EIR Daily Alert Service, THURSDAY, MAY 9. 2019
| THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2019 Volume 6, Number 91 EIR Daily Alert Service P.O. Box 17390, Washington, DC 20041-0390 |
Obama/Clinton/British Spying Began in 2015 vs. All Potential Presidential Successors, Obama Enemies
Putin-Trump Call Launches New Diplomacy, as Lavrov and Pompeo Meet in Finland, Plan More Talks
Vice Premier Liu He To Head China Negotiators in China-U.S. Trade Talks Set for Washington, May 9-10
Pompeo Insists Arctic Council Become a Geopolitical Arena, Confront Russia, Exclude China
Kiron Skinner and The Toynbee Factor in British Grand Strategy
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EDITORIAL
Pompeo and Bolton Drive World Towards War While Trump Moves for Cooperation
May 8 (EIRNS)—The intensity of the violent declarations against both Russia and China coming from the U.S. Secretary of State and the National Security Adviser, Pompeo and Bolton, stand in stark contrast to efforts by President Donald Trump to establish friendly relations with Russia and to negotiate a constructive cooperation agreement with China. Provoking crises in multiple hotspots—Venezuela, Iran, Korea—and issuing extreme attacks on China and Russia, Pompeo’s current tour of Europe is an open drive for military confrontation, intentionally declaring that peaceful cooperation must be replaced with geopolitical conflict. At the Arctic Council meeting this week, he lectured the member states that their historic approach to joint, peaceful development of the region must end, that they must join the U.S. in denouncing imagined Chinese and Russian “aggression,” even comparing China to Nazi Germany. Pompeo then cancelled a planned visit to Germany without informing the Germans as to the reason, flying off to Iraq, where he lectured the Iraqis that they must protect U.S. troops in their country from an imagined Iranian attack. (The Iraqi Foreign Ministry issued a statement after Pompeo left that Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi had told him that “his country will continue to strengthen friendship and cooperation with all friendly and neighboring countries, including Iran.”)
Pompeo then visited the U.K., where he gushed: “It was evident in my conversations both with Jeremy Hunt and with Prime Minister May that the special relationship does not simply endure, it is thriving.” He told the press that the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to support the U.S.-backed fake “President” Juan Guaidó in Venezuela was “disgusting.”
And yet, President Trump was, at virtually the same moment, issuing yet another tweet branding the British as the primary culprits in the treasonous coup attempt against his presidency. He wrote: “This British spy, Christopher Steele, tried so hard to get this (the Fake Dossier) out before the election. Why?”
Trump is referring to the revelation contained in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) document released on May 7 of heavily redacted notes by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec from a meeting she held with former MI6 agent Steele on Oct. 11, 2016—a month before the election and just ten days before Comey et al. filed a brief with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) requesting approval to spy on the Trump campaign, which request depended entirely on the fake Steele dossier. Kavalec’s notes show that Steele was “keen to see this information come to light prior to Nov. 8” i.e., Election Day. This report confirms that Steele was acting on his earlier confessed hatred of Donald Trump, on behalf of the British Empire and the Hillary Clinton campaign (which had paid for Steele’s dossier). This constituted direct interference in the U.S. election on behalf of a hostile foreign power—not the Russians, but the British Empire.
Ironically, Joe Biden, the septuagenarian Democrat who has now announced as a candidate for President, told a fundraiser that he had received a call from Prime Minister Theresa May expressing “anxiety” about Donald Trump and calling on him to run against him. Thus not only was British intelligence interfering in U.S. elections, but the head of the British government is also directly interfering, desperate to defeat Trump. Indeed, the House of Lords released a report in December 2018 warning that the “special relationship” could not survive a second term for Donald Trump, and must not allow it.
Those who have, over the past half-century, attempted to dismiss or refute Lyndon LaRouche’s insistence that the British Empire was the historic—and continuing—primary enemy of the United States of America, and of a civilized world, are now being forced to deal with that fundamental error in their understanding of history and of current affairs. The emergence of a President who is not afraid to expose British calumny, who opposes Imperial wars, and who promotes cooperation among Russia, China and the United States, has forced the British to betray themselves as the controlling force behind their corrupted assets in the United States, who have increasingly served the Empire since the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This is especially true of the administrations of the Bush family and Barack Obama, whose supporters today are desperately trying to continue the coup attempt against Trump despite the collapse of the “Russia collusion” hoax. Worse, the Bolton/Pompeo/Pence trio is openly countering virtually every step Trump has made to restore sovereignty to the United States, preaching geopolitical divisions and war-threatening confrontations which threaten a new global war.
This dichotomy within the American body politic can and must be resolved, bringing the U.S. into a new paradigm of cooperation with China and Russia in the New Silk Road, in combatting terrorism, and in establishing a new world economic order. The only certain means for accomplishing this existential task facing the human race is for President Trump to exonerate Lyndon LaRouche, thus placing LaRouche’s ideas for this new paradigm before the citizens of the United States, and the human family of nations.
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
FBI, State Department Knew Christopher Steele Sought To Derail Trump Candidacy Before Nov. 8, 2016
May 8 (EIRNS)—An FOIA release to Citizens United, the conservative political action committee, has revealed that British spy Christopher Steele was pushing the Obama State Department to get his fake dossier into the public domain before the November 2016 election in order to influence that 2016 presidential election. This stunning information was revealed in the heavily redacted and still classified written account of Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec concerning her meeting with Steele at the State Department on Oct. 11, 2016. It is an admission which is devastating to the lie peddled by Steele in defamation cases both here in the U.S. and in Britain, where Steele has attempted to cloak his dirty tricks as patriotic intelligence activities conducted entirely within intelligence channels.
Kavalec, who worked for, and just under, Ukraine coup puppet-master Victoria Nuland, met with Steele after Nuland had deliberately absented herself from Steele’s October 2016 State Department meetings. Nuland had played a major role in orchestrating Steele’s black propaganda campaign against Trump, after he had served in a similar role for her during the Ukraine coup. The fact that Steele was frantic to use his fake dossier to influence the election, was forwarded by State to key intelligence officials ten days before the Department of Justice used the scurrilous Steele dossier to obtain a FISA warrant for surveillance on Trump Campaign volunteer Carter Page. So, there were two sources who were warning about this British MI6 agent’s attempt to swing the election against Donald Trump, Kavalec at State and Bruce Ohr at Main Justice. The FISA warrant was obtained without revealing any of these extremely material facts to the FISA Court, or telling the Court that Steele had been fired by the FBI because of his media orchestration activities. Kavalec’s account was marked unclassified in 2016 by the FBI, but was retroactively reclassified by the FBI, on April 25, 2019, and, it appears, never produced to the Senate or House Intelligence Committees in their investigations of Russiagate.
As reported yesterday by John Solomon in The Hill, “Kavalec’s notes have momentous consequences. For the first time, we have written proof the U.S. government knew well before the FBI secured the FISA warrant that Steele had a political motive and Election Day deadline to make his dossier public.
“And we know that information was transmitted … to one or more people whose job is so sensitive that their identity had to be protected. That means there is little chance the FBI didn’t know about Steele’s political client, or the Election Day deadline, before requesting the FISA warrant.”
Margaret Thatcher Comes Back from the Dead in Bizarre Channeling by Joe Biden and Mike Pompeo
May 8 (EIRNS)—As the Democratic Party lurches from stunt to stunt, guided by outright psychosis and the approaching furies of Justice, evildoers on both sides of the aisle are suddenly hot to evoke Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady of death and doom. Thatcher was, as Lyndon LaRouche often said, an unhinged and evil witch who should have been tried for crimes against humanity. Thatcher said, in her autobiography, that she treated President George H.W. Bush as her pet poodle, and history will undoubtedly show that she was absolutely right about that, if nothing else. Thatcher, Bush, and France’s President François Mitterrand set humanity back decades and precipitated millions of deaths when they failed to take the opportunity of 1989-91, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the collapse of the Soviet Union, to forge a new higher order relationship between the world’s nations. They instead destroyed and looted Russia and most of Eastern Europe while continuing the British imperial order through ruthless austerity, war, and looting regimes imposed on the developing sector. Wags might ask, are the two guys recently claiming to commune with the dead lady, Joe Biden and Mike Pompeo, engaged in some bizarre British occult sexual ritual? What is the relationship of this Biden activity to his declared intention to use Make American Moral Again, or MAMA as a campaign slogan? We kid you not, he actually said this.
Here are the facts. On May 4th, Joe Biden was at a fundraiser in Columbia, South Carolina and said that Margaret Thatcher, dead since 2013, had called him to express concerns about Donald Trump and invited Biden to London to discuss the matter. Biden claimed later in his speech that he really meant Theresa May, attributing his citation of Margaret Thatcher to “a Freudian slip.” It got better from there. British officials first denied there was any such contact between Biden and May and then admitted that such a discussion about U.S./U.K. relations occurred on the sidelines of a McCain Institute event in London in October 2018. May’s discussions with Biden about Trump are perfectly coherent with Britain’s House of Lords, who declared their intention, in the December 2018 report entitled, “U.K. Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order,” to prevent Trump’s re-election at any cost.
Then, the bellicose fathead, Mike Pompeo turned up in London itself to give the “Margaret Thatcher Lecture” at the Centre for Policy Studies. The CPS was founded in 1974 by Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher, and, according to its website, “was responsible for developing the bulk of the policy agenda that became known as Thatcherism.” Channeling Thatcher’s sadistic domination of Bush when it came to muscling the U.S. into the horrific war in Iraq, Pompeo attempted to bully Theresa May not to go “wobbly” when it came to threatening and isolating China or promoting regime change in Iran. Pompeo claims to have told London that continued U.S. participation in the “special relationship” meant banning Huawei from British communications infrastructure. He nonetheless emerged to proclaim the special relationship, alive, well, and vibrant.
It is Pompeo who has blocked the President from hearing former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney’s evidence about the non-existent Russian hack at the DNC producing WikiLeaks’ documentation of DNC, Podesta, and Clinton perfidies. The non-existent hoax is at the heart of the Russiagate sedition aimed at destroying Donald Trump’s presidency. The British, and not the Russians, as many are now recognizing, were the foreign meddlers out to determine the 2016 U.S. presidential election and are now out to do so again. How quickly this becomes a fully developed and passionate issue within the U.S. population will determine the fate of the nation.
Pompeo in the U.K.: Empire Forever
May 8 (EIRNS)—Secretary Mike Pompeo met with Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and Prime Minister Theresa May today, telling the press afterwards that, following these meetings, it is clear that “the special relationship does not simply endure, it is thriving.” He said Trump was looking forward to the state visit in June and was eager to sign a post-Brexit free trade agreement.
Pompeo had no problem in insulting Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the opposition Labour Party, who would likely win an election if it were held today. Asked about Corbyn’s refusal to back the U.S.-appointed fake president of Venezuela Juan Guaidó, Pompeo answered: “It is disgusting to see leaders, not only in the United Kingdom but in the United States as well, who continue to support the murderous dictator Maduro. No leader from a country with Western democratic values ought to stand behind them.” He also paid lip service to the lying campaign to label Corbyn an anti-Semite due to his support for Palestinian causes. Pompeo said he was “troubled by the anti-Semitism that’s emerging again in our society and in yours,” and repeating his proclamation that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”
He ripped into the U.K. refusal to ban Huawei, saying: “Ask yourself: would the Iron Lady [Margaret Thatcher] be silent when China violates the sovereignty of nations through corruption or coercion?” He said a nation cannot have Huawei in its system “and still have a trusted network,” and that the “United States will only participate in trusted networks.” Hunt, rather than stating that Snowden long ago revealed that the NSA monitors everyone, said that the U.K. “would never take a decision that compromised our ability to share intelligence with our Five Eyes colleagues, in particular with the United States.”
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Iran Announces ‘Modifications’ of Its Obligations under 2015 Nuclear Deal
May 8 (EIRNS)—Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced this morning that Iran will begin downgrading some of its commitments under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany that placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in return for the lifting of economic sanctions that had been imposed on it for its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. The U.S. withdrew from the agreement a year ago and reimposed its own sanctions, and has threatened secondary sanctions against other countries, including U.S. allies, that continue economic relations with Iran.
Rouhani told his cabinet this morning that the Iranian government had notified the five remaining signatories to the JCPOA of its decision, under which it will stop selling off its excess enriched uranium in its possession above the 300-kg limit specified in the agreement, and heavy water above the limit of 130 tons. Rouhani warned that the remaining five powers, plus the EU, have 60 days in which to ameliorate the effects of U.S. sanctions, mainly pertaining to Iranian oil exports and banking interaction, or it will take two more measures and stop observing the limit on uranium enrichment to 3.67% purity, reports Tasnim. Iran will not start breaching commitments and waging any war, Rouhani stressed, but it will not give in to bullying, either, and will give a decisive response to any aggressor.
“Today, an extremist group that is running the affairs in the White House has taken the authority from even the President, and this has made problems not only for the peoples of the region, but also America’s friends in Europe, Canada and Mexico,” Rouhani said in his remarks to the cabinet. “Today, all those who were allies to the United States, and all enterprise owners and entrepreneurs around the world are suffering. In such conditions, Zionism, the reactionaries and internal groups in the U.S., especially AIPAC, put pressure on the government to withdraw from the JCPOA.”
Iran’s Supreme National Security Council released a formal statement describing the actions that Rouhani had announced. It stressed that Iran was taking its actions under Articles 26 and 36 of the agreement itself, which gives Iran certain rights to take actions if other signatories to the agreement fail to live up to their commitments, as the U.S. has by withdrawing from it.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to continue its consultations with the remaining members of the JCPOA at all levels, but will show a strong and immediate response to any irresponsible action, including referral to the UN Security Council or implementation of further sanctions,” it said. “We entered nuclear talks with goodwill, made an agreement with goodwill, implemented the agreement with goodwill, and provided enough time to the other members after the withdrawal of the United States with goodwill. Now, it is the remaining countries’ turn to prove their goodwill and take serious and practical steps to preserve the JCPOA.”
Pentagon Announces B-52 Deployment to Southwest Asia
May 8 (EIRNS)—The Pentagon announced, yesterday, that four B-52s from Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, would be deploying to Southwest Asia, likely to Al Udeid Airbase in Qatar. Navy Capt. Bill Urban, a Central Command spokesman, said in a statement, that “the Air Force is deploying B-52s to the U.S. Central Command” area of operations, but that “We are not going to provide a specific timeline for that deployment.” While there is no reporting, yet, that the B-52 deployment was actually previously scheduled, it fits the pattern of 2016, when six B-52s replaced six B-1s at Al Udeid when the B-1s were sent home for equipment updates. This time around, the B-1 fleet has been suffering safety-of-flight issues to the point that the entire fleet was even grounded for a time.
As for the deployment of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson confirmed on May 6 that it had been, indeed, already scheduled to go to Southwest Asia but that the deployment was accelerated. He described the move as an example of “dynamic force employment,” the Pentagon’s model of sending out troops and other assets at seemingly irregular intervals to keep U.S. adversaries off-balance. Richardson wrote on Twitter that the carrier would transit to Central Command’s area of responsibility “at the direction” of National Security Adviser John Bolton and Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan.
“This is the beauty of having a dynamic force,” Richardson tweeted. “The U.S. Navy can easily maneuver to protect national interests around the globe.”
Is Turkey’s Erdogan Afraid of Losing Future Elections?
May 8 (EIRNS)—The Turkish election commission on May 6 ruled in favor of an appeal by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to hold a rerun of the mayoral election in Istanbul. It will be held on June 23. This overturns the election victory of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, who had already been certified as the winner of the March 31 election.
Addressing a crowd of supporters, Imamoglu condemned the ruling and calling it a “blow to democracy.”
The commission made its ruling based on a technicality, not on evidence of false votes, since the recount had already confirmed Imamoglu’s majority. The AKP claimed that many of the polling stations were supervised by non-civil servants, which is formally against the law, but a practice that has been widely undertaken in other municipalities and was undertaken in last year’s parliamentary and presidential elections.
“From now on, Ekrem Imamoglu is not only the candidate of the Republican People’s Party, but of all 16 million residents of Istanbul. You will see, the conscientious people of Istanbul will re-write history on June 23,” CHP leader Kemal Kiliçdaroglu told his parliamentary group at a weekly meeting on May 7.
In an obvious reference to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a CHP communiqué read: “There is no other example in our history in which the rule of law, justice, clean politics and economic stability have been sacrificed in the name of personal ambitions and fears of just one man.” It further stated that the decision destroyed the fundamental principles of democracy, and vowed that the CHP, as the party of the Republic of Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, will struggle against the erosion of democracy.
Addressing Parliament, Kiliçdaroglu strongly lashed out at the 7 judges of the 11-member Supreme Election Board (YSK) who voted on May 6 in favor of cancelling the Istanbul election, calling them members of a gang. “Judges are not to be sold. They have to be ashamed of their decision. Since when was seizing the people’s rightful shares a part of a judge’s duty?” demanded Kiliçdaroglu. “All of you are guilty before history. … They have massacred justice. And they did it on the first day of Ramadan.”
The CHP has formally asked the Supreme Election Board to cancel the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections since the same violation occurred in those elections. “If the YSK is sure about its decision on the Istanbul elections, then it should also revoke the mandate of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, because the same laws, regulations and same polling stations officials were applied in both elections,” Muharrem Erkek, deputy CHP leader, told reporters after filing the appeal. “A good majority of the heads of these polling station committees were in charge in the presidential and parliamentary elections that took place in June 2018. If the YSK stands behind its decision on Istanbul, then it should cancel the 2018 elections as well.” Another opposition party, the Good Party, submitted its own appeal seeking cancellation of all local elections in Istanbul on the same grounds as the CHP.
Erdogan has reasons to fear an Imamoglu victory in Turkey’s most populous city where he was himself once mayor. The first is that Imamoglu is considered a leader of the younger generation of the CHP and is very popular. Second, Erdogan’s AKP also lost the mayoral election in the capital, Ankara, which had been a stronghold of the AKP. Although the AKP lost also in Izmir, the country’s second-largest city, that was already a CHP stronghold. There have now been three major elections in which AKP lost its absolute majority and has had to form an alliance with the ultraright-wing National Movement Party.
ECONOMY
Germany’s Nuclear Exit Was a Mistake, Industrialist Tells Die Welt
May 8 (EIRNS)—In an interview published yesterday with Germany’sDie Welt daily and covered by mass-tabloid Bildzeitung, Wolfgang Reitzle, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of industrial gas company Linde AG, attacks Germany’s “failed energy transition” from nuclear to solar and wind: “Here, under the impact of the tsunami-caused reactor damage in the nuclear power plant Fukushima 9,000 km away, an epochal decision was taken at the snap of a finger—without any analysis based on fact and evaluation of the overall context. In Germany, Geiger counters were sold out, whereas in Japan’s capital Tokyo, near Fukushima, no increase of radioactivity was measured.”
“Today, on certain days we import electricity from neighboring countries, and Germany is surrounded by countries whose nuclear power plants are less safety than the German plants that have been shut down,” Reitzle states. The population has not been made any safer by any of this. And: “Nuclear power should stay a component of our energy policy, because it is the only one that can provide the base load, it is cheap, and free of CO2.”
Reitzle also attacks the government for its economic policy orientation that discards the importance of the Mittelstand, which is predominantly generating the nation’s economic wealth. Taxation and bureaucracy are a burden and a threat to the Mittelstand, he says.
THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
Amid Deepening Crisis, Argentines Widely Anticipate Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s New Book
May 8 (EIRNS)—As just-released quarterly figures show a stunning and continuing destruction of the Argentine economy and living standards, courtesy of the International Monetary Fund and President Mauricio Macri, there is widespread anticipation of former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s May 9 presentation of her bookSincerely, a review of the three Kirchner presidencies—two of herself and one of her late husband Nestor Kirchner—and what they achieved.
The presentation will take place at the Argentine Book Fair, held at an historic site once owned by the landed oligarchy’s Rural Society. She will speak in a room that holds 1,000, but an estimated 4,000 are expected. Requesting that her usually noisy, drum-banging militants not attend, so as not to distract from the seriousness of the occasion, she has arranged for a large video screen to be set up near the locale for supporters to watch.
While it’s unknown whether Fernández will run in this year’s presidential election, there is an urgent need and demand for a change in policy. The latest quarterly figures from the government’s statistical agency show a year-on-year industrial decline of 11.1%; for March alone, industrial production dropped by 13.4%, with auto production plummeting 29.7% for the first quarter, and 39.1% just for March. The construction industry dropped by 11.3% for the first quarter, and 12.3% for March alone. According to economist Julia Strada, industry is operating at 58.4% of its installed capacity.
According to a vice president of the Argentine Industrial Union, the decline in industrial production has yet to reach bottom. Moreover, the government has not been able to stop the peso devaluation—yesterday it reached an unprecedented 46 to the dollar, while the inflation rate for April was 4.6%, a tad below March’s record 4.7%. Despite Macri’s claim to be controlling food prices, they continue to rise, placing food out of the reach of the poorest and further shrinking the internal market.
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