Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Five children killed in government shelling as they leave school in Eastern Ghouta

The shelling followed a UN aid delivery to the area a day earlier

An injured Syrian child lies on a bed at a makeshift hospital following a reported government shelling in Jisreen on 31 October (AFP)

Government shelling killed around 10 people, including five children at a school gate, in a besieged rebel enclave near Syria's capital Damascus on Tuesday, a day after a UN aid delivery to the area, a war monitor said.

The shelling also injured 30 other people in the Eastern Ghouta area, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Small blue school bags and a tiny pair of shoes lay in a corner, drenched in blood.

Outside the primary school, children stared at the pools of blood staining the concrete ground.

"I was coming out of school and was about to turn into a side street when the shell hit. There were dead people, wounded people," one child told AFP.

The Britain-based Observatory said the ongoing shelling which began Tuesday morning hit the towns of Jisreen, Douma, Saqba, Mesraba, Harasta, Ain Terma, Hazza and Kafr Batna.

"A shell fired by regime troops hit the entrance of a school in Jisreen just as children were leaving it, killing five people including four schoolchildren," Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

On Monday a United Nations and Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) convoy delivered aid to the towns of Kafr Batna and Saqba.

A tightening siege by government forces has pushed people to the verge of famine in the eastern suburbs, residents and aid workers said last week, bringing desperation to the only major rebel enclave near the Syrian capital.

Syrian state television on Tuesday said shells had also hit parts of government-held Damascus, injuring at least five people.

In July, Moscow and rebels in Eastern Ghouta signed a deal to make the area a "de-escalation zone". The agreement raised hopes of open crossings and aid flows.

The aid organisation International Rescue Committee said on Monday the de-escalation zone agreements with rebel areas across Syria were failing to protect civilians.

"The safety of civilians has not improved with the establishment of these so-called de-escalation areas. With so many armed groups not covered by ceasefire agreements, we have even seen periods of increased aerial bombardment," IRC's Middle East Director of Public Affairs Tom Garofalo said.

France gears up to help Israel whitewash its crimes

BDS France activists leafleted outside the Institute Français in Paris on 26 October to protest the “France-Israel 2018” propaganda festival planned for next year.

BDS France

Ali Abunimah Activism and BDS Beat 31 October 2017

Earlier this month, the French government issued a condemnation of Israel’s rapid expansion of its colonies on occupied Palestinian territory, calling its actions “illegal under international law.”

But like similar statements from other European governments, it was only words.

France’s real policy is to give Israel unconditional support and rewards no matter what crimes it commits.

A prime example of that is the Saison France-Israël 2018 propaganda festival planned by the Institut Français, the international cultural arm of the French government, in collaboration with Israel.

Blaming Palestinians

“The France-Israel 2018 Season will mark a new and important stage in relations between the two countries,” according to the Institut Français. “It will honor in all domains of creativity the close and high-level ties that already exist while mapping out horizons for the future.”

With glitzy events in France and Israel, the initiative aims to “present the image of the two countries through the most contemporary forms of expression.”

The chief Israeli co-organizer of the festival is Emmanuel Halperin, a TV presenter and former diplomat who has promoted anti-Palestinian propaganda.

Completely absolving Israel of its responsibilities, Halperin claimed last year that Palestinians seek the “destruction of Israel” through a “very perverse strategy.” According to Halperin, Palestinians want to “let the situation rot” in order to bring Israel under international pressure.

He has also claimed that Palestinians want Israel to maintain its brutal decade-long siege of Gaza in order to “tarnish Israel’s image in the international community.”

Covering up the Nakba

The choice of 2018 for this propaganda festival can be no coincidence. Next year marks the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Zionist militias in order to establish the Israeli state on the ruins of Palestinian society.

Last week activists from BDS France, a group supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign, rallied outside the Paris headquarters of the Institut Français “to denounce the scandalous propaganda operation France-Israel 2018, which aims to enhance relations between France and the Israeli apartheid regime.”

“We do not let ourselves be fooled by calls for dialogue when they concern a state that uses culture for the political goal of restoring its international image,” BDS France said. “Culture can never whitewash Israel of its crimes, persecutions and discrimination, whether against the populations of Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians living in Israel, or refugees.”

Officials questioned

Meanwhile the campaign of repression by French authorities against citizens aiming to hold Israel accountable continues.

Earlier this month police summoned four municipal officials from the town of Ivry, including the mayor, for investigation over statements they made supporting a boycott of Israeli settlement goods.

The statements were made during a debate last year, when the Paris suburb’s town council voted by a large majority to call on the French government to end its repression of the BDS movement and to ban the import of settlement goods.

The police complaint was filed by BNVCA, an Israel lobby group that masquerades as an anti-racism organization.

The town’s resolution is in line with a growing international consensus that trade in settlement goods should be banned.

But now the Ivry officials could face charges of “publicly provoking discrimination” merely for supporting this consensus that Israel should be made to abide by international law.

Philippe Bouyssou, one of the officials targeted by the complaint, called the police intervention “an intolerable attack on the freedom of expression.”

During his election campaign earlier this year, President Emmanuel Macron vowed that if elected he would continue his predecessor’s campaign of repression against the BDS movement.

In contrast to France’s enthusiasm for promoting Israel’s interests, it stayed silent for two full months about Israel’s ongoing detention without charge of Salah Hamouri, a Palestinian-French human rights defender.

Balfour Declaration At 100: Some Pertinent Reflections

By Mohamed Harees –OCTOBER 29, 2017

Lukman Harees

For centuries long our land enslaved- by Turkish kings with sharpened blade.
We prayed to end the Sultan’s curse, the British came and spoke a verse.

“It’s World War One, if you agree- to fight with us we’ll set you free.”

The war we fought at Britain’s side,-our blood was shed for Arab pride.

At war’s end Turks were smitten,-our only gain, the lies of Britain.

This Stephen Ostrander’s simple verse manages to cut through a mountain of rhetoric to the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The question of giving Palestinians their own homeland has commanded the attention of the UN since the organization was founded. Since resolutions 242 and 338, the Security Council has taken no significant steps to end the Israel-Palestine conflict, in the light of continued Israeli arrogance and US hegemony. As we reflect on origins of this conflict, we cannot overlook “the single most destructive political document of the 20th century on the Middle East” (as the leading Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi described it), – the Balfour Declaration, the centenary of which falls in November this year.

Incidentally, Britain sponsored the Zionist project through the Balfour Declaration to transform Arab Palestine into a ‘Jewish state’ in November 1917. The Declaration was actually a letter written on November 2, 1917, by the then foreign secretary of Britain, Arthur James Balfour, to Baron Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. Although it did not offer partition, it sowed the seeds for it, which eventually allowed the Zionist movement to occupy Palestine.

The letter promised the Jews a “national home” in Palestine, which was then a part of the Ottoman Empire but was soon to be ruled under a British mandate, without prejudicing the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. It was later incorporated into a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate for Palestine, despite contradicting other agreements. This Declaration was a prime example of colonial arrogance shown by Britain; which Arthur Koestler witheringly summarised as a document in which ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’. No wonder Palestinians casted aside the Mandate as the illegitimate exercise of British imperialism. It is worth our while to re-read Edward Said’s wise words about the Balfour Declaration.

“What is important about the Declaration is, first, that it has long formed the juridical basis of Zionist claims to Palestine, and second, more crucial for our purposes here, that it was a statement whose positional force can only be appreciated when the demographic, or human realities of Palestine are clearly understood. For the Declaration was made (a) by a European power (b) about a non-European territory (c) in a flat disregard of both the presences and the wishes of the native majority resident in that territory, and (d) it took the form of a promise about this same territory to another foreign group, that this foreign group might, quite literally, make this territory a national home for the Jewish people.”.In fact, it was more than that: It allowed a settler colonial movement, appearing very late in history, to envisage a triumphant project even before it set proper foot in the land or had a meaningful geographical and demographic presence there”.

Tofail Ahmed: A living legend in Bangladesh’s Politics

by Anwar A. Khan-Oct 31, 2017

“A leader is one who knows the way,
goes the way and shows the way.” – John C. Maxwell

( October 31, 2017, Dhaka, Sri Lanka Guardian) Tofail Ahmed, Member of Parliament and Commerce Minister of Bangladesh arrived at 75 years of his age on 22nd October 2017. He knows the art of politics in line with the spirit of the above quote. Tofail is a living legend in politics in Bangladesh from his student’s life at a very early age. The 1969 upheaval led by Ahmed was so popular that it had a far-reaching impact on our national politics and history. The Guardian newspaper of UK then ran a report on him and introduced him as the virtual Governor of former East Pakistan during the 1969 uprising though Tofail Ahmed used to live an ordinary life like the general students, taking money from his father. The 1969 uprising which led the ouster of Pakistan’s dictatorial President Ayub Khan from power and the Agartala Conspiracy Case against Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was reduced to ashes. Sheikh Mujib came out from the jail like a man distinguished by exceptional courage and nobility and strength. Sheikh Mujib was then adorned with the title of “Bangabandhu” (Friend of Bengal) at a mass reception by Tofail Ahmed on behalf of the people of Bangladesh. Later on, Bangabandhu became the Founding Father of Bangladesh.

He was born in a remote hamlet under the Bhola District of Bangladesh on 22nd October 1943. His very name signifies him something else…extraordinary… over-the-top …a legendary politician in Bangladesh’s history. A symbol of something! It is something that someone intends to stand for something other than itself. A symbol is something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention. It does not have to be an image: for example, a rose can be said to be a symbol of love, a cup can be used as an object of reference, a symbol for breaking time, and a cross – a symbol of hope. Yes, Tofail Ahmed has stood as a symbol of hope for his people. He was a legendary student leader during his student life in the Dhaka University in the 1960s. Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its values. So much emphasis has been placed upon the significance of the true, candid and sincere service to the people. Tofail Ahmed is a great political leader like the famous words of Beth Revis, “Power isn’t control at all–power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own.”

The term 1960s refers to an era more often called the Sixties, denoting the complex of inter-related cultural and political trends around the globe. Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed, MP was a product of that time; and he led the 1969 mass uprising as the Vice President of Dhaka University Central Students’ Union. If you analyse the nature of student politics in the golden days of the 1950s and 1960s, you may find the difference. “The Sixties”, as they are known in both scholarship and popular culture, is a term used by historians, journalists, and other objective academics; in some cases nostalgically to describe the counterculture and revolution in social norms about clothing, music, drugs, dress, sexuality, formalities, and schooling; and in others pejoratively to denounce the decade as one of irresponsible excess, flamboyance, and decay of social order. The decade was also labelled the Swinging Sixties because of the fall or relaxation of social taboos especially relating to racism and sexism that occurred during this time. Noted commentator Christopher Booker described this era as a classical Jungian nightmare cycle, where a rigid culture, unable to contain the demands for greater individual freedom, broke free of the social constraints of the previous age through extreme deviation from the norm. Several Western nations such as the US, UK, France, and West Germany turned to the political left in the early and mid-1960s.

In Bangladesh, the 1960s was a period of radical political change as 32 countries gained independence from their European colonial rulers. During that period, all of the student organisations were ideologically based and were accountable to the general students, since they had to go to the general students to win the central union elections. As a result, they tried to attract the general students by motivating them, dealing with the problems of the students and through co-curricular activities. Through such activities they supplemented the national issues. As a result, these issues got popularity and became successful movements. Tofail Ahmed once said, “Bangladesh Chhatra League was neither a student front of the Awami League nor was it an associate member, rather it was an independent organisation lead by the students for the welfare of the students. We were not allowed to deliver speeches with the national leaders, nor did the national leaders come to our programmes except in 1970, when Bangabandhu participated at the council of Chhatra League due to a national crisis.”

Now as a giant politician, he considers like the political leaders and social scientists who believe that student politics can be revived to its original form by handing over absolute control to regular students by arranging councils and central students’ elections regularly. A fully functional central students’ union is also effective in running the universities smoothly. The university and college authorities could easily solve many problems in consultation with the elected student leaders. To achieve this, they believe that the political leaders must come to consensus of not misusing the students for political or personal interest; the teachers should play a neutral and nurturing role. When the process will start functioning, it will attract the brightest students.

True leadership can only emerge if students get a chance to nurture their leadership qualities during their university life. A complete end to political activities is not the answer and will cause the nation to suffer in the future. A future generation lacking political consciousness will create intellectually stunted national leaders. Organising the students’ union elections is the need of the hour and student organisations should be prepared for this by arranging councils. The process has already started in some institutions. The good news is that all of the student parties are participating in these union elections at different colleges. It is only if our political parties are sincere about making sure about our educational institutions are exactly what they are supposed be, that is, centres of learning where young adults are inspired to be principled, honest citizens, the culture of violence and corruption under the shelter of student politics will end. Student politics should be limited to issues that affect students and enhance student life not endanger it.

Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed is one of the most influential political leaders in the history of Bangladesh and as an ideal follower of the “Father of the Nation” Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. He was one of the great organisers of Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 and acted as one of the Chiefs of Bangladesh Liberation Front or in other words ‘Mujib Bahini’. He is a veteran Parliamentarian and earned love and respect of Parliament Members and people from all walks of life for his oratory skills in parliamentary debate on various national issues. He was the Minister for Commerce and Industries from 23 june1996 to 28 December, 1999. He Continued as the Minister for Industries up to 2001, Chairman, Parliamentary Standing Committee on Ministry of Industry from 2009-2013. He was also Minister for Housing & Public Works and Industries from 21 November, 2013 to 12 January, 2014. Now he is working as Minister for Commerce Ministry from 12 January, 2014.

MP Tofail Ahmed is the Chairman of one of the Parliamentary Standing Committees. He is also the member of the advisory committee of AL. Earlier he was one of the influential member of the presidium (highest body) of AL. He was elected several times as member of national parliament from Bhola-1 constituency. In 1970, Tofail was a young man who became the political secretary of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. He is one of the top political leaders in Bangladesh. He started political career by joining in AL. He started politics since his student life by joining student politics. Huge numbers of people participated in demonstrations that are still remembered with reverence–like the 1969 movement under his able and dynamic student leadership. It was a significant movement as if like all power to all the people, whether you are white, black, blue, red, green, yellow or polka-dotted–in the final analysis, what was wanted was real Bengali people’s community control and empowerment. The struggle was for a different future for the people of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh has a long and very rich history. It has produced amazing leaders who have influenced and contributed to the people, history and country as it is today. Some of them were good leaders, others even great. But there have also been leaders who abused their power and did not serve the public interest and who failed to follow the public interests to serve their citizens. It is important to know who at least some of these leaders were and how they shaped our country and its people. They were not only the big leaders – they are the people’s leaders and Tofail Ahmed is one of such a great leader in the domain Bangladesh’s politics. He has been working tirelessly to make a difference to uplift the lives of common people in Bangladesh. Most people will agree that Tofail like leaders influence our country in some way or another. In Bangladesh, many independence movement leaders helped their country to gain freedom from colonial rulers and in this respect; the name of Tofail Ahmed will come to the forefront in the public eyes. He is one of the strong voices of people’s power in Bangladesh. He is still remembered as the de-facto Governor of former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) during the 1969 uprising.

Long live this living legend of politics of Bangladesh with his warmth of sunshine for his people.

Tunnel collapse may have killed 200 after N.Korea nuclear test - Japanese broadcaster

OCTOBER 31, 2017

TOKYO (Reuters) - A tunnel at North Korea’s nuclear test site collapsed after Pyongyang’s sixth atomic test in September, possibly killing more than 200 people, Japanese broadcaster TV Asahi said on Tuesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the situation.

People walk past a street monitor showing a news report about North Korea's nuclear test in Tokyo, Japan, September 3, 2017. REUTERS/Toru Hanai/Files

Reuters has not been able to verify the report.

About 100 workers at the Punggye-ri nuclear site were affected by the initial collapse, which took place around Sept. 10, the broadcaster said.

A second collapse during a rescue operation meant it was possible the death toll could have exceeded 200, it added.

Experts have said a series of tremors and landslides near the nuclear test base probably mean the country’s sixth and largest blast on Sept. 3 has destabilised the region, and the Punggye-ri nuclear site may not be used for much longer to test nuclear weapons.

Suspect identified in Manhattan vehicle attack, with 8 dead in 'act of terror'

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said at least eight people were killed when a vehicle drove onto a bike path in Lower Manhattan Oct. 31. (Reuters)

By Mark Berman, Devlin Barrett and Rachel Siegel October 31 at 6:39

A man deliberately drove into bicyclists and pedestrians in a bike path in Lower Manhattan, killing at least eight people and injuring more than one dozen in an act of terrorism, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said Tuesday.

“This is a very painful day in our city,” de Blasio said at a news conference. “Based on the information we had at this moment, this was an act of terror, a particularly cowardly act of terror aimed at innocent civilians.”

At the news conference, New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill said that around 3:05 p.m., a man driving a rented Home Depot pickup truck entered the West Side Highway bike path, striking bicyclists and pedestrians as he drove southbound. He collided with a bus, injuring two adults and two children inside.

The man then “exited the vehicle brandishing two handguns,” O’Neill said. A paintball gun and a pellet gun were later recovered at the scene.

A police officer confronted the man and shot him in the abdomen, wounding him, O’Neill said. Police arrested the suspect and said they were not seeking anyone else in the incident.

The suspect is a 29-year-old from Tampa, Sayfullo Saipov, according to two law enforcement officials.

A Home Depot spokesman confirmed that a rental truck from the company was involved and said Home Depot was cooperating with authorities.

President Trump responded to the attack on Twitter, saying it “looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump has been briefed on the incident by Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and will be continually updated as more details are known.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected,” Sanders said.

Though the Islamic State — a militant group that regularly claims responsibility for attacks around the world — did not immediately assert responsibility for the New York attack, its supporters celebrated it in online postings, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity on the Web.

Greg Ahl was driving south on 12th Avenue when he passed “crushed bikes and bodies all along the bike path.” He said the attacker must have just driven down the path since “nobody had even stepped up to help [the bikers] yet.”

Ahl, of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, estimated seeing 30 crushed bicycles around 3:15 p.m. with “parts everywhere” that “looked like they had been run over.”

He said that a pedestrian told him that a white pickup truck had just driven south through the bicycle lane.

“After I saw more than a dozen crushed bicycles, I realized what it was,” Ahl said.

Officials flooded to the scene after the first reports of the carnage on the West Side of Manhattan, not far from Stuyvesant High School and the World Trade Center site.

De Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) arrived in the area in the late afternoon and were briefed on what happened alongside O’Neill, the police commissioner.

A fire department spokesman said Tuesday that people were “being treated and evaluated at the scene,” which he described as “a pretty lengthy scene.” Police urged people to avoid a stretch of West Street extending more than a mile along the West Side of Manhattan.

Wesley Lowery and Eli Rosenberg contributed to this developing story. First posted: 3:52 p.m.

Donald Trump’s Biggest Disinformation Campaign Yet

The Russia collusion scandal is closing in on America's commander-in-chief of fake news.

Former campaign manager for U.S. President Donald Trump, Paul Manafort (R), leaves U.S. District Court after pleading not guilty following his indictment on federal charges on October 30, 2017 in Washington, D.C. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

BY MAX BOOT-

OCTOBER 31, 2017, 10:20 AM

President Donald Trump hasn’t delivered on his campaign promise to create U.S. coal or steel jobs (foreign steel imports are up 27 percent this year), but he is creating a bonanza in the business of “fake news.” Admittedly a lot of those jobs have been outsourced to Russia, but Trump is also providing plenty of employment at home.

Even before Monday’s bombshells from special counsel Robert Mueller — Trump’s campaign manager and his business partner have been indicted on multiple counts of laundering more than $18 million from pro-Russian clients in Ukraine, while a Trump foreign policy advisor pleaded guilty to lying about his efforts to solicit Clinton “dirt” from Russian contacts — Trump and his associates had launched Operation Obfuscation. Their far-fetched claim is that the real collusion isn’t between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It’s between Hillary Clinton and the Kremlin.

“It is now commonly agreed, after many months of COSTLY looking, that there was NO collusion between Russia and Trump,” Trump tweeted on Friday. “Was collusion with HC!” Then on Sunday, with the indictments looming, a more desperate version of the same message: “There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out. DO SOMETHING!” And on Monday, after the indictments were announced: “[W]hy aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????”

Picking up the theme, Trump’s faithful follower Jeanine Pirro blared on Fox News: “It’s time to shut it down, turn the tables, and lock her up.” Former White House aide Sebastian Gorka did her one better. He implied that Hillary Clinton was guilty of treason, just like the Rosenbergs, and that she too deserves the electric chair!

What, exactly, is the evidence for these hyperbolic claims? White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders asserted: “The evidence Clinton campaign, DNC & Russia colluded to influence the election is indisputable.” True — if “indisputable” has been redefined to mean “nonexistent.” The White House case, based on little more than warmed-over hearsay and discredited conspiracy mongering, relates to two familiar controversies: the Steele dossier alleging Trump-Russia links and the Russian acquisition of a Canadian company that owns uranium mines in America.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His forthcoming book is “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.”

The Steele dossier, compiled by the respected former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, landed in the news recently when a law firm representing the Clinton campaign admitted to having paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS to compile it. (Earlier, we now know, Fusion had been hired by conservative news site the Washington Free Beacon to research Trump and other candidates.) The horror! If you listen to Trump’s defenders, it’s perfectly proper for Donald Trump Jr. to seek opposition research from Russian agents but a death-penalty offense for the Clinton campaign to try to uncover the Trump-Russia links. In their telling, the investigation of a potential crime is as bad as the crime itself. Huh?

The argument seems to be that because Steele talked to Russian sources in the course of compiling his dossier, he, and thus the entire Clinton campaign, was “colluding” with the Kremlin. By the same logic, anytime the CIA talks to Russian agents it, too, is “colluding” with Russia. This is to render the word “collusion” meaningless — which is precisely the point.

It’s perfectly possible, even probable, that some misinformation made it into the Steele dossier. That’s often the case with raw intelligence files. But the veteran CIA officer John Sipher has concluded that a “large portion of the dossier is crystal clear, certain, consistent and corroborated.”

There is no reason to suppose, as the Trumpkins posit, that the Kremlin fed all this information to Steele in the hopes of discrediting Trump when no one could be certain that the report would ever become public. Why, in any case, would the Kremlin seek to discredit the most pro-Russian candidate ever to pursue the presidency? Why, moreover, would Trump want to help Hillary Clinton, whom he is widely reported to revile for her tough anti-Russia line? And why, if the Kremlin were intent on making Trump out to be a Russian stooge, would its spokesman so vociferously deny that very charge? To believe that the Steele dossier was an elaborate Kremlin ploy requires the same sort of faith-based reasoning necessary to believe that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. or that Ted Cruz’s father killed JFK.

In the final analysis, the Steele dossier is a sideshow, and the question of who funded it is a sideshow of a sideshow. Yes, the FBI saw it, but it’s not the basis for the unanimous assessment released in early January by the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the director of national intelligence concluding that the Kremlin interfered in the U.S. election to help Trump and hurt Clinton. Nor is the Steele dossier the reason why independent counsel Robert Mueller has been appointed to investigate the president.

Mueller was appointed only after (1) Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself after not having been truthful about his own contacts with Russia’s ambassador during the campaign and (2) Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in a self-confessed attempt to stop the probe of the “Russia thing.”

Thus Trump is now being investigated not only for collusion with a hostile foreign power but also for obstruction of justice and probably other offenses as well — and based on the indictments unsealed Monday, special counsel Mueller is making rapid progress. The truth or falsity of the Steele dossier does not affect the outcome of this investigation in the slightest.

What about the uranium deal, which Trump has compared to Watergate and his “minister of information,” Sean Hannity, has called “the biggest scandal — or, at least, one of them — in American history”? If you listen to the hype, you would think that in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton allowed the Russians to loot America’s uranium reserves. As Trump said on Oct. 24, 2016: “Remember that Hillary Clinton gave Russia 20 percent of American uranium and, you know, she was paid a fortune.”

The reality, as numerous media organizations have documented, is rather more prosaic. In 2010, Russia’s nuclear-energy agency, Rosatom, applied to buy a majority stake in Uranium One, a Canadian firm that controls roughly 20 percent of America’s uranium reserves. The deal had to be cleared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which includes a representative of the State Department along with eight other federal agencies. Ultimate approval authority to stop the deal lay with President Obama. The government duly OK’d the sale, because it wasn’t judged to be a threat to national security. Rosatom was prohibited from exporting any of the uranium, and the mining licenses would remain with U.S. subsidiaries controlled by American citizens.

If you believe the conspiracy-mongers, however, the reason the deal went ahead is that Uranium One’s owner contributed beaucoup bucks to the Clinton Foundation. Fact check: Foundation donor Frank Giustra sold his company to Uranium One in 2007 and says he unloaded his personal stake in the firm at that time — three years before Rosatom tried to buy Uranium One. Bill Clinton did get $500,000 for a speech in Moscow in 2010, but there is no evidence that this was part of any quid pro quo, and there are no records of Rosatom contributing to the Clinton Foundation.

Moreover, Hillary Clinton says she was not personally involved in the review of the sale, and the official who represented the State Department on the review panel backs her up. Even if they are lying, Clinton’s vote still would have been only one of nine, so the approval of the sale was hardly her doing.

The real scandal may turn out to be Trump’s efforts to tar Clinton.

CNN has reported that “Trump made it clear he wanted the gag order lifted on an undercover informant who played a critical role in an FBI investigation into Russian efforts to gain influence in the uranium industry in the United States during the Obama administration.” If true, this would suggest that Trump is actively interfering with the course of justice in order to impugn a political opponent.

This episode recalls Trump’s efforts earlier this year to prove that Obama had wiretapped him. In September, Trump’s own Justice Department definitively refuted this reckless allegation, writing in a court filing: “Both FBI and NSD [National Security Division] have no records related to wiretaps as described by the March 4, 2017 tweets.” The only crime that may have been committed was by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who had to step down from overseeing the Kremlingate probe because of accusations that he had leaked classified information to concoct an “Obama surveillance scandal.”

Now Nunes has directed the House Intelligence Committee to investigate the uranium deal in cooperation with the House Oversight Committee, while the House Judiciary Committee is set to launch the umpteenth probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The operating principle was laid out by Trump himself in his final debate with Clinton when he responded to her accusations that he was a pawn of Putin by sputtering with his trademark eloquence: “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet.” This is the reasoning of an elementary school playground: “I know you are, but what am I?”

That Trump’s defenders find this riposte so compelling is an indicator of the extent to which they are willing to suspend their critical faculties in slavish service to their maximum leader. As for the rest of us, we need to ignore the Trumpkins’ attempts to shift the conversation and focus like a laser on the case that Mueller and his Untouchables are building against the president of the United States and his closest associates.