Attorney General Bill Barr Says We’d Better Get Religion

In October, Attorney General Bill Barr managed to fit into a wide-ranging itinerary that takes him to places as improbable, given his office, as the U.K., Italy and Ukraine, a stop in South Bend, Indiana, where he gave a speech at Notre Dame. It proved quite controversial.

He tells us of a Hobbesian world where “Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large”. He says the nation’s founders were unsure whether the citizenry “could maintain the moral discipline and virtue necessary” for this new form of government to survive.

Barr wants to apply those missing restraints. “No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity” but if we left that to government, it would lead to tyranny. Restraint can’t be left to the people, either. That leads to “licentiousness” and “the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good”.

So what can be done?

Unsurprisingly, religion is for him the answer. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people”, says a quote from John Adams that Barr provides, and Barr elaborates that “free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people”.

“From the Founding Era onward, there was strong consensus about the centrality of religious liberty in the United States”, he says, expressed in the First Amendment’s restriction that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. America is here enjoined from declaring any religion to be the official religion of the state and the people are free to follow any religion of their choice. The phrase does seem to expect that we will exercise some religion, though, and Barr wants you to know that he has in mind a particular religion: “By and large, the Founding generation’s view of human nature was drawn from the classical Christian tradition”, and later he reminds us, “The Founding generation were Christians”.

But “over the past 50 years religion has been under increasing attack”. There’s been “a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square”. The villain is militant secularism and its lack of principles that makes for the easy accommodation of moral relativism, is his view. It takes the form of “mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, academia, and ‘savage’ social media campaigns in an unremitting assault on religion and tradition values”. Barr believes secularism is to blame for every social pathology: depression and mental illness, soaring suicide rates, discouraged youth, increasing violence, the drug epidemic, and births to unmarrieds that now run to 70%. He says it is “organized destruction” that has taken on “all the trappings of a religion, including inquisitions and excommunication”, but he does not tell us what secret organization is coordinating this assault.

Secularism is certainly on the rise. Barr is evidently troubled by studies such as the 2018-19 Pew Research survey’s findings that a quarter of the population now has no religious affiliation, up from 17% a decade ago. Today’s number would be higher were it not averaged with generations such as the oldest among us, who are 85% Christian and only 10% unaffiliated. It masks that less than half of millennials self-identify as Christian and 40% of them are unaffiliated.

There is a mix of causes, but the younger generations are exposed to the exploded knowledge of an impossibly vast universe that is utterly incompatible with the superstitions of ancient religions, and that is a more likely cause of religion’s decline than Barr’s phobia of “militant secularism”. His belief in “natural law — a real, transcendent moral order which flows from God’s eternal law — the divine wisdom by which the whole of creation is ordered” [his emphasis] just doesn’t register with millennials.

As for morals, there is the conceit that morals stem only from religious teachings. But it’s fair to ask of those who disagree, then from where else do we receive the moral teachings of goodness? “The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion”, Barr says. “What we call ‘values’ today are really nothing more than mere sentimentality, still drawing on the vapor trails of Christianity.” Clearly, Barr does not respect those who exercise freedom of religion by not being religious. Without those Christian vapor trails, they would be bankrupt of morals and values.

His speech inevitably turns political. “Among these militant secularists are many so-called ‘progressives’. But where is the progress?”, he asks. Instead of “focusing on our own personal morality and transformation” as Christianity teaches,

“We have the State in the role of alleviator of bad consequences…The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with the wreckage…We start with an untrammeled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state on which we depend.”

“Secularists have been continually seeking to eliminate laws that reflect traditional moral norms” such as rolling back laws that once forbade abortion and euthanasia. But didn’t both make individuals free to control their own lives rather than suffer the prohibitions of Barr’s coercive state? He cites Obamacare requiring religious employers and Catholic religious orders to adopt insurance plans that included coverage of contraceptives and abortifacients as “irreligion and secular values…being forced on people of faith”.

In fact, the Supreme Court, with its five Catholics, did precisely the opposite, forcing the religion of the family that owns the Hobby Lobby chain on its thousands of employees by denying them that coverage. That, for him, is today’s militant secularists failing to “have a live and let live spirit — they are not content to leave religious people alone to practice their faith”. Practice on others, we would add. Live and let live must for him surely apply to florists, photographers and bakers who refuse to provide services to weddings of same-sex couples. Pete Buttigieg knows about the other side of that live and let live, speaking against current law that makes it “lawful to harm people so long as you remember to use your religion as an excuse”.

As “ground zero for these attacks”, Barr then gets around to schools where anyone of faith expects “the teaching of that religion” to take place, there being “no greater gift we can give our children”. He decries state policies that oppose the use of taxes to fund private schools that indoctrinate children in religion, and the several states that have passed laws requiring public schools to adopt an LGBT curriculum that violates how parents are attempting to raise their children. (Aren’t Christians supposed to teach tolerance?). A California county refuses to allow children to be excused from instruction “related to gender, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation”. We’d agree with Barr, but for a different reason: whatever happened to actual education?

“If ever there was a need for a resurgence of Catholic education — and more generally religiously-affiliated schools — it is today”, says Barr. He wants to assure us that…

“[A]as long as I am Attorney General, the Department of Justice will be at the forefront of this effort, ready to fight for the most cherished of our liberties: the freedom to live according to our faith”.

And there it is: the official pro-religion policy of the Department of Justice, and posted to its website. You can find it here.

Oct 27 2019 | Posted in Policy | Read More »

Cracks Appear in Trump’s Stonewall

President Trump forbade those in his administration from testifying before the House impeachment inquiry, and a number at first failed to show up, flouting the subpoenas that demanded their presence. But in recent days several have broken ranks to give statements and answer questions in sessions that run nine and ten hours. Republicans are furious for
Republicans stage a stand-in outside the Capitol’s
subterranean SCIF

being denied access to the committees’ hearings. We’ll review their case, but first a quick rundown.

Among the apostates were former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch; national security official Fiona Hill, a Russia and Europe specialist; the Pentagon’s Ukraine expert, Laura Cooper; and Gordon Sondland, a hotelier and million dollar contributor to Trump’s inauguration who was rewarded with the ambassadorship to the European Union but who found himself in non-E.U. Ukraine taking instruction from non-government official Rudy Giuliani.

It was William Taylor, though, the current ambassador to Ukraine, armed with the meticulous notes he had kept, who laid out the chronological sequence of meetings, phone calls, and e-mails in his opening statement that left no doubt that funding to aid Ukraine’s defense against Russia and an invitation to the White House had been held hostage by Donald Trump, conditioned on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy launching investigations into the Bidens and probing the risible conspiracy fable that it was Ukraine that interfered in the 2016 elections, not Russia.

Taylor, a West Point graduate, served for six years as an infantry officer with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, then with NATO and the State Department, and came out of retirement to take the job. Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham’s attempt to besmirch that resumé , stupidly calling him one of those “radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution”, left the White House looking desperate.

Taylor made Trump’s extortion a certainty. His act combined the abuse of his power with breaking the law against soliciting election assistance from a foreign source.

That left Republicans with little other than to complain about the impeachment process, calling the secret depositions from which no transcripts have emerged unfair for shutting Republicans out of the SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) three floors under the Capitol building where testimony is taken behind securely closed doors.

But closed meetings are the standard practice. Democrats were quick to cite that the Benghazi investigation which sought to find former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton guilty of malfeasance, held 107 interviews in private over four months before the first public hearing. That was chaired by Trey Gowdy, a Republican representative from South Carolina until this January, whose 2015 interview was widely quoted amid the accusations hurled back and forth for his having said:

“I could just tell you of the 50 some-odd interviews we have done thus far, the vast majority of them have been private and you don’t see the bickering among Congress in private interviews. You don’t see any of that…The private ones always produce better results.”

The final Benghazi report made the same points as well as saying:

” Interviews allow witnesses to be questioned in depth by a highly prepared member or staff person…Interviews also allow the Committee to safeguard the privacy of witnesses who may fear retaliation”.

to the barricades

After the damaging testimony by Taylor, Trump tweeted that Republicans should support him more vigorously. Dozens of House Republicans dutifully trooped down the stairs to force entry into the SCIF. Some brought in their cell phones, strictly against rules as a breach of security; some of them then refused to relinquish them.

It was a farcical protest meant for Fox News where viewers were unlikely to be told that standard House rules say that only members of the committee(s) conducting depositions may attend, which of course includes the Republican members of those committees. There are 47 Republicans on the three committees conducting the depositions — Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight — all of whom have had access to all of the proceedings.

Just how farcical became apparent when about a dozen of those 47 committee members who could have been inside for the deposition of Pentagon Ukraine expert Laura Cooper were instead spotted outside among the protesters demanding to go in. And a source told Fox News that some members asked to be arrested, citing the optics of being marched out of the SCIF in handcuffs in front of reporters and news cameras.

Republicans don’t seem to think there’s much with which to counter the evidence pouring forth. The format of these deposition — actually, they are called “interviews” — gives the Democrats an hour to ask questions, then the Republicans have an hour, and the alternation continues for the balance of the session. Yet Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California on the House intelligence committee who briefly was a candidate for the presidency, says that whereas each session begins with a few dozen Republicans in the room, instead of asking questions in rotation with Democrats, they mostly leave, such that at day’s end the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is about 10-to-1. What questions they do ask tend to be “cockamamie conspiracy questions” about 2016 and the DNC server being in Ukraine, Swalwell said. The NewsHour couldn’t get any of the committee Republicans to come on the program, showing a wariness of questions on the substance of the charges against the president which they’d be unable to refute.

The overwhelming evidence left Republicans reverting to the outrage of the original letter from the White House that railed against the impeachment inquiry calling it “illegitimate” and “unconstitutional” for having held no vote by the members to authorize it. The eight-page letter to congressional leaders by White House Counsel Pat Cipollone is for Fox News commentator Sean Hannity a “devastating” indictment of the ” corrupt, secret, behind closed doors, smoke-filled room Venezuela-style impeachment coup attempt”.

It was ridiculed by those on the left for being so improper a legal letter. The White House counsel represents the presidency as institution, but Cipollone stumps for the president himself. “The President has a country to lead. The American people elected him to do this job, and he remains focused on fulfilling his promises to the American people”. Cipollone lauds him for economic growth, low unemployment, negotiating trade deals, apparently “fixing our broken immigration system” and even “addressing mass shooting”. In a startling and conclusory statement, he decides Trump’s call to Zelenskyy was “completely appropriate, that the President did nothing wrong, and that there is no basis for an impeachment inquiry”. Furthermore, Zelenskyy “agreed that the call was appropriate”. The head of a foreign government decides for us, too. Congress having to issue subpoenas to do its job:

” violated civil liberties and the separation of powers by threatening Executive Branch officials, claiming that you [Congress] will seek to punish those who exercise fundamental constitutional rights and prerogatives. All of this violates the Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent. Never before in our history has the House of Representatives — under the control of either political party — taken the American people down the dangerous path you seem determined to pursue.”

But what about his legal claims which now animate the Republican campaign against the impeachment proceedings?

“Your highly partisan and unconstitutional effort” is a recurring argument by Mr. Cipollone. “Unconstitutional” occurs eight times in the letter. That the Constitution’s impeachment provisions are unconstitutional is certainly a novel idea. It becomes apparent that he is referring to parts of the Constitution other than the impeachment provision, principally the House’s failure to follow due process.

It is not a strong argument because the Constitution doesn’t even give impeachment a complete sentence. All it says is “The House of Representatives … shall have the sole Power of Impeachment”. Elsewhere, it lists the misdeeds that qualify for impeachment, and gives the Senate the job of deciding whether to convict on the charges the House has drawn up, but there are no specifics as to how the House is to go about the job. A better argument would have been a muscular bid that, in consideration that the institution of the presidency is on the line, the House should feel duty bound to adopt orderly and publically declared procedures and guidelines to ensure fairness.

Cipollone tells Congress “You have denied the President … the rights guaranteed to all Americans”, namely , “the right to cross-examine witnesses, to call witnesses, to receive transcripts of testimony, to have access to evidence, to have counsel present”, and more. This is the due process that Cipollone contends is being denied the president. If that sounds like a reasonable complaint, it doesn’t fit the case. The impeachment inquiry is not a trial. It is like a grand jury. It is the prosecution working through the discovery phase, developing its case. The defense is not yet entitled to know the committees’ findings. That happens in the Senate, which conducts the trial. It is there that Mr. Cipollone should insist on getting his due process satisfaction. Unlike the Nixon and Clinton impeachment proceedings, the Trump counterpart has no independent counsel digging up the evidence preliminary to Congress stepping in. This time, the House itself has to develop evidence and only then open public hearings on what they have found. So the White House contention, that “What you have labeled contrary to the Constitution…and all past bipartisan precedent-as an ‘impeachment inquiry'” cannot be so called because the House members have not voted to make it so, is premature.

President Trump has said that the White House would cooperate if the House were to vote for the inquiry — provided that the “rules are fair”. What rules? The House has simply subpoenaed people to testify and for various offices to provide all pertinent documents. Even if there were to be rules, Ms. Pelosi and fellow Democrats would be leery of taking a vote only to deal with a famously mercurial president who, having gotten the vote he wanted, might demand ever more rules to forestall cooperation. Remember that negotiating whether Trump would be interviewed by the Mueller report — what questions could be asked, whether follow-up questions would be allowed, whether answers could instead be submitted in writing — went on for a year.

Nevertheless, the commotion and accusation of unfairness and secrecy is registering with a public unmindful of Congress’ mysterious ways, and the Democrats would do well to hasten issuing transcripts to make its case to the public.

checks out of balance

And about those ignored subpoenas? Their resolution relies on the courts that seem oblivious to the gravity of history unfolding; any resolutions will absurdly come only after impeachment proceedings have run their course. The snail pace of the judicial system hands Trump a cynical strategy to exploit. A series running in Newsweek says…

“An administration can shield itself from legitimate requests for information and argue that an investigation is illegitimate because Congress is rushing to judgment without determining the facts — a totally circular claim that attempts to undermine Congress’ utmost check on the executive branch.”

Needed is a statute that requires expedited handling by the courts of congressional subpoenas of the executive branch. Our notion of checks and balances is mythology without it. What is further needed is the right of Congress to issue a civil suit against the president himself if a Trump-like president ignores a court’s verdict. America has come to this.

Seems There’s No Stopping Fossil Fuels

U.S. oil production is running at 12.2 million barrels of oil a day this year, up from 11 million a day last year. American shale now accounts for roughly 10% of the world’s oil supply, reckons The Wall Street Journal.

Oil, natural gas, and coal account for 81% of the world’s energy consumption, reports Axios.com, a figure that hasn’t changed in 30 years despite the rapid growth of renewables such as wind and solar. Fossil fuel consumption has grown along with them.

Why Would We Want Saudi Arabia
As An Ally?

We needed their oil. Midway through World War II, the Roosevelt administration was warned that the U.S. was running low, having almost single-handedly fueled the allied war effort. There in Saudi Arabia lay a resource that had hardly been tapped. Oil became the core of the U.S.-Saudi Arabia relationship for decades
They need no introduction, but where are Clinton and Obama in this gallery? They were equally accommodating of the Saudis, but their years lacked incidents such as those we recount.

thereafter: We would buy their oil, they would buy American weapons, we’d guarantee their security. So it was that we would have as an ally one of the world’s most repressive countries ruled by a royal family that hoarded to itself the unimaginable riches found beneath its desert floor.

But that calculus has changed. First, the U.S. is now the world’s biggest oil producer: 12 million barrels a day thanks to shale, subsurface geologic rendering, and technologies such as directional drilling. Besides, the Saudi kingdom presents us with problems. The war they are waging against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen has led to the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. The king gave the reins to run the country to a crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who a year ago is believed with certainty to have ordered the gruesome murder of Washington Post opinion writer, Jamal Khashoggi, by a gang of 15 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

In the year since the killing, President Trump has never acknowledged that bin Salman ordered Khashoggi’s assassination, managing no more than, “It could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”.

The killing of a journalist is of no moment to Trump, who cares only that the kingdom shares his antipathy toward Iran and is a customer for American weapons. So when Iran bombed the Saudi oil facilities,

Trump’s tweet that the U.S. would wait to hear from Saudi Arabia “under what terms we would proceed!” was a stunning show of his subservience. Apparently he views “his” military as mercenaries available for hire. Saudi Arabia is not a treaty ally. We are under no obligation to do their fighting for them. There is no justification for the United States to become involved at all. Trump’s “locked and loaded” readiness brings to mind George W. Bush’s defense secretary Robert Gates saying that the Saudis “always want to fight the Iranians to the last American”.

a star is born

When bin Salman took the stage, he was celebrated as a reformer for introducing a host of unheard-of freedoms to the kingdom. That women would be allowed to drive cars got most notice, but they were also given the right to travel without a male relative’s permission; to register family events such as births, marriages or divorces with the government; to receive equal treatment in the workplace; and the religious police were told to back down from their strict requirements that women be fully covered. Successive American administrations have had no qualm with a government that had created apps sold on Apple and Google that allow Saudi Arabian men to control the movements of their wives and daughters, specifying where they can go and for how long, with alerts when they stray.

To win over the kingdom’s many young people (about 60% are 30 or younger), bin Salman freed all to engage in such forbidden entertainment as movies, car races and sporting events.. He plans to build 350 movie theaters across the country. Feted for modernizing the deeply conservative Saudi culture, he toured the U.S. coast to coast for three weeks, meeting business leaders, Silicon Valley figures, movie people.

Then came the Khashoggi murder and revelations of the dark underside of the kingdom. According to a Saudi group that tracks political prisoners, Prisoners of Conscience, some 2,600 Saudi dissidents — scientists, lawyers, writers, women’s rights advocates — were locked up while the crown prince was traveling from country to country building his image as a liberal reformer .

About a dozen women activists who had campaigned for that very right of women to drive autos were in May of last year incarcerated in separate, darkened rooms at what seemed to be an unused palace on the Red Sea where they were interrogated individually and subjected to beatings, electric shock, waterboarding, rape and threats of death, according to the sister of one. The message was clear: the prince did not want the pleasures he chose to bestow on his people to seem the accomplishment of agitators.

The killing of Khashoggi is hardly unique. Bin Salman is reportedly surprised that it has caused such a furor because it is Saudi practice to hunt down its dissident citizens and, if not murdered on the spot, return them to the kingdom for imprisonment, torture and, often as not, death by beheading, the preferred Saudi method. He did not foresee that a commentator at a U.S. newspaper was another order of magnitude.

The hit squads are referred to by U.S. intelligence as the Rapid Intervention Group, which is overseen by a top aide to the prince, Saud al Qahtani. It was he who oversaw bin Salman’s lightning-strike roundup of several hundred of the super rich, including many of his own royal family relatives, and their detention in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel. Charged with corruption and held for weeks, they had television and room service at their call while their captors forced them to sign over billions in assets to repay what they had allegedly taken from the kingdom by exploiting their positions or contacts. Some are known to have been tortured. One died. After release all were reportedly outfitted with ankle bracelets, cannot use air travel, and are under constant observation to prevent any coordinated moves against the prince.

That’s gentle treatment compared with Saudi Arabia’s brutal record of human rights violations.

 Salman Alodah, an extremely popular religious figure with a huge Twitter following, expressed hope that some reconciliation could be worked out with Qatar, with which Saudi Arabia is in conflict. He was told that “neutrality in this crisis was treason”, said his son. He was arrested, shackled hand and foot in his cell, charged with 37 offenses including “spreading discord and incitement against the ruler”, and the kingdom is seeking the death penalty for him.

 The crown prince jailed an economist for questioning the valuation of Aramco, the Saudi oil giant, in advance of its public offering. He spent a year in prison. The charge is that he had stirred up sedition through his Twitter account.

 A Saudi who operated a website critical of the country’s religious establishment was sentenced to 1,000 lashes with a cane, 10 years in prison, and a large fine. International outcry served to halt the lashings at 50, although they may have continued in secret.

 A Saudi youth is facing execution for anti-government actions, possession of a firearm, and joining a terrorist organization when he was as young as 10. The killing of children is viewed internationally as particularly barbarous.

no problem with that

On his first trip abroad as president, Mr. Trump’s first stop was not the U.K., not a European ally, but Saudi Arabia. The kingdom knew how to win his fealty. He was greeted with grandeur — a review of troops, a ceremonial sword dance, giant photos beamed on the sides of hotels at night. He came away with a $110 billion deal, so he said, for the purchase of American armament.

But the alleged sales seem to exist only as unenforceable letters of intent. Next to Iran, the president’s priority is money, which supersedes any consideration of assassinations and human rights violations. Trump constantly speaks of $450 billion of Saudi spending in the United States, but there’s no trace. Exports in 2018 were about $22.3 billion with about the same in 2017, says the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

It is inconceivable that Crown Prince bin Salman — dubbed MBS — did not order the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, given his control over the state security apparatus. No one would have dared organize such an operation on his own, which at the least, required use of government planes. Yet President Trump took the word of Saudi King Salman, MBS’s father, who personally made to him a “flat denial” of any government involvement. “It sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers”, Trump said.

Evidence piled up. MBS and al-Qahtani had exchanged 11 texts during the time of the murder. “We could possibly lure him outside Saudi Arabia and make arrangements,” the crown prince had told associates in August of 2017. MBS was even warned by al-Qahtani that going after a journalist abroad risked a backlash, but the prince reportedly responded that the national interest of Saudi Arabia dwarfed the risk of a little bad publicity.

So this is who the U.S. is “steadfast” in keeping as an ally. Indeed, just after release of a detailed report from a United Nations investigation this past June containing this evidence, Donald Trump saw fit to ask bin Salman to breakfast while at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan. It was a signal sent to despots around the world that those in the media — Trump’s “enemy of the people” — could be assassinated free of repercussion from the United States. On “Meet the Press” at about the same time, Trump said about a phone conversation with bin Salman that the subject “didn’t really come up.” Assassinations came with the territory, Trump explained, because the Middle East is a “vicious, hostile place”. But about Saudi Arabia,

“I only say they spend $400 to $450 billion over a period of time, all money, all jobs, buying equipment. I’m not like a fool that says, ‘We don’t want to do business with them’. And, by the way, if they don’t do business with us, you know what they do? They’ll do business with the Russians or the Chinese.”

It was a statement that said America no longer has any of the principles that made the country so admired, but even his rationales were specious: sales that don’t exist, and the Saudis turning to other countries for weaponry incompatible with what they already have such as their 300 fighter jets from the U.S. and Europe.

all in the family

The Saudis saw in Jared Kushner the path to win the favor of President Trump, who showed great deference to him while disparaging his own sons. The Saudis offered help that Kushner believed was essential with the Palestinians if his grand ambition of forging a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian impasse was to be realized. Contact was made with the crown prince soon after he came to power. The two became fast friends, exchanging evaporating WhatsApp messages outside the purview of the State Department — Kushner then having no security clearance — and drawing concern that the prince might be playing him. Prior due diligence had shown to the Saudis his ignorance of the region other than Israel and MBS reportedly claimed he had the president’s son-in-law “in his pocket”. Indeed, even after the Khashoggi murder, Kushner persuaded the president to continue support of the prince.

Kushner has reasons for being friendly with the regime. The House Oversight Committee discovered that, overlapping into the early months of Trump’s presidency, top officials, including his first National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, had been hatching a plan to build nuclear power plants throughout Saudi Arabia that would enrich Trump friends, chiefly Thomas Barrack, a billionaire businessman with ties to the Middle East who had served as chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee. Winning the presidency meant everyone cashing in. The project would be undertaken by Brookfield Asset Management, a company that owns Westinghouse Electric, which makes nuclear reactors and in the past built any number of nuclear plants in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the Kushner family real estate business was in serious trouble of default on loans taken to pay far too much for a past-its-prime office building at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York. Along came none other than Brookfield Asset Management to take the building off their hands. Was there a quid pro quo? Was Kushner expected to sell the deal to bin Salman? Was he to persuade the president to sign off? Drafts were even prepared for Trump’s signature. All was vigorously opposed by White House lawyers and those concerned for nuclear proliferation, but those in the president’s inner circle continued to pursue it even after Flynn’s replacement as NSA, Gen. H. R. McMaster, ordered it shut down.

Would Trump have signed? When campaigning, he had said on Fox News that maybe countries would be better off defending themselves if they had nuclear weapons. Following up on that on CNN, Anderson Cooper, asking which countries, said, “Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons?”. Trump replied, “Saudi Arabia, absolutely, it’s going to happen, anyway”.

By the way, these would be civilian power plants, but the Saudis insisted that the deal provide for producing their own nuclear fuel, which is the gateway for nuclear weapons.

why isn’t this collusion?

In an April bipartisan vote, Congress rebelled over the civilian death toll in Yemen from the Saudis’ indiscriminate bombing and their inhuman blockade of food and medicine imports. The members invoked the War Powers Act of 1973 in defiance of Trump to halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Human Rights Watch was reporting “about 90 apparently unlawful attacks” in Yemen since 2015 by the Saudi coalition with the United Arab Emirates “that have hit homes, markets, hospitals, schools and mosques”.

The president vetoed the resolution and in May invoked an emergency provision of the Arms Export Control Act to fast track clearance for American companies to sell $8.1 billion of arms to the Saudis, the UAE, and Jordan. Part of the deal provides for Raytheon to ship 120,000 precision-guided “Paveway” bombs to the coalition. Worse than the sales, the deal allows Raytheon Company, a major American weapons manufacturer, to co-venture with Saudis to build the control systems and electronic circuitry for American-designed precision guided bombs. Thus is Trump leaking closely-guarded technology to a country about which Rand Paul, Republican Senator from Kentucky, said, “Few nations should be trusted less than Saudi Arabia”.

Not only was the Senate incensed that Trump had done nothing to condemn bin Salman for the grisly murder, but Trump had now sidestepped Congress with a phony emergency claim.

In July, a bipartisan alliance saw senators such as New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez band with South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who normally endorses Trump’s every action, to introduce a flurry of measures disapproving the deal, backed by a public that polled 58% against and only 13% for the arms shipments. No matter. The president vetoed again.

with friends like these…

In fairness, deference to Saudi Arabia did not begin with Donald Trump. Its gone on and on.

The U.S. sent some 400,000 troops to counter what George H. W. Bush repeatedly called the “naked aggression” of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. That was not at all our mission. Our troops were sent to fight for oil. It was Oil War I. The fear was that Hussein would move what was, at the time, the fourth largest army in the world down the road into Saudi Arabia, giving him control of the largest reserves in the world.

Ten years later came 9/11. Saudi Arabia is the seat of Islam and its holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, with thousands making a pilgrimage to Mecca every year and Muslims everywhere aiming their prostrated bodies at Mecca in prayer five times a day.

The royal family decades ago arranged with the powerful clergy that it could remain in power undisturbed in return for funding madrasas (schools) around the world that were free to preach an extreme form of Islam named Wahhabism. It was this element that was behind the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon, and the attack that failed when heroic passengers went to their deaths to bring flight 93 down in a Pennsylvania field. Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the 19 terrorists were Saudis and followers of Wahhabism. This is our ally, the country that funded the hatred of the West that led to 9/11. A hatred preached in their mosques that has cost America thousands of lives and some $2 trillion combating Islamic terrorism, from al Qaeda to ISIS. And yet we go on thinking of Saudi Arabia as an ally.

here’s your deep state

Just two days after 9/11, Bush family friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan visited the White House where he and George W. Bush smoked cigars
Bush with Prince Bandar bin Sultan

on the Truman Balcony. An arrangement was made for 160 Saudi officials and bin Laden family members to fly out of the United States on chartered aircraft, not only without FBI questioning but some with FBI escorts to airports. You see, the Saudis had invested heavily in George Bush Sr.’s Texas oil ventures.

Bush Jr. would then classify 28 pages of a congressional report on 9/11 that sit in the basement of Congress where they can be read by Congress members, but they are forbidden to reveal what the pages say.

They likely have to do with a suspected Saudi government intelligence agent based in San Diego, known to have met there with two of the hijackers, and who was in receipt of $3,000 a month from the checkbook of no less than Bandar’s wife, money that it is believed was funneled to the hijackers to cover their costs.

So, we ask, why is it again that Saudi Arabia should be considered an ally?