Trump appears to promote violence against CNN with tweet

 President Trump renewed his attacks against CNN, which he has repeatedly called "fake news," on June 27, after CNN retracted a story about ties between a Trump associate and a Russian investment fund. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By David Nakamura July 2 at 10:24 AM

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — A day after defending his use of social media as befitting a “modern day” president, President Trump appeared to promote violence against CNN in a tweet.

Trump, who is on vacation at his Bedminster golf resort, posted on Twitter an old video clip of him performing in a WWE professional wrestling match, but with a CNN logo superimposed on the head of his opponent. In the clip, Trump is shown slamming the CNN avatar to the ground and pounding him with simulated punches and elbows to the head. Trump added the hashtags #FraudNewsCNN and #FNN, for “fraud news network.”

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

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Donald J. Trump 

✔@realDonaldTrump

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN

9:21 AM - 2 Jul 2017

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The video clip apparently had been posted days earlier on Reddit, a popular social media message board. The president's tweet was the latest escalation in his beef with CNN over its coverage of him and his administration.

A White House spokeswoman with the traveling press corps hotel here in Bridgewater, N.J., a few miles from Trump's golf club, declined to address questions about the tweet. Trump has no public events planned for Sunday; his schedule lists phone calls Sunday night with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. He is scheduled to return to Washington on Monday evening and participate in an Independence Day event at the White House on Tuesday.

On ABC’s “This Week,” homeland security adviser Tom Bossert dismissed the idea that the tweet might be a threat, while he praised the president for “genuine” communication.

“No one would perceive that as a threat; I hope they don’t,” Bossert said, referring to the tweet.
In a statement tweeted out by CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, CNN called it “a sad day when the President of the United States encourages violence against reporters.” The network cited Trump's “juvenile behavior far below the dignity of his office. We will keep doing our jobs. He should start doing his.”

The company's communications department Twitter account responded to Trump's tweet by quoting White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders during a briefing last week when she said: “The president in no way form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence. If anything, quite the contrary.”

In the statement, CNN said: “Clearly, Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied when she said the President had never done so.”

Some Trump supporters noted on social media that the violence in professional wrestling is simulated and that the president was making a symbolic point about “fake news” coverage of him. But questions about the political climate for journalists has swirled for weeks since Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) body-slammed a reporter for the Guardian the day before a special election, which he won. Gianforte, who had initially denied Jacobs' account, later apologized to him and was sentenced in court to 40 hours of community service and 20 hours of anger management classes.

Trump's ire at CNN has increased since CNN retracted a story last week that said the Senate was investigating connections between one of his transition aides and the head of a Russian bank; three reporters and editors resigned over the report, which the network said failed to go through the proper vetting, but the White House has continued to denounce the story.

On Saturday, Trump called CNN “fake news” and “garbage journalism.” He also implied that his critics are wrong to suggest that it is beneath the office of the presidency to attack rivals on Twitter. He said he was compelled to weaponize the medium to defeat “fake news” organizations.

1 Jul

Donald J. Trump 

 ✔@realDonaldTrump

The FAKE & FRAUDULENT NEWS MEDIA is working hard to convince Republicans and others I should not use social media - but remember, I won....

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Donald J. Trump 

✔@realDonaldTrump

....the 2016 election with interviews, speeches and social media. I had to beat #FakeNews, and did. We will continue to WIN!

6:02 PM - 1 Jul 2017

 
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Donald J. Trump 

✔@realDonaldTrump

My use of social media is not Presidential - it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!

6:41 PM - 1 Jul 2017

 
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Trump also spent a chunk of a speech at the Celebrate Freedom rally for veterans and religious freedom at the Kennedy Center on Saturday night denouncing and taunting the media.
“The fake media is trying to silence us, but we will not let them. The people know the truth,” Trump said. “The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House, but I’m president and they’re not.”

He drew a standing ovation from the crowd, which waved miniature American flags.

President Trump spoke about the media while at the Celebrate Freedom Concert in Washington D.C. on July 1. (The Washington Post)

The video clip appears to be from a WWE appearance in which the president body slammed WWE Chairman Vince McMahon as part of the “Battle of the Billionaires.”

Trump, a New York real estate developer and promoter, has had a long association with the WWE and was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 2013. At the ceremony, McMahon referred to Trump as “a Wrestlemania institution” and recalled this episode, which culminated with Trump participating in shaving McMahon's head in the ring.

“I will challenge Vince next year to a fight,” Trump said in his acceptance speech, “and I will kick his ass, if he wants. I will kick his ass.”

Trump appointed McMahon's wife, Linda, who donated $6 million to a pro-Trump SuperPAC, as the head of the federal Small Business Administration.

Bossert echoed a line of defense that other Trump surrogates have employed in recent days: that when Trump's policies are attacked in the media, he has a right to counterpunch — in this case, physically.

“He’s beaten up, in a way, on the cable platforms — he has a right to respond,” Bossert said.
Bossert argued that the tweet might actually a good thing because “whatever the content of that tweet or any particular tweet, he’s generated a genuine ability to communicate directly” with the public.

“Importantly here, he’s a genuine president expressing himself genuinely,” Bossert said. He added that he was “pretty proud of the president for developing a Twitter and a social media platform where he can talk directly to the American people.”

When “This Week” host Martha Raddatz pressed him to weigh in on the appropriateness of the tweet, Bossert accused the media of harping on it instead of focusing on more substantive issues.

“It’s a good example of you or the media producers here deciding what we talk about and what we don’t talk about,” he said.

On CBS's “Face the Nation,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said that “it’s not going to do any good” for himself or anyone else to talk about “things we might not like about his Twitter behavior.” If they want to elevate discourse, Lee, said, lawmakers should “make sure we do whatever we can to treat others kindly.”

On CNN's “State of the Union,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said he is concerned about Trump's attacks on the media more broadly.

“There's an important distinction to draw between bad stories or crappy coverage and the right that citizens have to argue about that and complain about that and trying to weaponize distrust,” Sasse said.


— Karoun Demirjian and John Wagner contributed to this report.

Part II – A Hell Of A Ward!

By Emil van der Poorten –JULY 2, 2017

Emil van der Poorten

I closed last week at the point that the Attendant shaving my entire body with a razor blade held between his fingers had created the opportunity for me to enter one of those faiths that require circumcision. As an atheist, that would have been a rather unfortunate fate, to understate the case!

Anyway, I was trundled back to my bed in the gurney that left something to be desired in the matter of basic cleanliness, leave alone the asepsis that one would except in a hospital.

In the bed next to mine was the young soldier who was awaiting the same procedure as I and, as is typical in such situations, entered into conversation with me.  He was, needless to say, more than a little surprised at the failure of the attendant to take him up on his offer of a new disposable razor at the time I had to be shaved.

Soon we were wheeled away to our respective fates in the Pacemaker-installation chamber!

I was placed, on my back, on a “bed” not wide enough to accommodate my shoulders and instructed to keep my arms horizontal, not letting them drop.  Try it sometime when you have the time and inclination to engage in such an exercise and don’t fail to let me know how you prevent an unsupported arm or arms from shaking uncontrollably! While this comedy was unfolding the assistants to the doctor who was to put the Pacemaker in were being directed to run hither and thither, putting on lights and extinguishing them in a manner that would have done the Keystone cops proud!

When it was finally acknowledged that both my arms needed support, a rough board was wedged on the side of the arm that was shaking uncontrollably to keep it still.  That worked!

Then began the actual process of installing the Pacemaker.

The anaesthetic was still working when the cut was made because I didn’t experience any pain. A trip down the internet highway to locate “Doctor in the house” a classic film of its time might prove most instructive and entertaining in the context of what followed however!

The exertions of the “Pacemaker-installer’s” conduct was uncannily reminiscent of Dirk Bogarde and company, as young interns, doing a pantomime of their curmudgeon of a senior surgeon (James Robertson Justice) closing up an operated-on patient, jumping up and down on his sedated body in order to get his innards where they belonged!

Anyway, let me return to the narrative.

After having rammed the pacemaker into the (inadequate?) cavity in my pectoral muscle, our worthy then set about sewing up the cut.

This required the occasional request from yours truly that he could feel the suturing needle going in and out of me and could he please do something about it? The response was that, since I had a heavy body, the dose of anaesthetic administered initially was inadequate and, in all fairness to the man, he did give me more of the fluid as and when requested thereafter. Also, prior to the commencement of the suturing and during the procedure, my shoulder was pushed as far inwards as possible, supposedly to ensure that the wound did not open later. In this the doctor performing the procedure had the assistance of his two helpers, fortunately neither of whom was a body-builder!

My travails seemingly over, I was wheeled back to the ward and soon my soldier friend and I had recovered from the sedation and began recounting our respective experiences of “the procedure that didn’t amount to surgery.”  Despite the fact that he was slim, verging on skinny, he too had had to request extra anaesthetic because the initial dose had been inadequate to numb the area of his body being worked on.

That evening I began to experience pain in the area of the incision.  This grew steadily worse and I texted, on my mobile phone that I had smuggled into the ward, the doctor who had performed the procedure. The garbled response appeared to suggest I use an oral anaelgesic (which I didn’t have access to). 

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Free Trade, War and Debt: All Branches of the Same Tree

by Geraldine Perry -Jul 1, 2017

( July 1, 2017, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) Free trade, debt and war are all part of the same package, each feeding off the other. They are – each of them – rackets in their own right and they are all symptoms of the same problem. That problem has to do with the fact that our government – along with the rest of the world – has entirely forgotten the basic concept of how a national economy actually “earns” its way to prosperity.

The American colonists understood this in a very visceral way. For example, Benjamin Franklin once remarked that there are only three ways a nation can become wealthy. (1) It can engage in war and war profiteering. (2) It can reap unearned profits through exploitation of wage and price differentials, under cover of “free” trade. OR (3) It can create new, earned wealth through a balanced domestic exchange economy.

Franklin, like the other colonists, knew whereof he spoke, having witnessed firsthand the shenanigans of the British East India Company, which not only began using slave labor for its operations by the 1620’s but which required England to continually bail it out, heaping extra debt on the English people and forcing England to look for tax revenue from her increasingly disgruntled American colonies.

But bailing out the East India Company was not the real reason why England was in debt. That state of affairs must be attributed to the fact that England had, in 1666, relinquished her prerogative to issue the nation’s money – a prerogative sanctified by the world famous Mix’t Moneys case of 1604. Instead of maintaining that prerogative for the benefit of her people, England was persuaded, through bribery, intrigue and various forms of subterfuge to surrender that prerogative over to private hands – those hands being those of the British East India company, through the Mint Act of 1666.

The East India Company thus was given the right to coin – or issue – its own money, allowing it to reap handsome profits for the privilege. Still not satisfied, the merchants of the Company, together with London bankers, then instigated the creation of the Bank of England and a permanent national debt along with a method for expanding the private debt of England’s citizens, all to the financial advantage of these private interests. . .

The “money question” which the East India Company had seized for the benefit of itself and not the public was the actual source of England’s growing debt, and the reason behind her endless wars waged on behalf of commerce.

The British East India company was created in 1600 by charter from Queen Elizabeth, for the purpose of plundering the planet. To carry out this deed, England also provided the British East India Company with military and financial support, forcing the government to bail the Company out a number of times before 1800, thereby helping it to eventually build its very own empire in India. British colonialism carried out by the East India Company was brutal, and included the forceful seizure of land and deposing of rulers. It also included taxes and loyalty tributes that were extracted from average citizens through methods that included torture.

The deeper in debt England became the harder she looked for revenues – with her own people being among those most imposed upon. Jefferson comments in an 1816 letter to Wm. H. Crawford, and in so doing he almost eerily predicted today’s multiple crises:

No earthly consideration could induce my consent to contract such a debt as England has by her wars for commerce, to reduce our citizens by taxes to such wretchedness, as that laboring sixteen of the twenty-four hours, they are still unable to afford themselves bread, or barely to earn as much oatmeal or potatoes as will keep soul and body together. And all this to feed the avidity of a few millionary merchants and to keep up one thousand ships of war for the protection of their commercial speculations.

The problem, as Jefferson and company could see, was that England had chosen to elevate herself above all other nations based on John Locke’s philosophy called “the rights of conquest” and so was dependent upon the plundering and pillaging of the British East India Company. With England’s cooperation, the Company was, by 1800, supporting its very own army of 200,000 – more than most European states at the time. It also had begun financing its tea trade with illegal opium exports to China, eventually igniting the infamous Opium Wars.

The company also established its own feeder college in 1806, known as Haileybury College or East India College, for the express purpose of staffing the Empire. It trained the soldiers, businessmen, and missionaries – and by these means it came to inventory the planet and its resources. The man in charge was the head of the Department of Economics, one Thomas Robert Malthus, philosopher and a minister of Christian Doctrine.

Malthus had a population theory based on the idea that the planet would be overtaxed with population. New life, he held, expanded geometrically, whereas the food supply acquired new efficiency only on an arithmetic basis. Therefore some life was superfluous. Malthus was soon joined by followers of Charles Darwin, who argued for survival of the fittest. The fittest had divine right to survive.

This was the philosophy that set the Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and finally the English on a course of conquest until each coveted acre, each sandbar, each spit of land on earth was accounted for. One might say that our modern-day CIA Fact Book, which can be viewed online, has taken over this task, but I digress.

It was at the juncture during which the slave trade was just expanding, around the mid-1700s, that the talent scouts of what was to become Haileybury College availed themselves of the services of a Scottish gentlemen by the name of Adam Smith, who fit into the mental prototype for the East India company’s enslavement pursuits. Smith was in effect made an intellectual prostitute. In his well-known Wealth of Nations, Smith posits a deceptively appealing argument in favor of “free” trade by warning against the necessity of domestic producers seeking protectionism. Smith might just as well have been called the father of “Free” trade as the father of modern economics.

In due course the English pronounced expendable any population they could bully. Except for Continental wars, the British rarely fought an enemy that wore shoes, the American colonies excepted… A certain mindset thus developed among the world’s leading countries which held that it was the role of a few traders to control manufacturing for the entire world and to monopolize its reproductive power; and – as one historian put it – to keep all other countries in a state of industrial vassalage.

Given all this is it any wonder that Thomas Jefferson, expressing the views of his allies and compatriots, would write in 1815 that he hoped that “we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” The banks, for Jefferson, were the corporations of utmost concern.

You might say that all of this proves that history may rhyme, as Mark Twain famously said, but history also repeats.

It’s no secret that war is very good for business, but war is also good for “free” trade advocates – who always include the multinational corporations and by extension the investment class and most importantly the banks – who in point of fact make it all happen. Smedley Butler may have said it best in his 1935 book appropriately titled War Is a Racket:

I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. . . . For a great many years as a soldier I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out. Again [the nations of the world] are choosing sides. . . All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people, not those who fight and pay and die – only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.

Recall that this book was written in 1935, but I digress again.

The untold truth is that America consigned herself to endless and ever-escalating “wars of commerce” the moment she followed in the steps of England by handing over her prerogative to issue the nation’s money to the private banking and financial interests in 1913. Those private interests then moved to further coalesce their profits and consolidate their power through an integrated world system of finance under the structures created by the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1945 – all built on the fact that, by that time, most nations of the world had relinquished their right – and responsibility as sanctified by the Mix’t Moneys case of 1604 – to coin (or create) their own money for the benefit of the people and not private interests.

Today, the world economic system actively and aggressively promotes military economies over civilian economies, relentlessly and increasingly pushing national economic policies toward military spending. Globalization, through a long parade of so-called “free” trade agreements, has seriously weakened the powers of even the most powerful nations on earth while at the same time freeing corporations to move profits and operations across national boundaries. As Jefferson foresaw, and as the East India company foreshadowed, corporate interests now dominate those of the state.

Popular New York columnist Thomas Friedman somewhat inadvertently characterized the strategic relationship that has developed between corporations and militaries when he famously remarked that “the hidden hand of the [“free”] market cannot flourish without a hidden fist.” Predictably, the reach along with the strategies and techniques employed by that hidden fist have been greatly refined and extended since the days of the East India Company.

For example, corporations no longer have their own private armies. Instead they employ the services of multinational corporations such as Dyncorp, KBR, the British Erinys International, Asia International and Blackwater, currently known as “Academi.”

These and similar companies offer their services on the world market, services that include risk advisory, training of local forces, armed site security, cash transport, intelligence services, workplace and building security, war zone security needs, weapons procurement, armed support, air support, logistical support, maritime security, cyber security, personnel and budget vetting, weapons destruction, prisons, surveillance, propaganda tactics, psychological warfare, covert operations, close protection and investigations.

How, it may be asked, do we talk ourselves into financing – i.e. going into debt – for all this stuff?

Surprisingly the services of these companies are used not only by governments around the world but also by corporations, humanitarian groups and NGOs, media personnel, and the UN. Moreover, the conflict in Iraq led to an unprecedented proliferation of private military companies and nonmilitary contractors.

Today, contractors make up a second, private army that’s larger than the entire U.S. military force. Some estimates suggest that more than 180,000 individual contractors of many nationalities work for the U.S. government in Iraq, doing an assortment of jobs for which the U.S. has paid more than $100 billion. While private military companies represent a worldwide phenomena, the United States and Great Britain – predictably – account for over 70% of the world’s market for the services of these private military services companies.

Then we have the international arms trade, which is considered to be one of the three most corrupt businesses in the world. And reminiscent of the British East India Company, open slave markets have begun to appear in Libya, this at the same time that women in Bangladesh are selling their organs to pay off their internationally financed micro-loans and farmers in India routinely commit suicide because they cannot pay their debt to Monsanto and company. Examples go on and on.

All of this and more is the direct result of overwhelming debt among nations that have relinquished their prerogative to coin (or create) money for the public advantage and instead have handed it over to private hands. Most of the resulting debt is financed by the international investment banks, including those of the World Bank Group created out of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1945.

Meanwhile, as our own local police get “weaponed up” with things like Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, battering rams, armored vehicles and much more, more and more state and local governments are being forced into bankruptcy. Other governmental entities manage to escape at least temporarily by simply finding ways to pay higher interest and insurance rates as they float more bond debt to remain in operation.

Still others look for ways to “privatize” public assets – an arrangement that allows government and business to co-own a former public asset which had been built by you and me – with associated fee structures locking out the disadvantaged and squeezing the middle class. These arrangements, known as PPP or public/private partnership projects, are made by investment bankers around the globe, who themselves are rushing to benefit from the tidy fees they know will be realized through the privatization of all manner of public infrastructure including highways, water departments, schools, prisons and more.

As the British East India company showed, control over money creation and credit is an integral part of economic conquest; it is the basis upon which countries are colonized. A recent article in the online ZeroHedge showed that about 80% of the population are net payers of interest, due to the fact that the cost of interest is always embedded within the cost of the products we buy. The other 20% of the population are net receivers of interest, and of that 20% only 4% receive most of the interest on our cumulative debt. All of which means that the wealthy own interest-yielding assets, while the rest of us owe interest on the debt. This fact alone explains how and why the system as it stands produces the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots. It also is the reason why our national debt hovers around $20 trillion, give or take a trillion or two, and our private debt hovers around $57 trillion, give or take a trillion or two.

Obviously more debt will not resolve debt. The assets created by our labor cannot simultaneously be a liability we owe to ourselves at interest. At the core of it all is that we have entirely forgotten the basic concept of how a national economy actually “earns” its way to prosperity – and have instead been persuaded by the best prostituted intellectuals and academics that money can buy to believe that the best way to prosperity is to become an interest receiver.

Nearly buried in the trash heap of history, a team of like-minded and highly credentialed raw materials economists uncovered a natural law of physics and arithmetic that helped them prove beyond all doubt that raw materials income, particularly that of agriculture, governed national income unless the latter was expanded by debt. Their data also made it clear that when trade is expanded beyond what the nation itself can consume, the internal domestic U.S. economy is destabilized. This is the process by which, as Charles Walters said, the nation that degrades either the production or the income of its agriculture through “free” trade thereby condemns itself to war.

Suggested Resource 1.

1.“The Untold Story of the American Struggle Against the Money Power” with a selected list of references provided in the last slide

Geraldine Perry is the co-author of The Two Faces of Money and author of Climate Change, Land Use and Monetary Policy: The New Trifecta.

British officials drop 'cake and eat it' approach to Brexit negotiations

Exclusive: insiders say ministers will have to choose between economic interests or sovereignty but Brexit department denies any change of mood

A spokesman for Brexit secretary David Davis said the prime minister’s Lancaster House speech remains the government’s official strategy. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

Philip Hammond speaking at the Economy Day of the Economic Council in Berlin. Photograph: Bernd von Jutrczenka/AP

Dan Roberts Brexit policy editor-Sunday 2 July 2017 

British officials have quietly abandoned hope of securing the government’s promised “cake and eat it” Brexit deal, increasingly accepting the inevitability of a painful trade-off between market access and political control when the UK leaves the EU.

Government insiders report a dramatic change of mood at the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) since the general election, with growing Treasury influence helping force ministers to choose between prioritising economic interests or sovereignty.

This is in stark contrast to the public position of both main political parties, first set out in the Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech in January, in which she echoed Boris Johnson’s boast that Britain can “have its cake and eat it” – enjoying full trade access without conceding over immigration, courts and payments. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn sacked three shadow ministers on Thursday for departing from a similar position.

Yet UK civil servants are now said to be presenting ministers with a more binary choice: accept political compromises similar to aspects of the European Economic Area (EEA), or settle for a much more limited trade deal such as the recent EU-Canada free trade agreement (Ceta).

“We have a problem in that really there are only two viable options,” one official told the Guardian. “One is a high-access, low-control arrangement which looks a bit like the EEA. The other is a low-access, high-control arrangement where you eventually end up looking like Ceta – a more classic free trade agreement, if you are lucky.

“Of course the policy position remains the Lancaster House speech which says what we want is a high-access, high-control situation, but the author of that speech [reported to be Downing Street adviser Nick Timothy] is no longer in an influential position.”

Though full EEA-style participation in the single market is seen as politically toxic due to its requirement to accept freedom of movement, pressure is building in Whitehall for a rethink of opposition to a customs union with the EU. This would satisfy many business leaders, who are clamouring for ways to avoid trapping manufacturers behind an inflexible tariff wall but possibly still allow new international trade deals to be pursued in the service sector.

“What we’ve seen post-election is that business voices that had felt bullied into silence pre-election are recovering their voice,” explained a senior official. “The economic arguments that had got lost in the last six months are now being heard again and those who had tried to railroad this by saying you are talking your country down are being given a run for their money.

“There are some ministers, such as the chancellor, who understand that and there are others who either don’t or are unwilling to,” the official added. “[Brexit secretary David Davis] is in the middle somewhere. His method of negotiating is always to be shameless in asking for something you can’t get because then you’ll end up in a place closer to what you want than if you start with a realistic offer ... but he is more pragmatic.”

A spokesman for the Brexit department denied there had been any change of mood since the election and said the approach outlined in the prime minister’s Lancaster House speech remained the government’s official strategy. Asked to respond to reports of ministers now being forced to consider a trade-off, the DExEU spokesman said they “did not recognise the language”.

But reports of the new mood of realism across Whitehall have been confirmed by at least two other officials at the highest levels of DExEU and the Treasury who have spoken privately.

Tensions burst into the open last week when Hammond gave a speech in Berlin warning against allowing “petty politics to interfere with economic logic” and publicly ridiculing the “cake and eat it” approach. Davis hit back by questioning the consistency of the chancellor’s calls for a transition phase.

The Brexit secretary’s former chief of staff James Chapman this weekend claimedthe Lancaster House speech had “hamstrung” the government with “absolutist” positions on red lines such as participation in the European court of justice.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, last week revealedthe existence of an unpublished Treasury analysis showing that the costs of leaving without a customs union deal far outweigh any benefits from future overseas trade deals.

“The coalition of forces pushing for a softer Brexit is considerable,” Grant said. “The Treasury, long an advocate of retaining close economic ties to the EU, is newly emboldened.”

Terry Scuoler, chief executive of the Engineering Employers Federation, will meet Davis, Hammond and the business secretary, Greg Clark, on Friday at Chevening House in Kent, in a revived business summit that many view as another sign of the shifting mood.

“We are having a much more realistic conversation now,” said Scuoler, who will warn them not to “set about ideologically dismantling the best free trade agreement in the world”.

Internally, the influence of Treasury mandarins is said to be the decisive factor in sweeping away the pretence of a “cake and eat it” option, but the battle is now on to decide what replaces it.

“I don’t know where this will end up,” said one of the official sources. “The cabinet is pretty divided, but both sides of the argument are getting airtime. Quite a few people in the Conservative party, including the chancellor, [have] said that one of the reasons the election went the way it did is that the Conservatives abandoned their traditional territory of being the party of business and the economy.”
But insiders warn that the clock is now ticking to agree which vision will prevail before the first phase of EU negotiations is concluded over the summer.

“There is still a fudge and before we get down to negotiating in October/November we have got to decide once and for all which of those two options we are going for,” he added. “What you can’t do is sustain a fudge because then you are going into negotiations without knowing what you want.”

64 Years Later, CIA Finally Releases Details of Iranian Coup

New documents reveal how the CIA attempted to call off the failing coup — only to be salvaged at the last minute by an insubordinate spy.

BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN-JUNE 20, 2017

Declassified documents released last week shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s central role in the 1953 coup that brought down Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, fueling a surge of nationalism which culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and poisoning U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century.

The approximately 1,000 pages of documents also reveal for the first time the details of how the CIA attempted to call off the failing coup — only to be salvaged at the last minute by an insubordinate spy on the ground.

Known as Operation Ajax, the CIA plot was ultimately about oil. Western firms had for decades controlled the region’s oil wealth, whether Arabian-American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia, or the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iran. When the U.S. firm in Saudi Arabia bowed to pressure in late 1950 and agreed to share oil revenues evenly with Riyadh, the British concession in Iran came under intense pressure to follow suit. But London adamantly refused.

So in early 1951, amid great popular acclaim, Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry. A fuming United Kingdom began conspiring with U.S. intelligence services to overthrow Mossadegh and restore the monarchy under the shah. (Though some in the U.S. State Department, the newly released cables show, blamed British intransigence for the tensions and sought to work with Mossadegh.)
The coup attempt began on August 15 but was swiftly thwarted. Mossadegh made dozens of arrests. Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, a top conspirator, went into hiding, and the shah fled the country.

The CIA, believing the coup to have failed, called it off.

“Operation has been tried and failed and we should not participate in any operation against Mossadegh which could be traced back to US,” CIA headquarters wrote to its station chief in Iran in a newly declassified cablesent on Aug. 18, 1953.

“Operations against Mossadegh should be discontinued.”

“Operations against Mossadegh should be discontinued.”

That is the cable which Kermit Roosevelt, top CIA officer in Iran, purportedly and famously ignored, according to Malcolm Byrne, who directs the U.S.-Iran Relations Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

At least “one guy was in the room with Kermit Roosevelt when he got this cable,” Byrne told Foreign Policy. “[Roosevelt] said no — we’re not done here.” It was already known that Roosevelt had not carried out an order from Langley to cease and desist. But the cable itself and its contents were not previously published.

The consequences of his decision were momentous. The next day, on August 19, 1953, with the aid of “rented” crowds widely believed to have been arranged with CIA assistance, the coup succeeded. Iran’s nationalist hero was jailed, the monarchy restored under the Western-friendly shah, and Anglo-Iranian oil — renamed British Petroleum — tried to get its fields back. (But didn’t really: Despite the coup, nationalist pushback against a return to foreign control of oil was too much, leaving BP and other majors to share Iran’s oil wealth with Tehran.)

Operation Ajax has long been a bogeyman for conservatives in Iran — but also for liberals. The coup fanned the flames of anti-Western sentiment, which reached a crescendo in 1979 with the U.S. hostage crisis, the final overthrow of the shah, and the creation of the Islamic Republic to counter the “Great Satan.”

The coup alienated liberals in Iran as well. Mossadegh is widely considered to be the closest thing Iran has ever had to a democratic leader. He openly championed democratic values and hoped to establish a democracy in Iran. The elected parliament selected him as prime minister, a position he used to reduce the power of the shah, thus bringing Iran closer in line with the political traditions that had developed in Europe. But any further democratic development was stymied on Aug. 19.

The U.S government long denied involvement in the coup.

The U.S government long denied involvement in the coup. The State Department first released coup-related documents in 1989, but edited out any reference to CIA involvement. Public outrage coaxed a government promise to release a more complete edition, and some material came out in 2013. Two years later, the full installment of declassified material was scheduled — but might have interfered with Iran nuclear talks and were delayed again, Byrne said. They were finally released last week, though numerous original CIA telegrams from that period are known to have disappeared or been destroyed long ago.

Byrne said that the long delay is due to several factors. Intelligence services are always concerned about protecting “sources and methods,” said Byrne, meaning the secret spycraft that enables them to operate on the ground. The CIA also needed to protect its relationship with British intelligence, which may have wished some of the material remain safeguarded.

Beyond final proof of CIA involvement, there’s another very interesting takeaway in the documents, said Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University: New details on the true political leanings of Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, a cleric and leading political figure in the 1950s.

In the Islamic Republic, clerics are always the good guys. Kashani has long been seen as one of the heroes of nationalism during that period. As recently as January of this year, Iran’s supreme leader praised Kashani’s role in the nationalization of oil.

Kashani’s eventual split from Mossadegh is widely known. Religious leaders in the country feared the growing power of the communist Tudeh Party, and believed that Mossadegh was too weak to save the country from the socialist threat.

But the newly released documents show that Kashani wasn’t just opposed to Mossadegh — he was also in close communication with the Americans throughout the period leading up to the coup, and he actually appears to have requested financial assistance from the United States, though there is no record of him receiving any money. His request was not previously known.

On the make-or-break day of Aug. 19, “Kashani was critical,” said Milani. “On that day Kashani’s forces were out in full force to defeat Mossadegh.”

Clarification, June 21, 2017: This piece has been clarified to state that at least one person was in the room when Roosevelt received the August 18 cable, and that the cable was unpublished until now.

Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images

Australia: Sex abuse victims say charges against cardinal will hurt Pope’s legacy

Australian Cardinal George Pell leaves at the end of a meeting with the victims of sex abuse, at the Quirinale hotel in Rome, Italy, March 3, 2016. Source: Reuters/Alessandro Bianchi

Filipino Catholics attend pre-Christmas Mass. (File pic) Pic: AP.

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1st July 2017

THE CHARGING of a top Vatican official, Cardinal George Pell, with sex-abuse crimes this week will permanently stain the legacy of Pope Francis, exposing poor judgment in his appointment, victims of sexual abuse said.

Francis’ appointment of Pell, dogged for many years by victims’ allegations that he shielded abusers and had himself molested two young boys in the 1960s, underscores a lack of sufficient vetting for top Vatican posts, Vatican sources said.

Pell, appointed as Francis’ economy minister in 2014, has always strongly denied he molested children or turned a blind eye to abuses. On Thursday, Australian police charged him with historical sex crimes after a two-year investigation.

SEE ALSO: Australian cardinal in the Vatican charged with sexual assault

The charges bring the Church’s global abuse scandal to the heart of the Vatican and, according to victims and their advocates, weaken the pope’s credibility in tackling a decades-old crisis against which he vowed “zero tolerance”.

“I think his legacy is under severe threat,” said Peter Saunders, a victim of clergy abuse who took a leave of absence from the papal advisory commission on abuse last year in protest over a lack of progress.

“I genuinely thought when I met with Francis three years ago that ‘this man is the real deal’ and he is going to get on with things and I really thought there was a prospect of real, significant, and rapid change,” Saunders, a Briton, said in a telephone interview.

“But he is surrounded by people who don’t want change.”

The affair threatens to overshadow accolades the Argentine pope has won since his election in 2013 for bringing the Church closer to the poor and migrants and making it more welcoming to those who felt excluded in the past, such as homosexuals Church sexual abuse broke into the open in the United States with reports of cases in Louisiana in 1984 and exploded in 2002, when journalists in Boston found that bishops had systematically moved abusers to new posts instead of defrocking them.

Thousands of cases have come to light around the world as investigations have encouraged long-silent victims to go public, shattering the Church’s reputation in places such as Ireland, and more than $2 billion has been paid in compensation

Pell, 76, has taken a leave of absence in order to return to Australia, saying: “I am looking forward finally to having my day in court. I repeat that I am innocent of these charges.”

Victims groups have accused Pell of mishandling cases of abuse when he was in Australia as archbishop of Melbourne and later Sydney.

‘Catastrophic choices’

Pell told an Australian inquiry last year that the Church had made “catastrophic” choices by refusing to believe abused children, shuffling abusive priests from parish to parish, and relying too heavily on the counsel of priests to solve the problem. He denied involvement in any cover-up.

Australian police did not detail the charges or specify the ages of the alleged victims or the period when the crimes were alleged to have occurred. Pell was ordered to appear before Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on July 26.

Marie Collins of Ireland, another non-clerical member of the Vatican commission Francis established in 2014, and also a victim of priestly abuse when she was a child, quit in frustration in March, citing a “shameful” lack of cooperation within the Vatican.

SEE ALSO: Australia: Investigation finds 4,000 institutions implicated in child sex abuse

“What I have no hesitation in saying is that it has been proved that Cardinal Pell is guilty of the appalling mishandling of cases of abuse when still in place in Australia and causing untold pain to the victims in those cases,” she wrote on her website.

“The fact that Cardinal Pell was appointed to a very senior post in the Vatican rather than having to face any sanction for his mishandling of abuse cases was a slap in the face to all those he had let down so badly,” she wrote.

The Pell case also pointed to what Vatican insiders says is an inherently opaque and lax system for the appointment of some officials and a tendency to look the other way if the pope really wants someone whose past may be less than limpid.

“There really is no structured vetting process for top Vatican jobs as there is for when a priest is made a bishop or when a bishop is made a cardinal,” said a Vatican source who follows abuse cases.

“When someone is already a cardinal, as Pell was in Sydney, the feeling is that there is little left to vet,” the priest said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk about the Pell case.

Ex-footballer

Francis was impressed by Pell when they met in 2013. In meetings among cardinals before the conclave that elected Francis pope that year, the former Australian Rules football player stood out not only for his height and broad shoulders but also for his command of financial matters.
After becoming pope, Francis, hoping to put an end to Vatican financial scandals, moved Pell to Rome to head a new ministry, the Secretariat for the Economy.

More than a decade earlier, in 2002, Pell, the then archbishop of Sydney, faced an internal Church investigation relating to allegations that he had molested two boys at a holiday camp in the early 1960s when he was a trainee priest.

A retired Australian judge, Alex Southwell, ran a closed hearing at a Melbourne hotel. He wrote in his findings that the alleged victim appeared to be telling the truth but that there was no evidence to substantiate it.


He concluded that he was “not satisfied the complaint has been established”, citing lack of evidence, Pell’s sworn denial and the complainant’s later alcoholism and criminal history. – Reuters