“The court action, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks nearly half a billion dollars in penalties from three Lebanese financial organizations — the now-defunct Lebanese Canadian Bank and two Beirut-based money exchange houses — and 30 auto dealers in the United States. The $480 million in penalties is the sum of the drug proceeds that are alleged to have been laundered; the government is also seeking to freeze and seize assets traceable to those companies………… Thursday’s complaint offers fresh details about the workings of what it says was a scheme to launder South American cocaine cash and Hezbollah’s own money, naming the American-based auto dealers and people it says were Hezbollah operatives. For example, the action charges that Oussama Salhab was a Hezbollah operative in Togo who ran a network that transported cash from cars sold in Benin on flights to Beirut. Prosecutors say he worked with Maroun Saade — suspected of being a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, a Lebanese Christian political party allied with Hezbollah — who has been charged in a separate case with aiding the Taliban………”
I wonder what Mel Brooks is up to these days? Is he teaming up with Oliver Stone? Could those two be working on something like this, this topic of my piece here?
Is it just the holiday season or is the world going crazy around me? At least from my current perspective in the Pacific Northwest it seems like many heretofore otherwise sensible people are going mad. Look at all this:
Hezbollah alliance with the Taliban (across fourteen centuries of separation, across five nations of separation)?
Iranian alliance with al-Qaeda which is the mortal Wahhabi enemy of the Shi’as (including Iranians and Iraqis and Lebanese and Bahrainis and Pakistanis and all others)?
Iranian and al-Qaeda alliance allegedly but ridiculously improbably going way back to the 1990s, mostly via the good offices and miraculous guesswork of Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia?
Iranian-Mexican Drug Cartel-Texan Nutcase alliance to blow up a restaurant in Georgetown and its famous clients just because it serves mediocre food to smug bureaucrats and charges too much? This last one allegedly courtesy of the DEA and the U.S. Department of Justice, and possibly Mujahideen-e-Khalq, among others.
Iraqi-Iranian-Syrian (wtf?)-Lebanese alliance to conquer Bahrain as a prelude to conquering the rest of the world and forcing Rick Santorum and Rick Perry to become Muslims and make the Hajj to Mecca?
Lebanese-Columbian-Taliban-Hezbollah-Maronite Christian plot to make money from a new triangular trade but without the rum and the African slaves.
WTF is going on here? Is everyone going paranoid or are all of these plots real? Should we start looking under our beds each night for Iranian mullahs and Lebanese Shi’as? Are the Wahhabi princes now financing the hated Shi’a militants as well? Or is it just that the ‘plots’ are thickening? Cheers
mhg
BFF “A fractured picture of a post-Saleh Yemen is starting to emerge as Houthis battle Salafists in the north of the country. If no solution to the strife is found soon, it may snowball into an uncontrollable situation, possibly leading to sectarian war. Tensions between the two groups have now reached fever pitch. This was made abundantly clear in a press conference held by a number of journalists at their syndicate’s headquarters in Sanaa after returning from a visit to Dammaj. It soon emerged that the journalists were conveying only one point of view, demonstrating a bias towards the Salafists. They maintained that the people of the Dammaj region had been suffering from a seven-week blockade by the Houthis, who were preventing food and medicine from entering. This prompted a pro-Houthi audience member to rebuke the journalists’ claims. He distributed a statement, signed by a member of the Houthi political bureau, Abu Malek al-Fichy, claiming that there is an attempt to distract the revolution youth with secondary issues. But the media escalation did not stop there. It intensified with the fighting on the ground, especially after Yemen’s Salafists vowed, during a conference held Wednesday under the slogan “Supporting the Oppressed in Dammaj,” to defend themselves by all legitimate means. They accused Houthis of “striving to establish a Shia state in the north of Yemen and south of Saudi Arabia.” The recent tensions in the north have raised questions about Houthi plans for the future, especially after they had announced their refusal to accept the Gulf initiative and its implementation mechanisms………….”
This rejection of the GCC plan for Yemen explains why some GCC potentates in their media have recently started blasting the Houthis again. They are renewing something they have not done since after the Houthis defeated the Saudi military incursion in their country in 2009. The lightly and pitifully armed tribesmen, having dispatched the Saudi military that is among the best armed in the world, are now in conflict with the Salafis, who are the Saudi proxies. That is not necessarily to say the Houthis are sweethearts, they are not. They tend to be fierce independent fighters, and they are almost as reactionary as any Saudi potentates, but not nearly as corrupt (but then who in the world is as corrupt as the Saudi potentates?). No group in Yemen are sweethearts, probably not since Bilqis the Queen of Sheba went sweet on King Solomon (or maybe she had to). The GCC deal looks like a joke now, with (not yet former) president Saleh calling the shots in Yemen. He is playing Putin to his own Medvede (wtf that be). Cheers
mhg
What is one difference (or the similarity if you prefer) betweena North Korean voter (I know, North Koreans don’t vote, but humor me) and an American voter?
North Koreans are told and believe the following, among other things: that the Americans want to bomb North Korea and obliterate it with nuclear weapons and only the WMD of Kim Jong Il are keeping them at bay. Kim Jong Il and his sons Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Nam and Kim Dim Sum may also believe that.
Americans are told by the media and some politicians and ‘may largely’ believe the following, among other things:
The Iranians are building nuclear weapons which they will immediately use to destroy Israel. After that they would love to use their Hiroshima vintage bombs to trigger Armageddon or take over the world and make it a safer place for the awaited Mahdi (their Messiah). One pre-condition of all that is to bomb Europe back to the good old day of May 1945. Hence all the missiles deployed in Turkey and soon in other places near Iran. All that may have been corroborated by Saudi Intelligence, the shaikhs of Abu Dhabi, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, John Bolton, and one Texas screw-up named Mansoor Arbabsiar (I know you expected me to say Rick Perry). Provided that the End of Time and Rapture and the Christian right and the Republican Party do not beat them to it. Cheers
mhg
“Former House speaker and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has picked a foreign policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to be his national security adviser. Kiron Skinner directs CMU’s International Relations and Politics department and also services on the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel and service on the Council of Foreign Relations. Skinner has previously served as an adviser on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Defense Policy Board of the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001 to 2007. Skinner will continue to teach full-time on social and decision sciences at CMU, but will be on call to advise Gingrich………” Clearly Newt Gingrich doesn’t like to stray far from the ‘reservation, at least in matters of picking policy advisers, if not in ‘other’ matters. Hischoice is somewhat better than Romney, who picked a veteran of the right-wing and genocidal Lebanese Forces militia (apparently Romney feels that he needs to shore up his right-wing credentials). But, hey, the day is young, and I have not looked in Mr. Skinner’s closet yet. This almost certainly means that he, Newt, will decline my advise to take a hike on the Iraq-Iran border, preferably making a two-feet sortie across the border. Dommage. Gingrich is also eschewing the Bush-Obama-Clinton trend of seeking high profile female foreign policy advisers (Albright, Rice &Rice). Maybe ‘somebody’ has learned something after all. Cheers
mhg
BFF “When the world is focused on the uprisings in Egypt, Syria and the President of Yemen’s agreement to step aside, the spotlight has been diverted from the threat posed by Yemen’s Al Houthi Zaidi Shiite, pro-Iranian rebels. With an estimated 100,000 fighters, the Al Houthis harbour not only an expansionist agenda but the will to topple the government and impose their own brand of Shiite religious law on the entire country and beyond. They have made territorial claims to a number of Saudi villages and in 2009 they battled with Saudi forces. For the Al Houthis, the Yemeni armed forces’ preoccupation with maintaining security on the street has been a gift. Over the past 10 months they have succeeded in expanding their territorial control from their homebase Sa’ada into four Yemeni provinces and over the main crossing points into Saudi Arabia……..n recent days, Shiites have been demonstrating against the Saudi government in the city of Qatif in the oil-rich Eastern Region, where anti-royalist slogans have been scrawled on walls. The kingdom’s mufti blames Iran for the unrest, credible when Iranian clerics are calling for an end to the Al Saud ruling dynasty………” Predictable piece of rubbish by a retainer of the al-Nahayans rulers of Abu Dhabi, in one of their own newspapers. He is writing mainly about the Yemeni Houthis, who in 2009 totally defeated the invading high-tech Saudi armed forces under Prince Khaled Bin Sultan al-Saud. (Saudi semi-official had all but declared Khaled as the Rommel of Yemen, and he did have the same fate as Rommel at El-Alamein). In the process, this writer also accuses Saudi Shi’as who are seeking equal rights of being Iranian agents. He is also throwing in a majority of the peoples of Bahrain and Iraq (most likely Lebanon as well) as foreign agents. Funny: the UAE of the Bin Zayed Bin Sultan al-Nahayan brothers is groaning under the weight of foreign bases, from American to British to Pakistani to Monaco-an to Klingon. Not to mention the foreign mercenary force the al-Nahayan formed early this year with Blackwater veterans and Colombians, Australians, white South Africans and others. It is all part of the vast Shi’a conspiracy, I tell ya. And what is wrong with wanting to overthrow the al-Saud, along with the mullahs in Iran and the despots in Manama? Anybody with any sense would want that. Cheers
mhg
In the new liberated Libya there is a struggle between rival factions of the new regime. The main struggle is between “moderate” Islamists and “radical ”Islamists. The former are represented by some regime figures, such as NTC leader Mustafa Abduljaleel who says that the new Libya will remove the Qaddafi restrictions on polygamy (I expect the US Congress to invite him to address a joint session just for that, and to honor him with rousing standing ovations). He also says that Libyan law will be Islamic Shari’a law, although he has not bothered to ask the Libyan people yet.
The less moderate Islamists are the Salafis who want an even stricter Islamic society like Saudi Arabia or the Taliban. They have been clamoring to imitate the Saudi Wahhabis in tearing down ancient mosques and monuments as “haram” or taboo. In Mecca, some of the most ancient Islamic monuments from the days of the Prophet have been erased and replaced with five star hotels and shopping malls. Homes of the Prophet and his early sahaba supporters lost to the greed of princes and potentates. I have written here in the past about the transformation of Mecca as the new Las Vegas without the legal “diversions” of the one in Nevada. An unforgivable and irreversible crime.
Arab media reports
tell us the Libyan Salafis are already eying some mosques and shrines that are centuries old, with plans to tear them down and erase all traces o them. In their place, they might want to erect murals of the king of Saudi Arabia and all the senior princes.
All sides of the new Libya are fully armed and ready. I expect the secular exiles who rushed home when the dictator seemed about to fall to be thinking of their plans B and C. Cheers
mhg
“Al-Asaad told us that despite being grossly under-resourced, he is getting more and more recruits every day. The latest reports put the size of the armed opposition force at anywhere between 1,000 and 25,000. In his interview, the colonel told us that he unequivocally is not seeking a coup and supports the Syrian National Council as the legitimate representative of the people. He also stressed that the force he is assembling is inclusive and non-sectarian. Finally, he makes a plea to U.S. President Barack Obama to offer quick and decisive support for the resistance and underscores that the establishment of a buffer zone, as proposed by Turkey and France, could accelerate defections and change the course of the conflict……….”
The Syrians who did not like American intervention in Iraq are now eager for American and French and British (and possibly Israeli) intervention in Syria. That is after the NATO intervention in Libya, which was aided and abetted by the Arabs. The hypocrisy some Arab leaders, and some opinion-makers of the Wahhabi faux-liberal stripe, especially in the Gulf GCC, is breath-taking (I like this last word more and more these days). These Arabs cheered and helped and participated in the invasion (or liberation) of Iraq, only to turn around and bitterly criticize it when things did not go their way. They even pushed for a second American liberation of Iraq, a retake, just to set things right from the Wahhabi point of view. They practically pushed (an eager) NATO to intervene and liberate Libya from its ruling dynasty even as they helped chain the people of Bahrain to their repressive and corrupt dynasty of thieves. Now they want to the USA and NATO to liberate Syria from its ‘current’ despotic rulers. Some claim they want the West to liberate Syria from the Assad regime, others that they want NATO to liberate Syria (politically) from Iran, some say they want it liberated from both. Some of them also want to liberate Syria fully by aligning it with the royal theocracy of the People’s Democratic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I wonder if they also want to liberate the Golan, and from whom. Cheers
mhg
“Un groupe de professeurs d’université chinois a décerné à Vladimir Poutine un «prix de la paix» copié sur le prestigieux Nobel, en saluant les «remarquables» talents pacifiques du premier ministre russe, notamment son opposition au «bombardement de la Libye par l’OTAN». Le nom du lauréat du «prix de la paix Confucius» a été annoncé mardi à l’AFP par l’un des organisateurs, Qiao Damo. M. Poutine était notamment en lice avec la chancelière allemande, Angela Merkel, ou Yuan Longping, le père du riz hybride chinois……………”
Interesting that the Chinese decided to give Russia’s Putin a peace prize. I suppose because his country has not been engaged in any foreign war for decades. The Russians have had no Iraq, no Afghanistan, no Yemen, no Pakistan, no possible Iran, no nothing: I wonder how the Russian budget deficit is faring. In our region of the Middle East the potentates give each other prizes all the time. Prince X bin Y awards Prince Z bin W the award for the most wedded. Prince S bin OB awards shaikh B bin S the award for humanitarian thinking (not doing). Prince Yin bin Yang awards Prince Yang bin Yin the Prince Yin bin Yang bin Ying award for just “showing up”. You can call them Woody Allen awards: remember what he said about “showing up is 80% of life”?. After the ceremony they all leave by driving up the Prince Yang bin Yin bin Yang Al Yong Avenue. In the new township named after Prince Polygamous bin Greed bin Bribe bin Nepotism. Mutual incestuous awarding of prizes. Now about that hybrid rice………… Cheers
mhg
“BreakingNews Breaking News: Arab League offers to send 500 human rights and military observers to Syria, says Egypt TV -@BBCWorld…………….”
This is what I read Monday. The Arab League will send “human rights” observers to Syria! No doubt it will include Saudis, Bahrainis, Emiratis, and maybe Yemenis. Or maybe they will be supervised by these countries. All regimes that have shown great respect for human rights, allow free speech, do not kill protesters, do not arrest people without warrants and do not hold them for months either without charges (Saudi Arabia) or on trumped up charges (Bahrain). I think the word “chutzpah” should be incorporated into the Arabic language. Cheers
mhg
“Insanity combined with intelligence can be
defined as “genius” in some cases. Insanity combined with stupidity can
be defined as “Republican candidate” these days.“Me
“Saturday’s Republican debate, sponsored by CBS and the National Journal, revealed a Republican field that is promising war on Iran and a revival of the use of torture, as well as horrible relations with the new governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (according to Herman Cain, they have gotten “out of hand,” and he and Gingrich want to deal with them by supporting a muscular Christianity)………. The only adults in the room were John Huntsman and Ron Paul, who have no realistic chance of being the standard-bearer. They denounced water-boarding as torture and generally punctured the warmongering of the others. But it is shameful that potential US presidents are even talking about torturing people and launching wars of aggression………..These people just like the idea of war. War is good for munitions firms and security firms, who give a lot of money to Republican candidates. They’re actively looking for a war. It is good for business, for them……….” Juan Cole
These people must be a mix of insane and/or stupid, most likely a combination of both. Insanity combined with intelligence can be defined as “genius” in some cases. Insanity combined with stupidity can be defined as “Republican candidate” these days. (One exception is John Huntsman and maybe Ron Paul to some extent). It is like watching an old film reel of the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. Minus the beer halls and minus the brownshirts and blackshirts. Is Iran the new Czechoslovakia? Or is it the new Poland? How about Danzig and the Persian Gulf Corridor? Or will it be a Pearl Harbor in reverse? After all, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor for ‘nearly’ the same reasons these candidates want to attack Iran. Cole is also right: maybe these people are smart after all. There is a lot of money to be made by corporations in a war. On the backs of the American people, who will see their services deteriorate as the deficit grows to a few trillion more from a possible “Mother of all Middle East Wars”. Cheers
mhg
Rattlesnake Ridge 
BFF 