 stopover while on his way to Britain from Romania, where he had been living. "Everything was gone, the papers, the money," he said. "So I thought it was God"s will that I should stay here."

Several months after the New York Times published its hagiography of Shashaa, he was arrested for physically assaulting his third wife, who was hospitalized with a broken nose and shoulder. "The attack was obviously very brutal," a hospital spokesperson said at the time.

The woman, a Syrian, told police that she had wanted to live a more Western lifestyle; she wanted to find a job and stop wearing the hijab. Shashaa refused. After the woman called police, Shashaa refused to let them in. "What a man does with his wife does not concern the authorities," he said. Shashaa was arrested and then released.

During a raid on Shashaa"s mosque in Munich, police found copies of a book — Women in the Shade of Islam — which has been banned in Germany because of its calls for violence against women. Shashaa defended his possession of the book: "I need to know what is in these books. How else will I know how to argue with recruiters?"

Spanish authorities believe Shashaa moved to Spain to evade German law enforcement, which had become increasingly suspicious of his activities. Die Zeit reported:

"In 2012, German intelligence called him a Salafist: He opposed a pluralistic society, repeatedly stated that a woman should not leave the house without her husband"s permission, and during the Gaza War in 2009 preached a sermon that disparaged Jews. He wants a theocracy, which would be inconsistent with the separation of powers, the rule of law and the parliamentary system. He posted several videos with extremist content. According to the 2012 intelligence findings, his claims to have distanced himself from extremism were deemed "questionable.""

Shashaa, who does not speak Spanish, said he moved to Spain to establish a "center for cultural understanding." Through an interpreter, Shashaa told a Spanish newspaper that "spreading culture is the best way to end prejudice and to promote tolerance." He said that his cultural center would operate under the premise of "openness and integration" and that its doors would be "open to the whole world." He added that the walls of the center "must be made of glass so that everyone can see how we are and what is going on in there." Shashaa also insisted that "fundamentalism is a disease we must eradicate."

Spanish authorities are now investigating the source of Shashaa"s wealth. His mosque in Munich was shuttered in October 2015 due to financial difficulties, while the mansion he purchased in Spain in February 2015 is said to be worth more than half a million euros.

Meanwhile, more than two weeks after Shashaa was arrested, the New York Times still has not reported on the fate of its poster boy for Salafist pacifism.

German Intelligence Clears Russia Of Election Interference

Submitted by Ray McGovern via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

After a multi-month, politically charged investigation, German intelligence agencies could find no good evidence of Moscow-directed cyber-attacks or a disinformation campaign aimed at subverting the democratic process in Germany. Undaunted, Chancellor Angela Merkel has commissioned a new investigation.

President Barack Obama talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G7 Summit at Schloss Elmau in Bavaria, Germany, June 8, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Last year, Berlin’s two main intelligence agencies, the BND and BfV (counterparts of the CIA and FBI) launched a joint investigation to substantiate allegations that Russia was meddling in German political affairs and attempting to shape the outcome of Germany’s elections next September.

Like the vast majority of Americans malnourished on “mainstream media,” most Germans have been led to believe that, by hacking and “propaganda,” the Kremlin interfered in the recent U.S. election and helped Donald Trump become president.

German intelligence agencies rarely bite the hand that feeds them and realize that the most bountiful part of the trough is at the CIA station in Berlin with ultimate guidance coming from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But this time, in an unusual departure from past practice, analysts at the BND and BfV decided to act like responsible adults.

Whereas former CIA Director John Brennan prevailed on his analysts to resort to anemic, evidence-light reasoning “assessing” that Russia tried to tip the U.S. election to Donald Trump, Berlin’s intelligence agencies found the evidence lacking and have now completed their investigation.

Better still, the conclusions have been reported in a mainstream German newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, apparently because a patriotic insider thought the German people should also know.

Lemmings No Longer?

If BND President Bruno Kahl thought that his own analysts could be depended upon to follow their American counterparts lemming-like and find evidence – Curveball-style – to support the U.S. allegations, he now has had a rude awakening.

CIA Director John Brennan at a White House meeting during his time as President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser

When the joint investigation was under way with his analysts doing their best to come up with reliable evidence of Russian perfidy, Kahl had behaved like his BND predecessors, parroting the charges made by his CIA counterpart, that the Russians were fomenting uncertainty and instability in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

In a rare interview with the mainstream newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, on Nov. 28, 2016, Kahl went out on what he probably thought was a safe limb, denouncing subversive “interference” by the Russians (“as they did in the U.S.”). He was just a few months into his job and may have been naïve enough to consider what John Brennan said as gospel truth. (If he really is that gullible, Kahl is in the wrong profession.)

In the interview, Kahl played the puppet-doll Charlie McCarthy with Brennan in the role of Charlie’s ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. Kahl told the Sueddeutsche that he agreed with the U.S. intelligence “assessment” that the Kremlin was behind the cyber attacks aimed at influencing the U.S. election.

He added: “We know that cyber attacks are taking place and that they have no purpose other than to produce political instability. … Not only that. The perpetrators are interested in delegitimizing the democratic process itself. … I have the impression that the outcome of the American election has evoked no sadness in Russia so far. …

“Europe is [now] the focus of these disruption experiments, and Germany especially… The pressure on the public discourse and on democracy is unacceptable.” Sound familiar?

Still, one might excuse the novice BND president for assuming his analysts would remember which side their bread is buttered on and follow past precedent in coming up with conclusions known to be desired by their masters in Berlin and the CIA.

So it must have come as an unwelcome surprise to Kahl when he found out that, this time, BND analysts would stand on principle and refuse to be as malleable as their Washington counterparts. His analysts could find no proof that the Kremlin was working hard to undermine the democratic process in Germany, and said so.

Worse still from the U.S. point of view, the two German intelligence agencies resisted the usual pressure from some senior leaders in Berlin (perhaps including Kahl himself) to jam whatever innocuous information they could find into the anti-Russian mosaic that Washington was constructing, a kind of Cubist version of distorted reality.

And So, a Do-Over

So, what do powerful officials do when the bureaucracy comes up with “incorrect” conclusions? They send the analysts and investigators back to work until they come up with “correct” answers. This turned out to be no exception. Absent evidence of hacking directed by the Kremlin, the Germans now have opted for an approach by which information can be fudged more easily.

CIA seal in lobby of the spy agency’s headquarters. (U.S. government photo)

According to the Sueddeutsche, “Chancellor Merkel’s office has now ordered a new inquiry. Notably, a ‘psychological operations group’ jointly run by the BND and BfV will specifically look at Russian news agencies’ coverage in Germany.” We can expect that any articles that don’t portray Vladimir Putin in a devil’s costume will be judged “Russian propaganda.”

For guidance, Merkel may well give the new “investigators” a copy of the evidence-free CIA/FBI/NSA “Assessment: Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.” Released on Jan. 6, the report was an eyesore and embarrassment to serious intelligence professionals. The lame “evidence” presented, together with all the “assessing” indulged in by U.S. analysts, was unable to fill five pages; filler was needed – preferably filler that could be made to look like analysis.

And so, seven more pages were tacked onto the CIA/FBI/NSA Assessment, even though the information presented in them had nothing to do with the cause celebre of Russian hacking. No problem: The additional seven pages bore the ominous title: “Annex A: Russia – Kremlin’s TV Seeks To Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in US.”

The extra pages, in turn, were then used to support the following indictment: “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences.”

Did an Insider Leak?

It is not clear how the German daily Sueddeutsche acquired the conclusions of the joint investigation or even whether it has the full 50-page copy of the final report. The newspaper did make it clear, though, that it now realizes it was played by Kahl with his unsupported accusations last November.

Russian President Vladimir Putin answering questions from Russian citizens at his annual Q&A event on April 14, 2016. (Russian government photo)

From what the newspaper was told, the analysts seemed willing to give the boss what he had already declared to be his desired conclusion, but the evidence simply wasn’t there. The article quotes one security expert saying, “We would have been happy to give Russia a yellow card,” a soccer metaphor referring to improper conduct. A cabinet source lamented, “We found no smoking gun.”

Initially, the BND and BfV planned to release excerpts of their still classified inquiry, the Sueddeutsche reported, but it’s now not clear when, if ever, the full report will be released.

The day after the Sueddeutsche story appeared, some other media outlets reported on it – briefly. Newsweek and Politico gave the scoop all of three sentences each. Not fitting with the preferred “Russia-is-guilty-of-everything” narrative, it then died a quick death. I have been unable to find the story mentioned at all in major U.S. “mainstream media” outlets.

If Americans became aware of the story, it was probably via RT – the bête noire of the abovementioned CIA/FBI/NSA report condemning Russian “propaganda.” Can it become any clearer why RT America and RT International are despised by the U.S. government and the “mainstream media?” Many Americans are slowly realizing they cannot count on American network and cable TV for accurate news and are tuning in to RT at least for the other side of these important stories.

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It was from a early morning call from RT International that we first learned of the Feb. 7 Sueddeutsche Zeitung report on Germany’s failed hunt for evidence of Russian electoral interference.

Is Saudi Arabia Funding Extremist Islamist Groups In Germany?

Submitted by Codi Robertson via The Clarion Project,

A newly-leaked German intelligence report states Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar are funding extremist Islamic groups in Germany.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (R) and his Saudi counterpart Adel al-Jubeir give a joint press conferenceat the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.

The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and Northern German public radio broadcaster  Norddeutscher Rundfunk saw the brief and raised concern regarding a reported increase in Salafism, an ultra-conservative movement within Sunni Islam, within Germany.  

The report, compiled by German domestic intelligence agency Bft and Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) allegedly accuses Saudi Arabia and the two Gulf nations of funding various Islamic institutions including mosques and religious schools, as well as individual strict preachers and conversion, or “dawah” groups.

The three countries supported missionary groups as a “long-running strategy to exert influence,” according to the report.  More specifically, the report called out  the Saudi Muslim World League, Sheikh Eid Bin Mohammad al-Thani Charitable Association and the Kuwaiti Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (which is banned in both the U.S. and Russia for allegedly supporting al-Qaeda).  

The report found that these organizations have strong ties to the governments of their home countries.  

Neither of the German intelligence agencies have confirmed the accuracy of the leaked report.  There are some who say that say the leak was made intentionally so that Germany would cease controversial arm sales to Saudi Arabia.  

While Germans await official word from the intelligence agencies, Saudi Arabia’s German ambassador, Awwas Alawwad, completely rejected the report, stating that his country has “no connection with German Salafism.”  

Weeks before the leak, German authorities  banned the Islamic missionary group Germany Die Wahre Religion (DWR), or “The True Religion,” after officials found was “bringing jihadi Islamists together across the country under the pretext of preaching Islam.”

Germany, of course, is not new to the threat of Islamic terrorism.  An attack Monday on a Christmas market in Berlin left 12 dead and close to 50 injured. Two two attacks carried out by Islamic State supporters this past July. 

Also, suspicion that Saudi Arabia is funding terrorist organizations is not new.  Especially since the recent disclosures by the Saudis that they had, in fact, funded extremism in the past.

If it is discovered that the Saudis are still funding extremist Islamic groups, it could prove devastating for the West, as Saudi Arabia has been considered one of the few Middle Eastern countries that the West can call an ally.