There may be subjective experiences, but there’s is no “whose truth” in empiricism, and especially as regards forensic investigations and the courts (open, of record) and processes the support them. The feudal lords of any era would, of course, control the courts and influence or control the clergy, dealing themselves the power to rule capriciously. As regards the leverage provided by metaphysical beliefs to provoke mobs, there is no end or settlement: what human would presume to know the nature of God? đ The structures built atop such assertions lend themselves to arguments that cannot be resolved — in Obama’s term pluralized, “dumb wars”.
Among observers — detectives, journalists, lawyers, scientists — one viewer always views only a portion of the crime, parade, or war, so there’s room for “whose report” but as data developed with integrity compiles into contribution to case, hypotheses, and theories, that subjective character becomes increasingly objective plus + “valid and reliable” — and the same remains challengeable forever although challenges may stop as they drift into absurdity.
Perhaps loyalty to one point of view or another proves power because someone (by way of intimidation or reward) has developed the ability to get others to see as might be wished.
The blog represents only a developing perspective, of course, but the reference points and their sources may all be examined. We do not have to live in a world “framed” by the caprice and foibles of the powerful. The public has tools more powerful than the same and can in good conditions hold the same to account.
The story begins with âA Factual Overview of the September 11 Border Story.â This introduction summarizes many of the key facts of the hijackersâ entry into the United States. In it, we endeavor to dispel the myth that their entry into the United States was âclean and legal.â It was not. Three hijackers carried passports with indicators of Islamic extremism linked to al Qaeda; two others carried passports manipulated in a fraudulent manner. It is likely that several more hijackers carried passports with similar fraudulent manipulation. Two hijackers lied on their visa applications. Once in the United States, two hijackers violated the terms of their visas. One overstayed his visa. And all but one obtained some form of state identification. We know that six of the hijackers used these state issued identifications to check in for their flights on September 11. Three of them were fraudulently obtained.
Of late, BackChannels’ reading has involved turning from one chilling, albeit bureaucratise nonfiction, page to the next. Â Perhaps with the right coffee or spirits, another reader might set aside the latest McCarry (I’ll have to read him) or Silva (plenty of that here for the winter) and settle into the kind of obscure monograph that packs a moan a minute:
Once the operation was under way, the conspirators attempted to enter the United States 34 times over 21 months, through nine airports. They succeeded all but once. Border inspectors at U.S. airports were unaware of the potential significance of indicators of possible terrorist affiliation in conspiratorsâ passports and had no information about fraudulent travel stamps possibly associated with al Qaeda. No inspectors or agents were trained in terrorist travel intelligence and document practices. The culture at the airports was one of travel facilitation and lax enforcement, with the exception of programs to interdict drug couriers and known criminals.
Enough said — the staff report “9/11 and Terrorist Travel” is online, free, and, if it’s read, certain to add old flavor to the latest web chat about immigration and travel into the United States.
Reading at length — reading for hours — is practically a lost art but one nonetheless practiced around BackChannels. Â The source of the tip to the publication cited above:
Imagine such a thing as a “Medieval Time Bubble” — a place where heads of state hold “absolute power” over their plundered and subject people. It’s in that bubble, today post-Soviet and neo-feudal, that Putin, Assad, Khamenei, AND Baghdaddi need one another for keeping on display “Assad vs The Terrorists” and sustaining eadh their own portion of the medieval worldview.
I believe Daesh autonomous in its operations and spirit but manipulated to serve the ruling feudals as a foil for their militaries or their politics, to serve as leverage (“Assad OR The Terrorists” is the name of that play), and to serve as a goad to the west and related western defense spending.
The response to Daesh AND other medieval enterprises may have to come from the world that most immediately surrounds them.
Trolls online — paid? not paid? Â who knows — regularly credit the United States with having developed ISIS / ISIL / Daesh. Â For cause based in news, BackChannels has taken the opposite stance, and Daesh, although autonomous in its own mind and in its own workings, serves the medieval designs of Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran for the furtherance of despotism, fascism, and militarism — and endless war — far into the 21st Century.
In essence, the dissolving of the Soviet, almost 24 years ago, led not to democracy but to a feudal revanche benefiting primarily the ultra-privileged of Russia.
Today’s axis Moscow-Tehran may boast not only autocratic governance but with the help of Daesh’s presence in Iraq and Syria, a pretty good engine for the promotion of “New Nationalist” urges elsewhere and amplified and broadened divisions between people based on legacy in nationality, race, and religion, an anti-NATO strategy that appears to be working as post-KGB / KGB-Style Theater (“Assad vs The Terrorists”) proves that perception at a glance may create a useful target’s impression of reality.
If true, I don’t think it’s nonsense. The Kingdom has to assert itself against the revised Moscow-Damascus-Tehran alignment. Everyone knows that the PLO was a KGB project from the git-go and that similar politics (as with a Moscow meeting with the PFLP at this time last year) have been sustained by Putin. The Kingdom — and Kingdom Holdings — Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal have become stakeholders in the west.
The Soviet dissolved in session almost 24 years ago.
For people who think with calendars, this next year could be a doozy.
Cute, But Slow Down That Trolley!
What was reading before reading that headline:
Saudi multibillionaire Al-Waleed bin Talal has said that he would stand with Israel against the Palestinians if a new uprising was ignited, Kuwaiti media reported on Tuesday.
According to the AWD news website, bin Talal told the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas: âI will side with the Jewish nation and its democratic aspirations in case of outbreak of a Palestinian Intifada.â
An article from an obscure website falsely claiming that Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal had said that he would side with the Israelis against the Palestinians, went viral on social media before the prince released a statement on Thursday roundly denying the story.
Uh oh.
And Now the Rest of the Message from “Behind the News” (Israel)
The Saudi Arabian Football Federation has announced its refusal to play a World Cup preliminary match against the Palestinian national soccer team in a stadium near Ramallah, Samaria.
In its official announcement Tuesday to FIFA, Saudi Arabia expressed concern for the safety of its players in the sensitive area of Judea-Samaria, but reports say the real reason behind the refusal is fear that playing in the area would be a recognition of the âIsraeli occupation.â
Of course, BackChannels prefers the allegation of Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal’s gentle swing west to the strident reportage and commentary produced by east and west partisan press.
To test public attitude and sentiment on any given but not yet presented policy, one may “float a trial balloon” — put it Out There: “swings west” vs “refuses play on Israeli occupied territory!” — and ascertain the public response to each possibility.
Happens every day.
What is the distance between the private convictions of the powerful and the public perception of the same?
The Prince Online
One of the largest shareholders in Citigroup, the second-largest voting shareholder in News Corporation after the Murdoch family, and with major stakes in dozens of other Western companies, he travels the globe often wearing bespoke suits instead of the traditional Saudi thawb. Based in a country where women canât drive or vote, he champions womenâs rights and discourages his female employees, who make up 65 percent of his workforce, from wearing the veil in his offices.
Saudi Arabian billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talalâs Kingdom Holding Co. agreed to sell its almost 30 percent stake in Saudi Research and Marketing Group at nearly double the market value.
âNot in London, not in New York, not in Dubai, right here in Saudi Arabia,â he said eagerly. âKingdom Hotels, that will go public in Dubai and London. But Kingdom Holdings, that must go public here, thatâs for sure. Because half of my investments are in Saudi Arabia.âÂ
Farther down the column of the same piece:
Many of Prince Alwaleedâs most visible investments have been in the West, especially in hotel propertiesâmost recently Fairmont Hotels & Resorts , which he purchased with Colony Capital for some $3.5 billion. Kingdom Hotel Investments, which Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley will take public, raising at least $300 million, holds stakes in 26 hotels including such landmarks as Londonâs Savoy, the George V in Paris and a number of Four Seasons properties.
The world online, probably much like the one represented virtually, appears to have arrived freighted with classes and masses. Â The wealthy, the few breathtakingly so, appear to battle for share of control of the world’s productive businesses and resources, and two of the qualities of high honor, dignity and integrity, attend their achievements. Â The much, much, and far less wealthy may both bask in that glory as well as swim in its patronage and its “sweet words”, at times, perhaps, pandering.
Where is the Prince going?
The reader’s guess may be as good as BackChannels’ — although a writer blessed with look-up time and cursed with imagination may have a small edge in the collection of tea leaves for floating above the dark waters of an abyss of possibilities.
Back rooms and boardrooms, closed curtains and curtains lifted on theaters, few in the world, much less meandering around the web, may ever ascertain a true state of affairs in the region of the practical interests and strategies of the world’s chief controlling agents of privately-held capital or privately-controlled state capital.  Whether watching Kingdom or Kremlin — how different those two! — the (public access) watching needs must take place from somewhere far on the sidelines — down the columns and between the lines of common publications — and however magnificent the parade, one may see only one’s own small and shades-of-gray portion of the passing show.
In childhood, the kid with the chessboard chooses his opponent. Â Why not in adulthood? Â And what if you could not only control you opponent but make the same another rival’s opponent . . . how cool would that be?
That would be so far beyond cool as to have arrived at deliciously evil.
Bashar al-Assad’s best defense, for the realpolitik theatrical “Assad vs The Terrorists” becomes for the general opposition, including NATO opposition to the tyrant’s rule, “Assad or The Terrorists” (mirroring slogan: “Assad, Or We Burn The Country”).
Related to the previous, ISIS becomes the primary military war-on-terror focus for the west, which comes with diplomatic, human, and financial costs to the west.
 Incubated by its own enemy, the Assad regime and its backers, ISIS has been positioned in time and space to destroy the revolution once pressed by the Free Syrian Army and serve as a foil to the combined forces of Assad, Khamenei, and Putin, all of whom today may at will attack the same even if preferring other non-ISIS (and still noncombatant) targets.
In ISIS, Khamenei (he may thank Assad and Putin) has chosen a familiar Sunni opposition for Iran’s purchase in Iraq’s Shiite militia community. Â Once again, Iranian Revolutionary Guard get to get their boots into battle with their old Baathist foes, now serving as generals in Baghdadi’s cause.
Related Teasers, Links, and Reference
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, established in 1949, has 28 members devoted to the idea of collective security. Prediction: By the time President Obama leaves office in 2017, the NATO pledge of mutual defense in response to aggression will have been exposed as worthless. Objectively the alliance will have ceased to exist. The culprits? Vladimir Putinâand Barack Obama.
The long-term aim would be to defeat or demoralise the non-Isil opposition, so that Isil became the regimeâs only enemy. That would force the West to back President Bashar al-Assad against it. âThey want to clean the country of non-Isil rebels, and then the US will work with them as Isil will be the only enemy,” the Damascus source said.
Russia bombed Syria for a third day on Friday, mainly hitting areas held by rival insurgent groups rather than the Islamic State fighters it said it was targeting and drawing an increasingly angry response from the West.
The U.S.-led coalition that is waging its own air war against Islamic State called on the Russians to halt strikes on targets other than Islamic State.
Next came Russiaâs move on Syria. The weapons that Russia is sending there are not an attempt to settle the conflict. They are there to protect the Assad regime, which is its cause. Moreover, ISIL does not have warplanes: Russiaâs air defense missiles are in Syria for a different purpose.
This became clear on Wednesday, when America was given less than an hourâs warning that the Kremlin was imposing, in effect, a no-fly zone in Syria. With this the Russians not only mounted a direct challenge to American authority. They also ripped up the rulebook of military diplomacy. America was aghast, but had no response.
The Ba’ath regime was strongly anti-American, so it’s not surprising that–despite the unfortunate fate of the Iraqi Communist Party–it was primarily a client of the Soviet Union (not the US), and this relationship continued up until the moment when the Soviet Union collapsed.
That Baathists helped ISIS, before the declaration of the âCaliphate,â to rush into Iraq last year, and assist in the battles for key nodes in Iraq, is indisputable. Even in the Second Battle of Tikrit, just fought in the past few weeks, Baathists were a prominent component of ISIS forces. The very fact that Saddam Husseinâs al-Tikriti tribe was tossed out of their tribal domain certainly bore the hallmarks of the ultimate revenge against the Baathist core.
Moscowâs action were in line with the strategy it had used to defeat the separatist movement in Chechnya, infiltrating the insurgency, driving it into extremism, and facilitating the arrival of al-Qaeda jihadists who displaced the Chechen nationalists. In Syria, Russiaâs actions accord with the strategy adopted by the regime and its Iranian masters to present Assad as the last line of defence against a terrorist takeover of Syria and a genocide against the minorities. New evidence has emerged to underline these points.
Testimony from gendarmerie officers in court documents reviewed by Reuters allege that rocket parts, ammunition and semi-finished mortar shells were carried in trucks accompanied by state intelligence agency (MIT) officials more than a year ago to parts of Syria under Islamist control.
Four trucks were searched in the southern province of Adana in raids by police and gendarmerie, one in November 2013 and the three others in January 2014, on the orders of prosecutors acting on tip-offs that they were carrying weapons, according to testimony from the prosecutors, who now themselves face trial.
While the first truck was seized, the three others were allowed to continue their journey after MIT officials accompanying the cargo threatened police and physically resisted the search, according to the testimony and prosecutor’s report.
“. . . we trust the Russians. Â They proved throughout the crisis, the last four years, they proved they are honest, transparent, and have principles . . . .”
Without Putin, Bashar al-Assad as a dynastic leader would have been finished in 2011. Â However, instead of appropriately responding to Syrian complaints at the time and the yearning for a voice in their own governance, Assad chose to arrest and torture children. Â All that has changed in the past four years has been the scope in breadth and cruelty of the punishment meted to noncombatant Syrians.
At the outset, President Vladimir Putin’s post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia presented a block to the start of the erosion of the Assad family’s absolute ruling power; next: Assad cultivated ISIS by selectively not bombing the al-Qaeda Typicals in their infancy, which then dealt to himself a glorious piece — in his warped eyes — of political theater, “Assad vs The Terrorist”. Â Putin, Assad, and Khamenei each knew “The Terrorists”, which have largely turned out to be ISIS, although many other and similar organizations exist in the field, would present an even more difficult challenge to the west.
For Khamenei, nothing could sustain an Islamic theocratic tyranny in Iran quite like the prospect and reality of a continuous Great Shiite vs Sunni Battle, for which ISIS would conveniently serve as foil to the further expression and regional projection of Iranian Shiite power.
For the west, perhaps, there is less of “reset” in what has taken place in Syria and more of pressing the collapse of Soviet-style “state capitalism” in the form of an oligarchy — a “new nobility” — brought into existence and managed by Putin.  From that perspective, Russia has stalled in Syria and Crimea — and given the price of oil at the well these days — or the evident callousness of the Russian leadership — it may not want the burden of settling either conflict or reconstructing that which it has helped destroy, both “hot spots” being more effective at bleeding the west of financial resources and focus.  With U.S. President Obama shrugging away much of that form of challenge — or seeming to do that — that tack may not be going so well.
Similar observations may be made in regard to Iran’s position.
Even though it will see immense cash flow for the “nuclear deal”, the regime will have to deal with greater greed around itself as well as its unpopular extension through wars by proxy in the region.
Who knows but that Hezbollah will tire of its men dying for the ambitions of the Ayatollah.
Still, nothing will change all that fast.
While Putin, Assad, and Khamenei together defend “absolute power”, the suffering accompanying that psychology — and what ISIS means to bring to Syrians, i.e., greater tyranny in the name of God, will be even worse — will grow worse: the “Eye Doctor” has lost himself in his own inverted fantasia, a world in which Putin’s Russia has proven “honest, transparent, and principled” (tell that to Ukrainians) and Syrians suffer primarily at the hands of “The Terrorists” and not beneath the barrel bombs dropped on the most helpless of them by Assad’s own air force.
The “additional reference” section may be at this point outmoded by a very good and quick Google search engine. Â We can find what we may want to read in flash; whether we can find the conversation we need to have as quickly remains to be seen.
Ismail Haniyeh: Billionaire Khaled Mashaal: Billionaire Ali Khamenei and his brother: between the two of them, $57 billion in private portfolio.
The only “powers” occupying the Arab communities of Greater Israel or potential Palestinian suzerainty remain the PLO, Hamas, and powerful Palestinian families expert at getting others to die or suffer for their greed.
The official needs of the Arabs abandoned in now multiple wars and made to serve as goads to Israel and the west are as bottomless as the souls of their leaders have proven empty. Their claims to nobility — as suggested by the full pockets known to Arafat, Haniyeh, and Mashaal — have turned out over generations the proven claims of thieves and murderers. Hamas + human rights; Hamas + human shields; Hamas + millionaires: after a while, such searches tell a whole political story. Fatah has done less well in some regards. Black September is history. What Fatah and Hamas appear to have to offer their own, much less Israel or anyone else, appears to be their tired old jaws and their continuing violence or threat of it against their own constituents as well as Israel.
Related Reference
Bar-Zohar, Michael and Eitan Haber. Â The Quest for the Red Prince. Â New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1983.
Credit Putin, Assad, and Khamenei with the perversion of a modest people’s revolution in Syria (1911) into a grand piece of political theater: “Assad vs The Terrorists”. To get that image, the three leaders, bonded in a post-Soviet and now neo-feudal arrangement in relationship, had to adopt the strategy of bombing moderate Syrians to hell, basically, and allowing the colonizing growth of the al-Qaeda-type organizations to take over the field. http://www.newsweek.com/us-accuses-assad-aiding-islamic…
The behind-the-scenes story was relayed to me in the early winter of 2014, which means it had been observed earlier (by a Syrian refugee) in the theater.
The feudal-mind and leaders among them, “Red, Brown, or Green” — i.e., post-Soviet Russian; new National Socialists (like Jobbik in Hungary); and “the Islamists” — don’t care about people (revisit the recent history of the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp). What they care about in clinical terms is “narcissistic supply”; in more familiar terms is their own mirrored grandiose and messianic delusions: they have dealt themselves wealth, power, and palaces (and a $51 billion Winter Olympics) while this suffering in Syria was unfolding.
Also ranked among billionaires: Ismail Haniyeh; Khaled Mashaal.
Sold to the incurious: oil and Israel; discerned by the independent: “syndicate red brown green” — leaders gambling on their own lawlessness and the survival of medievalism and feudal absolute power.
BackChannels 