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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Updating previous paths of inquiry, as well as introducing new ones, the program begins with a bit of both–discussion of the murder of Saudi journalist and possible Saudi and U.S. intelligence officer Jamal Khashoggi. A development which resonates strongly with previous discussion of the so-called “Arab Spring” (read “Muslim Brotherhood Spring”), the corporatist economics of Ibn Khaldun and the Brotherhood, and Grover Norquist and Karl Rove’s Islamic Free Market Institute (which figures prominently in the post‑9/11 Operation Green Quest investigation into al-Qaeda and terrorist financing), Khashoggi’s death has occasioned howls of outrage, much beating of breasts and tearing of hair in normally Saudi-friendly confines both inside, and outside of the U.S.
Khashoggi’s many connections and personal and institutional relationships are important and pivotal in a number of ways. They include:
- Khashoggi’s long-standing advocacy of the Muslim Brotherhood. Note the mainstream media’s misrepresentation of the Muslim Brotherhood as “democratic.” In FTR #‘s 787, 1025 and 1026, we noted how fundamentally undemocratic the Brotherhood is: ” . . . . In his penultimate column, Mr. Khashoggi said democracy in the Middle East couldn’t happen without the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood. ‘The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes,’ Mr. Khashoggi wrote Aug. 28. ‘There can be no political reform and democracy in any Arab country without accepting that politicalIslam is a part of it.’. . . .”
- Allegedly actual membership in the Muslim Brotherhood: ” . . . . Several of his friends say that early on Mr. Khashoggi also joined the Muslim Brotherhood. . . .”
- A working professional relationship with Khaled Saffuri, the co-founder of Grover Norquist and Karl Rove’s Islamic Free Market Institute. This institution was, in effect, an American nexus for the Muslim Brotherhood and its laissez-faire/corporatist economics, as well as being a central element in the Operation Green Quest investigation. We covered Operation Green Quest at length in numerous programs, including FTR #‘s 356, 357, 462, 464, 513, 1006 : ” . . . . Jamal Khashoggi, a prolific writer and commentator, was working quietly with intellectuals, reformists and Islamists to launch a group called Democracy for the Arab World Now. . . . Khashoggi had incorporated his democracy advocacy group, DAWN, in January in Delaware, said Khaled Saffuri, another friend. The group was still in the planning stages, and Khashoggi was working on it quietly, likely concerned it could cause trouble for associates, including activists in the Gulf, Saffuri said. . . .”
- Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan, who might be described as a fascist wishbone, with one foot in the Islamic fascist Muslim Brotherhood and the other in the secular Pan-Turkist fascism of the National Action Party and the Grey Wolves. ” . . . . Mr. Khashoggi was close to the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose ties with Saudi Arabia had become increasingly strained in recent years. Turkey backed Qatar in its diplomatic spat with Saudi Arabia last year, and like Qatar, Turkey also differs with Saudi Arabia over its view of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Khashoggi knew President Erdogan personally and was a friend to some of his closest advisers, say people who knew him. . . .”
- Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, who, as discussed in numerous shows, including FTR #‘s 347 and 358, basically ran Osama bin Laden. Khashoggi was also close to Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, at one time the second largest stockholder in Newscorp (behind the Murdochs) and someone “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui named as one of the prominent Saudis who financed al-Qaeda. Immediately after being named by Moussaoui, al-Waleed announced that he was donating all of his billions to charity. ” . . . . Through it all, he maintained close ties to some of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful princes. In the early 2000s, he served as an adviser to Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former head of Saudi intelligence, during the prince’s time as ambassador to the U.K. and the U.S. He was a friend of the billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal. . . .”
- Osama bin Laden and support for the Afghan Mujahadeen, who morphed into al-Qaeda. ” . . . . He traveled to Afghanistan as a journalist, where he became the first Arab journalist to interview Osama bin Laden in the late 1980s. ‘A lot of them went to fight. He went to report,’ said Peter Bergen, an American journalist and academic who knew Mr. Khashoggi. . . .”
- Khashoggi was the nephew of Saudi weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who was pivotally involved with the Iran-Contra scandal, the support effort for the Afghan Mujahadeen, Al-Qaeda and the so-called “Truther” movement. ” . . . . His uncle was Adnan Khashoggi, a famous arms dealer,although Jamal Khashoggi did not benefit from his uncle’s wealth. . . .”
His relationship with Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki (who “ran” Osama bin Laden for a time), his role in the Afghan war covering bin Laden and the Mujahadeen and his work for the CIA-connected Washington Post suggest the distinct possibility that the late Jamal Khashoggi was a spook-journalist, working for both the Saudis and elements of CIA.
In FTR #1015, we noted the issuing of school textbooks glorifying Nazism while Narendra Modi headed the Indian state of Gujarat.
In FTR #998, among other programs, we noted John Conyers’ active opposition to the OUN/B successor organizations in power in Ukraine, and his ouster by the #MeToo movement, which displays symptomatic features of an “op.” Of particular interest is the apparent role of Far right blogger Mike “Misogyny Gets You Laid” Cernovich. An interesting person to signal the destruction of one of the few actively anti-fascist lawmakers by on ostensibly “progressive” political movement.
It is interesting and significant that Conyers also co-sponsored a House Resolution condemning Modi’s support for Nazi racism and ideology.
” . . . . The sponsor, Rep. John Conyers (D‑MI) said the State Department ‘has discussed the role of Modi and his government in promoting attitudes of racial supremacy, racial hatred, and the legacy of Nazism through his government’s support of school textbooks in which Nazism is glorified.’ The resolution said Modi revised school textbooks, which mentioned the ‘charismatic personality of Hitler the Supremo’ and failed to acknowledge the horrors of the Holocaust. . . .”
Worth noting in this context is the fact that Pierre Omidyar actively assisted the rise of both the OUN/B fascists in Ukraine and Modi’s BJP/RSS fascists in India, as discussed in FTR #889.
Next, we begin discussion of white supremacy, eugenics and anti-immigration policy–a topic to which we will return at greater length in our next program.
A 14-word posting on the Department of Homeland Security website has raised eyebrows. We believe it is an example of dog-whistling by fascist/Nazi elements inside of the DHS. The “Fourteen Words” were minted by Order member and Alan Berg murder getaway driver David Lane. “88” is a well-known clandestine Nazi salute. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, using the Nazi salute “Heil Hitler” was banned. To circumvent that, Nazis said “88,” because H is the eighth letter in the alphabet.
The 14 Words” slogan reads: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The DHS posting is titled “We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again.”
The numbers 14 and 88 are often combined by Nazis.
In articles below, we note the inclusion of elements in the DHS for whom such attitudes would be expected.
It comes as no surprise that a former DHS Trump appointee had documented links with white supremacists.
Ian Smith was not alone. John Feee and Julie Kirchener–both hard line anti-immigration activists–have been hired by Team Trump. ” . . . . Jon Feere, a former legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, or CIS, has been hired as an adviser to Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan. At Customs and Border Protection, Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, has been hired as an adviser to Customs and Border Protection acting Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, said Lapan. The hiring of Feere and Kirchner at the federal agencies has alarmed immigrants’ rights activists. CIS and FAIR are think tanks based in Washington that advocate restricting legal and illegal immigration. The two organizations were founded by John Tanton, a retired Michigan ophthalmologist who has openly embraced eugenics, the science of improving the genetic quality of the human population by encouraging selective breeding and at times, advocating for the sterilization of genetically undesirable groups. . . .”
The Federation for Immigration Reform has been partly funded by the Pioneer Fund, an organization that operated in favor of the eugenics policy of Nazi Germany. “. . . . Between 1985 and 1994, FAIR received around $1.2 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund is a eugenicist organization that was started in 1937 by men close to the Nazi regime who wanted to pursue “race betterment” by promoting the genetic lines of American whites. Now led by race scientist J. Philippe Rushton, the fund continues to back studies intended to reveal the inferiority of minorities to whites. . . .”
An article cited, but not excerpted, in the audio portion of the program notes the role of the scapegoating of immigration in the rise of neofascist parties. The devastation from the middle East wars–Syria in particular–has driven large numbers of desperate refugees to Europe. This plays beautifully into the political agenda of so-called “populists” who cite them as the reason for the implementation of what is essentially a xenophobic platform.
What this article does NOT mention is that one of the Sweden Democrats’ most prominent financial backer is Carl Lundstrom, who was also the main financial backer of the Pirate Bay website that hosted Wikileaks.
On CNN former Republican senator Rick Santorum thought the big story of the day on which Manafort was convicted and Michael Cohen plead guilty was the first degree murder charge laid against an “illegal” Mexican migrant worker following the discovery of a deceased white Iowa college girl Mollie Tibbetts. Can this become a rallying cry for Trump and his anti-immigrant and racist dead enders?
We note in this context that:
- The announcement of Rivera’s arrest for the Tibbetts murder happened on the same day that Paul Manafort’s conviction was announced and Michael Cohen pleaded guilty. Might we be looking at an “op,” intended to eclipse the negative publicity from the the Manafort/Cohen judicial events?
- Rivera exhibited possible symptoms of being subjected to mind control, not unlike Sirhan Sirhan. ” . . . . Investigators say Rivera followed Mollie in his dark Chevy Malibu as she went for a run around 7.30pm on July 18. He ‘blacked out’ and attacked her after she threatened to call the police unless he left her alone, officers said. . . . It is not yet clear how Mollie died. . . . Rivera told police that after seeing her, he pulled over and parked his car to get out and run with her. . . . Mollie grabbed her phone and threatened to call the police before running off ahead. The suspect said that made him ‘panic’ and he chased after her. That’s when he ‘blacked out.’ He claims he remembers nothing from then until he was back in his car, driving. He then noticed one of her earphones sitting on his lap and blood in the car then remembered he’d stuffed her in the truck. . . . ‘He followed her and seemed to be drawn to her on that particular day. For whatever reason he chose to abduct her,’ Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation special agent Rick Ryan said on Tuesday afternoon. . . . ‘Rivera stated that she grabbed her phone and said: ‘I’m gonna call the police.’ . . . . ‘Rivera said he then panicked and he got mad and that he ‘blocked’ his memory which is what he does when he gets very upset and doesn’t remember anything after that until he came to at an intersection.’ . . .”
- Just as Sirhan had been in a right-wing milieu prior to the Robert Kennedy assassination, so, too, was Rivera: ” . . . . The prominent Republican family which owns the farm where Mollie Tibbetts’ alleged killer worked have insisted that he passed background checks for migrant workers. Christhian Rivera, 24, who is from Mexico, was charged with first degree murder on Tuesday after leading police to a corn field where Mollie’s body was dumped. Dane Lang, co-owner of Yarrabee Farms along with Eric Lang, confirmed that Rivera had worked there for four years and was an employee ‘of good standing.’ Dane’s brother is Craig Lang, former president of the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation and the Iowa Board of Regents, and a 2018 Republican candidate for state secretary of agriculture. . . .”
- Trump cited the Tibbetts murder in a Charleston, West Virginia, rally that day: ” . . . . President Donald Trump chirped in during his Tuesday address at a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, blaming immigration laws for Mollie’s death. ‘You heard about today with the illegal alien coming in very sadly from Mexico,’ he said. ‘And you saw what happened to that incredible beautiful young woman. ‘Should’ve never happened, illegally in our country. We’ve had a huge impact but the laws are so bad. The immigration laws are such a disgrace. ‘We are getting them changed but we have to get more Republicans.’ Gov. Kim Reynolds complained about the ‘broken’ immigration system that allowed a ‘predator’ to live in her state. . . .”
The program concludes with review of Sirhan, whom we will review, again, at greater length in our next program.
Under hypnosis, Sirhan was able to recall a considerable amount of information about “the girl in the polka-dot dress”–a figure reported by many eyewitnesses to have celebrated the assassination of Robert Kennedy and appeared to have implicated herself and others in the crime. Note similarities between Christihan Rivera’s description of his attraction to Mollie Tibbetts and Sirhan’s description of his attraction to the girl in the polka-dot dress.
1. Among Jamal Khashoggi’s many connections are:
- A strong affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. ” . . . . Part of Khashoggi’s approach was to include political Islamists in what he saw as democracy building. That — along with his sharp criticisms of the kingdom’s crackdowns on critics, its war in Yemen and its policy on Iran — put him at odds with the rulers of Saudi Arabia, which deeply opposes Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood, seeing them as a threat. . . .”
- A working professional relationship with Khaled Saffuri, the co-founder of Grover Norquist and Karl Rove’s Islamic Free Market Institute: ” . . . . Jamal Khashoggi, a prolific writer and commentator, was working quietly with intellectuals, reformists and Islamists to launch a group called Democracy for the Arab World Now. . . . Khashoggi had incorporated his democracy advocacy group, DAWN, in January in Delaware, said Khaled Saffuri, another friend. The group was still in the planning stages, and Khashoggi was working on it quietly, likely concerned it could cause trouble for associates, including activists in the Gulf, Saffuri said. . . .”
The Saudi contributor to the Washington Post who went missing more than a week ago and is feared dead had major plans, including a string of new projects to promote inclusiveness and accountability lacking around the Arab world, his friends say.
Jamal Khashoggi, a prolific writer and commentator, was working quietly with intellectuals, reformists and Islamists to launch a group called Democracy for the Arab World Now. He wanted to set up a media watch organization to keep track of press freedom.
He also planned to launch an economic-focused website to translate international reports into Arabic to bring sobering realities to a population often hungry for real news, not propaganda.
Part of Khashoggi’s approach was to include political Islamists in what he saw as democracy building. That — along with his sharp criticisms of the kingdom’s crackdowns on critics, its war in Yemen and its policy on Iran — put him at odds with the rulers of Saudi Arabia, which deeply opposes Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood, seeing them as a threat.
The Saudi journalist, whose 60th birthday is this weekend, had also personal plans. He bought an apartment in Istanbul and planned to marry the day after he disappeared. He planned to commute between Istanbul and his home in Virginia.
Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct.2 and has yet to emerge. Turkish officials believe he was killed in side the building by a death squad that flew in from Saudi Arabia.
A friend and neighbor in the United States, where Khashoggi had a condo since 2008, said the Saudi writer had the contacts and resources to make his plans work.
“He had the wisdom of a 60-year-old. He had the energy and a creativity of a 20-something,” he said, asking to remain anonymous out of respect for Khashoggi’s family.
Khashoggi had incorporated his democracy advocacy group, DAWN, in January in Delaware, said Khaled Saffuri, another friend. The group was still in the planning stages, and Khashoggi was working on it quietly, likely concerned it could cause trouble for associates, including activists in the Gulf, Saffuri said.
The project was expected to reach out to journalists and lobby for change, representing both Islamists and liberals, said another friend, Azzam Tamimi, a prominent Palestinian-British activist and TV presenter.
Tamimi had planned to interview Khashoggi about the project on his show on Thursday, airing from Istanbul. Instead, the show was held with an empty chair with Khashoggi’s picture on it as guests discussed the case.
“Democracy is currently being slaughtered everywhere. He wanted to alert Western public opinion to the dangers of remaining silent in the face of the assassination of democracy,” Tamimi told the AP. “The Muslim Brothers and Islamists were the biggest victims of the foiled Arab spring.”
Tamimi said he and Khashoggi had set up a similar pro-democracy project together in 1992 when they first met. It was called Friends of Democracy in Algeria, he said, and followed the botched elections in Algeria, which the government annulled to avert an imminent Islamist victory.
Khashoggi spoke out against powerful ultraconservative clerics in Saudi Arabia. He was a voice of reform when Saudi Arabia came under intense criticism following the 9/11 attacks, in which a dozen Saudis were implicated.
When Sunni Islamists rose to power in other parts of the region, Khashoggi was pragmatic. He argued that the future of the region can’t be without Islamists and denounced governments’ crackdowns on them. He argued the most effective way to challenge Iran’s growing influence in the region is by allowing Sunni political Islam— a rival to Shiite Iran— to be represented in governments.
Khashoggi was to marry his Turkish fiancée on Oct. 3.
…
Saffuri said he was surprised Khashoggi returned to the consulate. He said his friend avoided going to the Saudi Embassy in Washington and didn’t talk to diplomats.
“He didn’t trust them. He knew they were up to something bad.”
2. More about Khashoggi’s many relationships:
- Again, he was a major advocate on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. Note the mainstream media’s misrepresentation of the Muslim Brotherhood as “democratic.” In FTR #‘s 787, 1025 and 1026, we noted how fundamentally undemocratic the Brotherhood is: ” . . . . In his penultimate column, Mr. Khashoggi said democracy in the Middle East couldn’t happen without the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood. ‘The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes,’ Mr. Khashoggi wrote Aug. 28. ‘There can be no political reform and democracy in any Arab country without accepting that political Islam is a part of it.’. . . .”
. . .” He was close to Turkey’s Erdogan, who might be described as a fascist wishbone, with one foot in the Islamic fascist Muslim Brotherhood and the other in the secular Pan-Turkist fascism of the National Action Party and the Grey Wolves. ” . . . . Mr. Khashoggi was close to the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose ties with Saudi Arabia had become increasingly strained in recent years. Turkey backed Qatar in its diplomatic spat with Saudi Arabia last year, and like Qatar, Turkey also differs with Saudi Arabia over its view of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Khashoggi knew President Erdogan personally and was a friend to some of his closest advisers, say people who knew him. . . .”
- Khashoggi was very close to Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, who, as discussed in numerous shows, including FTR #‘s 347 and 358, basically ran Osama bin Laden. Khashoggi was also close to Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, at one time the second largest stockholder in Newscorp (behind the Murdochs) and someone “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui named as one of the prominent Saudis who financed al-Qaeda. Immediately after being named by Moussaoui, al-Waleed announced that he was donating all of his billions to charity. ” . . . . Through it all, he maintained close ties to some of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful princes. In the early 2000s, he served as an adviser to Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former head of Saudi intelligence, during the prince’s time as ambassador to the U.K. and the U.S. He was a friend of the billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal. . . .”
- Khashoggi was a journalistic associate of Osama bin Laden and a supporter of the Afghan Mujahadeen, who morphed into al-Qaeda. ” . . . . He traveled to Afghanistan as a journalist, where he became the first Arab journalist to interview Osama bin Laden in the late 1980s. “A lot of them went to fight. He went to report,” said Peter Bergen, an American journalist and academic who knew Mr. Khashoggi. . . .”
The mystery surrounding Jamal Khashoggi, who disappeared after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, has drawn scrutiny to the Saudi government’s efforts to silence critics at home and abroad.
But Mr. Khashoggi’s case is more complicated.
While he had become known as a dissident writer in recent years, he was a longtime insider who remained close to some of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful princes.
One of the country’s best-known journalists, he clashed with the clerical establishment for his socially liberal views. His sympathy for democratic movements drew the ire of the Saudi government, particularly for the Muslim Brotherhood, which the royal family views as a threat to its absolute monarchy.
The rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the crackdown he oversaw against dissidents ranging from clerics to women’s rights activists, pitted Mr. Khashoggi against the establishment that had long tolerated him, and ultimately he decided to leave for the U.S. last year.
Fellow Saudis implored him to return with a mixture of blunt intimidation and subtle flattery he suspected was a trap. Saudi officials told him that his views were valued, and that he could contribute to the monarchy’s new vision—maybe even work with the government, according to his friends who recounted these conversations. Pro-Saudi government Twitter users hounded him, branding him a traitor.
“Your end will be painful, Mr. Jamal,” one Twitter user told him in March.
Turkish officials now suspect Mr. Khashoggi was murdered by a Saudi intelligence hit squad in the consulate the day he visited. The Saudi government has denied the accusation, and claimed Mr. Khashoggi left the building shortly after he entered it. Representatives for the Saudi government didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article.
The journalist, who was 59 when he disappeared, had believed he was safe in Istanbul. “He trusted Turkey even more than the U.S.,” said a Saudi friend of Mr. Khashoggi.
Mr. Khashoggi was close to the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose ties with Saudi Arabia had become increasingly strained in recent years. Turkey backed Qatar in its diplomatic spat with Saudi Arabia last year, and like Qatar, Turkey also differs with Saudi Arabia over its view of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Mr. Khashoggi knew President Erdogan personally and was a friend to some of his closest advisers, say people who knew him. During a conference in Turkey this past spring, he met Hatice Cengiz, a Ph.D. student. Over the summer they agreed to marry.
For most of his life, Mr. Khashoggi’s views broadly aligned with those of the Saudi establishment. A scion of a prominent Saudi family, he embraced in his youth the wave of Islamist fervor that swept the kingdom and was influenced by Muslim Brotherhood ideology.
He traveled to Afghanistan as a journalist, where he became the first Arab journalist to interview Osama bin Laden in the late 1980s. “A lot of them went to fight. He went to report,” said Peter Bergen, an American journalist and academic who knew Mr. Khashoggi.
In the 1990s, he reported from across the Middle East, where he became acquainted with different schools of political Islam. He was removed three times as editor of a leading Saudi daily, Al Watan, for crossing red lines, such as criticizing the religious establishment.
Through it all, he maintained close ties to some of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful princes. In the early 2000s, he served as an adviser to Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former head of Saudi intelligence, during the prince’s time as ambassador to the U.K. and the U.S. He was a friend of the billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal.
“He had been part of the establishment,” said Gerald Feierstein, a former top State Department official for the Middle East, who knew him.
Until the current Saudi leadership came to power, Mr. Khashoggi never thought of leaving his homeland, he said over multiple conversations with The Wall Street Journal before his death.
That began to change in 2016. After the election of President Trump, Mr. Khashoggi made comments critical of him. The Saudi government, eager to cultivate better relations with the Trump administration, swiftly banned him from speaking publicly, Mr. Khashoggi told the Journal.
Fearing he would be arrested or banned from leaving, he left Saudi Arabia. In the U.S., he became a contributor to the opinion pages of The Washington Post, which along with his nearly two million Twitter followers, gave his praise and criticism of the Saudi royal family enormous weight. In his penultimate column, Mr. Khashoggi said democracy in the Middle East couldn’t happen without the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes,” Mr. Khashoggi wrote Aug. 28. “There can be no political reform and democracy in any Arab country without accepting that political Islam is a part of it.” ?
He maintained cordial relations with some Saudi officials.
“Jamal has many friends in the kingdom, including myself, and despite our differences, and his choice to go into his so-called self-exile, we still maintained regular contact when he was in Washington,” Prince Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, D.C., and a son of King Salman, told reporters earlier this week. He has dismissed accusations of official Saudi involvement in the journalist’s disappearance as baseless.
Among the Saudi officials who contacted him after his departure was Crown Prince Mohammed’s media adviser, Saud al-Qahtani, according to a Saudi friend of Mr. Khashoggi.
“They told him: ‘You are a valuable voice, you should return to Saudi Arabia,’” recalled the friend. “They were trying to lure him back.”
His departure had come around the time when Saudi Arabia and its closest allies broke diplomatic ties with neighboring Qatar, citing Doha’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood among the reasons.
Much to the frustration of the Saudi government, Mr. Khashoggi continued to write favorably about the group.
U.S. officials have pointed to Mr. Khashoggi’s views on the Brotherhood as one issue that likely irritated Saudi royalty.
“There is very little nuance in how the Persian Gulf monarchies see the Muslim Brotherhood,” Andrew Miller, deputy director for policy at the Project on Middle East Democracy. “They view them as an inherent threat and evil.”
Although he denounced the rapidly shrinking space for public discourse in the kingdom, he applauded some of the social reforms spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed, such as the decision to allow women to drive.
Mr. Khashoggi became deeply homesick, but he didn’t feel safe enough to return.
Mr. Khashoggi has four adult children, three of whom are U.S. citizens, a U.S. official said. The fourth, a son named Salah, is in Saudi Arabia and holds Saudi citizenship. The Saudi government barred Salah from traveling outside the kingdom after his father left the country, according to friends of the journalist. Mr. Khashoggi lobbied to have the ban lifted, appealing to Saudi officials including Mr. al-Qahtani, the crown prince’s media adviser, and Prince Khalid, the ambassador, but to no avail.
Still, his criticism of the monarchy alienated him from his family back home, and he and his Saudi wife soon agreed to divorce.
During his time in exile, Mr. Khashoggi’s views on the monarchy hardened. In early 2018, he founded a pro-democracy nonprofit group called Democracy for the Arab World Now, according to a friend.
Mr. Khashoggi was preparing to start a new life with his Turkish fiancée, Ms. Cengiz, who accompanied him to the consulate on Oct. 2 and said he never came out it. He had an appointment to pick up documents related to his divorce. . . . .
3. Khashoggi was the nephew of Iran-Contra weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi, himself a financier of al-Qaeda, as well as being a later financier of the so-called “Truther” movement that obscures Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. ” . . . . His uncle was Adnan Khashoggi, a famous arms dealer, although Jamal Khashoggi did not benefit from his uncle’s wealth. . . .”
He also is reported to have actually joined the Muslim Brotherhood. ” . . . . Several of his friends say that early on Mr. Khashoggi also joined the Muslim Brotherhood. . . .”
Jamal Khashoggi landed in Washington last fall, leaving behind a long list of bad news back home.
After a successful career as an adviser to and unofficial spokesman for the royal family of Saudi Arabia, he had been barred from writing in the kingdom, even on Twitter, by the new crown prince. His column in a Saudi-owned Arab newspaper was canceled. His marriage was collapsing. His relatives had been forbidden to travel to pressure him to stop criticizing the kingdom’s rulers.
Then, after he arrived in the United States, a wave of arrests put a number of his Saudi friends behind bars, and he made his difficult decision: It was too dangerous to return home anytime soon — and maybe forever.
So in the United States, he reinvented himself as a critic, contributing columns to The Washington Post and believing he had found safety in the West.
But as it turned out, the West’s protection extended only so far.
Mr. Khashoggi was last seen on Oct. 2 entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where he needed to pick up a document for his wedding. There, Turkish officials say, a team of Saudi agents killed and dismembered him.
Saudi officials have denied harming Mr. Khashoggi, but nearly two weeks after his disappearance, they have failed to provide evidence that he left the consulate and have offered no credible account of what happened to him.
His disappearance has opened a rift between Washington and Saudi Arabia, the chief Arab ally of the Trump administration. And it has badly damaged the reputation of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 33-year-old power behind the Saudi throne, who this time may have gone too far for even for his staunchest supporters in the West.
The possibility that the young prince ordered a hit on a dissident poses challenges for President Trump and may turn once warm relationships toxic. It could convince those governments and corporations that had overlooked the prince’s destructive military campaign in Yemen, his kidnapping of the Lebanese prime ministerand his waves of arrests of clerics, businessmen and fellow princes that he is a ruthless autocrat who will stop at nothing to get his enemies.
While the disappearance has cast a harsh new light on the crown prince, it has also brought attention to the tangled sympathies throughout Mr. Khashoggi’s career, where he balanced what appears to have been a private affinity for democracy and political Islam with his long service to the royal family.
His attraction to political Islam helped him forge a personal bond with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who is now demanding that Saudi Arabia explain his friend’s fate.
The idea of self-exile in the West was a blow for Mr. Khashoggi, 60, who had worked as a reporter, commentator and editor to become one of the kingdom’s best known personalities. He first drew international attention for interviewing a young Osama bin Laden and later became well-known as a confidant of kings and princes.
His career left him extraordinarily well-connected, and the tall, gregarious, easygoing man seemed to know everyone who had anything to do with Saudi Arabia over the last three decades.
But settling in Washington had advantages. A friend invited him for Thanksgiving last year and he shared a photo of himself at dinner with his 1.7 million Twitter followers, tucking into turkey and yams.
When his turn came to share what he was thankful for, he said: “Because I have become free, and I can write freely.”
According to interviews with dozens of people who knew Mr. Khashoggi and his relationship with the Saudi leadership, it was his penchant for writing freely, and his organizing to push for political reform from abroad, that put him on a collision course with the crown prince.
While Saudi Arabia has long been ruled according to the consensus of senior princes, Crown Prince Mohammed has dismantled that system, leaving his own power largely unchecked. If a decision was taken to silence a perceived traitor, it likely would have been his.
Osama, Adnan and the Muslim Brotherhood
Mr. Khashoggi’s first claim to fame was his acquaintance with Osama bin Laden. Mr. Khashoggi had spent time in Jidda, Bin Laden’s hometown, and, like Bin Laden, he came from a prominent nonroyal family. Mr. Khashoggi’s grandfather was a doctor who had treated Saudi Arabia’s first king. His uncle was Adnan Khashoggi, a famous arms dealer, although Jamal Khashoggi did not benefit from his uncle’s wealth.
Mr. Khashoggi studied at Indiana State University and returned to Saudi Arabia to report for an English-language newspaper. Several of his friends say that early on Mr. Khashoggi also joined the Muslim Brotherhood.
Although he later stopped attending meetings of the Brotherhood, he remained conversant in its conservative, Islamist and often anti-Western rhetoric, which he could deploy or hide depending on whom he was seeking to befriend.
His newspaper colleagues recalled him as friendly, thoughtful and devout. He often led communal prayers in the newsroom, recalled Shahid Raza Burney, an Indian editor who worked with him.
Like many Saudis in the 1980s, Mr. Khashoggi cheered for the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which was supported by the C.I.A. and Saudi Arabia. So when he got an invitation to see it for himself from another young Saudi, Bin Laden, Mr. Khashoggi jumped at the chance.
In Afghanistan, Mr. Khashoggi wore local dress and had his photo taken holding an assault rifle, much to his editors’ chagrin. But it does not appear that he actually fought while on assignment there.
“He was there as a journalist first and foremost, admittedly as someone sympathetic to the Afghan jihad, but so were most Arab journalists at the time — and many Western journalists,” said Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian researcher who interviewed Mr. Khashoggi about his time in Afghanistan.
His colleagues concurred.
“To say that Jamal was some kind of an extremist is all lies,” said Mr. Burney, now a newspaper editor in India.
But the war’s failure to put Afghanistan on sound footing haunted Mr. Khashoggi, as did Bin Laden’s later turn to terrorism.
“He was disappointed that after all that struggle, the Afghans never got together,” said a Saudi friend of Mr. Khashoggi’s who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Mr. Khashoggi’s trips to Afghanistan and his relationship with Prince Turki al-Faisal, who headed Saudi intelligence, made some of Mr. Khashoggi’s friends suspect he was also spying for the Saudi government.
Years later, after American commandos killed Bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, Mr. Khashoggi mourned his old acquaintance and what he had become.
“I collapsed crying a while ago, heartbroken for you Abu Abdullah,” Mr. Khashoggi wrote on Twitter, using Bin Laden’s nickname. “You were beautiful and brave in those beautiful days in Afghanistan, before you surrendered to hatred and passion.”
From Reporter to Royal Insider
As his journalism career took off, Mr. Khashoggi reported from Algeria and drove into Kuwait during the first Gulf War. He climbed the ladder of the kingdom’s media world, where princes own newspapers, content is censored and scandals involving royals are buried.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he blasted the conspiracy theories common in the Arab world, writing that the hijacked planes “also attacked Islam as a faith and the values of tolerance and coexistence that it preaches.”
He was named editor of the Saudi newspaper Al Watan in 2003, but fired less than two months later over an article blaming an esteemed Islamic scholar for teachings used to justify attacks on non-Muslims. He was reinstated in 2007 and lasted a bit longer in his second tenure.
He traveled with King Abdullah and grew close to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the billionaire investor, who was later arrested by Crown Prince Mohammed. Prince Turki, the former intelligence chief, hired Mr. Khashoggi as an adviser when he served as ambassador to Britain and the United States.
It was during his time there that Mr. Khashoggi bought the condo in McLean, Va., where he would live after fleeing the kingdom.
Backing Uprisings Abroad, Reforms at Home
Many of Mr. Khashoggi’s friends say that throughout his career of service to the monarchy, he hid his personal leanings in favor of both electoral democracy and Muslim Brotherhood-style political Islam.
When a military coup in Algeria in 1992 dashed the hopes of an Islamist political party to win control of the Parliament there, Mr. Khashoggi quietly teamed up with an Islamist friend in London to start an organization called “The Friends of Democracy in Algeria.”
The group took out advertisements in newspapers in Britain before its parliamentary elections that read, “When you go to cast your vote, remember that this is a bounty many people around the world are denied, including Algerians,” recalled his friend, Azzam Tamimi, who acted as the public face of the effort and hid Mr. Khashoggi’s role.
By the time he reached his 50s, Mr. Khashoggi‘s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood was ambiguous. Several Muslim Brothers said this week that they always felt he was with them. Many of his secular friends would not have believed it.
Mr. Khashoggi never called for more than gradual reforms to the Saudi monarchy, eventually supporting its military interventions to deter what the Saudis considered Iranian influence in Bahrain and Yemen. But he was enthusiastic about the uprisings that broke out across much of the Arab world in 2011.
Like the Afghan jihad before them, however, the movements of the Arab Spring disappointed him as they collapsed into violence and as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates used their wealth to crush opposition and bolster autocrats.
“He never liked that Saudi Arabia used their policies accelerating the crackdown around the region,” said Sigurd Neubauer, a Middle East analyst in Washington who knew Mr. Khashoggi.
The kingdom’s tolerance for even minimal criticism faded after King Salman ascended to the throne in 2015 and gave tremendous power to his son, Mohammed, the crown prince known informally by his initials as M.B.S.
The young prince announced a program to diversify the economy and loosened social structures, including by granting women the right to drive.
Mr. Khashoggi applauded those moves, but chafed at the authoritarian way the prince wielded power. When Mr. Khashoggi criticized Mr. Trump after his election, for example, Saudi officials forbade him to speak, fearing he would harm their relationship with the new administration.
Crown Prince Mohammed went after his critics with all his power, barring them from travel and throwing some in jail. Mr. Khashoggi left the kingdom last year, before scores of his friends were rounded up and hundreds of prominent Saudis were locked in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton on accusations of corruption. A number of them, including at least two sons of former kings, are still detained.
Mr. Khashoggi began contributing columns to The Washington Post, comparing Crown Prince Mohammed to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Khashoggi’s friends assumed such writing landed him on the prince’s blacklist.
“Mohammed bin Salman had been paying millions of dollars to create a certain image of himself, and Jamal Khashoggi was destroying all of it with just a few words,” said Mr. Tamimi, the friend. “The crown prince must have been furious.”
But Mr. Khashoggi didn’t stop.
He was planning to start a website to publish translated reports about the economies of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, where he felt many people did not understand the scale of corruption or the limited future of the oil wealth.
He was also founding an organization called Democracy in the Arab World Now, or DAWN, an advocacy group. Mr. Khashoggi was trying to secure funding and set up a board when he disappeared, friends said.
Receiving an award in April from the Islamist-leaning Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, Mr. Khashoggi said democracy was under attack across the Arab world by radical Islamists, authoritarians and elites who feared that popular participation would bring chaos. Power sharing, he said, was the only way to stop civil wars and ensure better governance.
Crown Prince Mohammed “is investing hundreds of billions of dollars into future projects and he’s doing that depending on his own ability to judge and the ability of a small circle of advisers,” Mr. Khashoggi said. “Is that enough? No, it is not enough.” . . . .
4. In FTR #1015, we noted the issuing of school textbooks glorifying Nazism while Narendra Modi headed the Indian state of Gujarat.
In FTR #998, among other programs, we noted John Conyers’ active opposition to the OUN/B successor organizations in power in Ukraine, and his ouster by the #MeToo movement, which displays symptomatic features of an “op.” Of particular interest is the apparent role of Far right blogger Mike “Misogyny Gets You Laid” Cernovich. An interesting person to signal the destruction of one of the few actively anti-fascist lawmakers by on ostensibly “progressive” political movement.
It is interesting and significant that Modi also co-sponsored a House Resolution condemning Modi’s support for Nazi racism and ideology.
” . . . . The sponsor, Rep. John Conyers (D‑MI) said the State Department ‘has discussed the role of Modi and his government in promoting attitudes of racial supremacy, racial hatred, and the legacy of Nazism through his government’s support of school textbooks in which Nazism is glorified.’ The resolution said Modi revised school textbooks, which mentioned the ‘charismatic personality of Hitler the Supremo’ and failed to acknowledge the horrors of the Holocaust. . . .”
Worth noting in this context is the fact that Pierre Omidyar actively assisted the rise of both the OUN/B fascists in Ukraine and Modi’s BJP/RSS fascists in India, as discussed in FTR #889.
. . . . The State Department decision precipitated a resolution by the House of Representatives to condemn a range of Modi’s actions, including promoting Nazi ideology. The sponsor, Rep. John Conyers (D‑MI) said the State Department “has discussed the role of Modi and his government in promoting attitudes of racial supremacy, racial hatred, and the legacy of Nazism through his government’s support of school textbooks in which Nazism is glorified.” The resolution said Modi revised school textbooks, which mentioned the “charismatic personality of Hitler the Supremo” and failed to acknowledge the horrors of the Holocaust. . . .
5. A 14-word posting on the Department of Homeland Security website has raised eyebrows. We believe it is an example of dog-whistling by fascist/Nazi elements inside of the DHS. The “Fourteen Words” were minted by Order member and Alan Berg murder getaway driver David Lane. “88” is a well-known clandestine Nazi salute. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, using the Nazi salute “Heil Hitler” was banned. To circumvent that, Nazis said “88,” because H is the eighth letter in the alphabet.
The numbers 14 and 88 are often combined by Nazis.
In articles below, we note the inclusion of elements in the DHS for whom such attitudes would be expected.
Sometimes a dog whistle can be a number, not a word. The number “88” appeared in a strange context in a press release from Homeland Security calling for building a border wall, along with a headline that had a total of fourteen words — but until today, no one seems to have noticed.
Today, the press release, originally issued in February, is getting some attention from journalists covering the “hate and extremism” beat. Here is an example, from Christopher Mathias, who covers hate and extremism for The Huffington Post.
What is happening, for those needing a translation, is this: The number “88” is code for Heil Hitler. And 14 is white-supremacist shorthand.
“One of the most common white supremacist symbols, 88 is used throughout the entire white supremacist movement, not just neo-Nazis. One can find it as a tattoo or graphic symbol; as part of the name of a group, publication or website; or as part of a screenname or e‑mail address,” the ADL’s hate symbol database notes.
Most of the press release, titled “We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again,” uses percentages, as do many statistical reports.
But the second-to-last line is what is drawing attention on Twitter, because it has this curious wording: “On average, out of 88 claims that pass the credible fear screening, fewer than 13 will ultimately result in a grant of asylum.”
That’s odd. Normally, a report might say something like “less than 15 percent ultimately result in a grant of asylum.”
It may just be coincidence, and on a day when journalists are shot, everyone with a connection to media is understandably on edge. But there is one other factor to consider, say those who hear a dog whistle: what if this “88” is read in conjunction with the headline, which has 14 words?
The 14-word thing is its own signal. As the ADL hate symbol database explains in its unpacking of 88:
The number is frequently combined with another white supremacist numeric code, 14 (shorthand for the so-called “14 Words” slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) in the form of 1488, 14/88, 14–88, or 8814.
That slogan can be understood as something not very far from the press release headline: “We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again.”
Coincidence? Maybe.
But a numerical system of interpretation can be a way for a group to communicate with itself. In Jewish tradition, gematria is one system of Biblical commentary. Each letter in the Hebrew alphabet has a numerical value, and some commentators use this symbol of numbers to arrive at additional meanings. Some see profound meaning in this, others have always dismissed it as mere coincidence.
In the case of the DHS press release, it may be coincidence — or it may be more, a signal to those who know the system of codes.
What can be said for sure is this: It is unusual to use the statistic “13 out of 88.” It could, of course, be a typo. And the headline bearing the requisite “14 words” is not soothing for anyone who has spent time with hate databases.
But right now, those are the only definite take-aways.
In a time of fear and anxiety, it is important to take extra care before drawing conclusions. Still, from now on, it may be wise to watch the numbers, not just the words.
6. It comes as no surprise that a former DHS Trump appointee had documented links with white supremacists.
In the past two years, leaders of an emboldened white nationalism have burst into the forefront of national politics and coalesced around a so-called alt-right subculture as they have endeavored to make their ideology part of the mainstream. Recent developments have shed light on previously unknown connections between white-nationalist activists and the Trump administration. Now, the Department of Homeland Security has denounced “all forms of violent extremism” following the resignation of a policy analyst who had connections with white nationalists, according to leaked emails obtained by The Atlantic.
The emails show that the official, Ian M. Smith, had in the past been in contact with a group that included known white nationalists as they planned various events. On one of the email threads, the address of the alt-right white nationalist leader Richard Spencer is included, as well as Smith’s. Another group of recipients includes Smith as well as Jared Taylor, the founder of the white nationalist publication American Renaissance, who calls himself a “white advocate.”
The messages, given to The Atlantic by a source to whom they were forwarded, paint a picture of the social scene in which white nationalists gathered for an “Alt-Right Toastmasters” night in 2016, and organized dinner parties and visits from out-of-town friends. And they provide a glimpse into how a group that included hard-core white nationalists was able to operate relatively incognito in the wider world, particularly in conservative circles. The revelation of these messages comes amid increasing scrutiny of white nationalists’ ties to the administration; a White House speechwriter, Darren Beattie, left the administration after CNN reported earlier this month that he had attended a conference with white nationalists in 2016. The Washington Post reportedlast week that Peter Brimelow, the publisher of the white nationalist website VDare, had attended a party at the top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow’s house. Kudlow told the Post he was unaware of Brimelow’s views and would not have invited him had he known about them.
After being reached for comment about The Atlantic’s reporting, Smith said in an email: “I no longer work at DHS as of last week and didn’t attend any of the events you’ve mentioned.” Neither he nor DHS disputed that it is him on the emails in question.
White nationalists have an affinity for the president, who they believe shares some of their policy priorities. After the counterprotester Heather Heyer was killed at a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, President Donald Trump remarked that there were “very fine people on both sides” who attended the rally. After hearing the president’s statement, Spencer told The Atlantic he was “really proud of him.””
According to sources with knowledge of Smith’s role at DHS, he was a policy analyst working on immigration. He used to work for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), an anti-immigration legal organization associated with the right-wing Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). From 2014 to 2017 he wrote a number of columns on immigration for National Review. (The NationalReview.com editor Charles Cooke didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment).
Smith’s public writings showcased a right-wing perspective on immigration, such as opposing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended race-based restrictions on immigration, particularly from countries in Asia and Africa, and which Smith argued was responsible for the “barely governable system we have today,” opposing sanctuary cities, and applauding the controversial S.B. 1070 anti–illegal immigration law in Arizona.
In an interviewwith the website FOIA Advisor in 2016, Smith said he “was born just outside Seattle, grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, and lived in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Sydney, Australia for many years.” In that interview, he described his role at the IRLI thusly: “I work at a nonprofit law firm that represents people harmed by the government’s failure to regulate immigration.”
Dale Wilcox, the executive director of the IRLI, said in a statement: “Ian Smith was an investigative associate at IRLI, as an independent contractor for two years and an employee for less than a year between January 2015 and October 2017. How our employees fill their time outside of the office, or the private relationships they pursue, are not issues of IRLI’s concern. It is not any organization’s responsibility to track their employees after hours activities or peer into their employee’s private lives. For the record, IRLI and FAIR have no association with the individuals mentioned and we repudiate their views. Furthermore, if it would come to our attention that any employees are associated with individuals and organizations that hold noxious views on matters of race and ethnicity, that may be grounds for termination. Finally, it must be noted that simply appearing on someone’s email list should never be interpreted as a blanket endorsement of that individual’s point of view.”
After describing the emails involving Smith in detail to DHS spokespeople on Monday, The Atlantic learned on Tuesday that Smith had resigned from his position.
A DHS spokesperson, Tyler Q. Houlton, said: “The Department of Homeland Security is committed to combating all forms of violent extremism, especially movements that espouse racial supremacy or bigotry. This type of radical ideology runs counter to the Department’s mission of keeping America safe.”
Several emails obtained by The Atlantic show Smith included on threads with people associated with white nationalism, such as Marcus Epstein, a former Tom Tancredo aide who entered an Alford plea in 2009for assaulting a black woman in Washington, D.C., in 2007, and Devin Saucier, an editor (under a pseudonym) at American Renaissance. Epstein declined to comment; Saucier did not respond to a request for comment.
On June 3, 2016, Epstein emailed a group including Smith, Saucier, Taylor, and others to invite them to an “Alt-Right Toastmasters” event. “We are having our much delayed follow up meeting on Monday June 6 at 7:00 PM. A couple of out of town guests will be there. Please RSVP and if you want to invite anyone else, please check with me,” Epstein wrote. “I’m going to give a short presentation on ‘The Pros and Cons of Anonymity’ at 8:00 followed by discussion.” In a previous email on the subject, Epstein had said he was timing the event for a visit from Wayne Lutton, the editor of the white-nationalist publication The Social Contract. According to a source who was there, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Smith attended this event.
On December 17, 2015, Saucier and Epstein emailed a YouTube link, which is now defunct, to a group of addresses including Smith’s and Spencer’s. Reached by phone, Spencer said, “To my knowledge, I’ve never met Ian Smith. I get roped in to all sorts of email conversations, I receive too many emails every day for me to respond to.”
Though the emails don’t show Smith and Spencer interacting, some of the messages indicate a familiarity on Smith’s part with Spencer’s projects. In another email, sent on March 7, 2015, Smith refers to an event held by “NPI,” the acronym for the National Policy Institute, Spencer’s white-nationalist nonprofit, saying he had missed it because he was out of town. And in another, on May 9, 2016, Smith recommended someone for a job at a prominent, Trump-supporting media outlet, saying that the person was “currently working in development at LI” (the conservative training group the Leadership Institute) and “writes for Radix, Amren, VDare and Chronicles under a pseudonym.” The word Amren refers to American Renaissance; Radix is Spencer’s publication. “Chronicles” appears to refer to Chronicles Magazine, another publication associated with this movement, which has published Lutton and Sam Francis, the late editor of the Council of Conservative Citizens’ newsletter. Smith also wrote that the person he had recommended “helps Richard and JT with their websites,” appearing to refer to Spencer and Jared Taylor.
In one email exchange at the end of October 2015, Ben Zapp, a real-estate agent who has in the past been photographed with members of this scene, invited a group including Smith; Saucier; Epstein; Tim Dionisopoulos, a Media Research Center staffer; and Kevin DeAnna, the former Youth for Western Civilization president, to his apartment for dinner, stating that he wasn’t going to that weekend’s NPI conference. (The 2016 conference of NPI is where Spencer was caught on videoleading a “Hail Trump” chant while audience members gave Nazi salutes.) Zapp, Dionisopoulos, and DeAnna did not respond to requests for comment.
Epstein replied to the thread saying he wasn’t going to NPI either but was planning to socialize with people who were, and that “I can’t speak for everyone, but this is probably not the best time.” Zapp responded, “It’s a dinner, not a party—thus the having to get out by 9:30 or 10 at the latest. I would imagine this would start on the early side, like 7:00 or even earlier. So it’s settled—we know my home shall remain judenfrei.” Judenfrei is a German word meaning “free of Jews,” which the Nazis used to describe areas from which Jews had been expelled or killed.
Smith responded to the group: “They don’t call it Freitag for nothing,” using the German word for “Friday,” and added, “I was planning to hit the bar during the dinner hours and talk to people like Matt Parrot [sic], etc. I should have time to pop by though.” Matt Parrott is the former spokesman for the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party, which flamed out earlier this year after its leader, Matthew Heimbach, had an affair with Parrott’s wife, leading to the two falling out.
And in an email from 2014, Smith jokingly calls “spooning dibs” on Jack Donovan during a visit from Donovan, a “masculinist” writer who has ties to members of the alt-right and is heavily involved in Wolves of Vinland, a neo-pagan group entwined with the white-nationalist movement. Saucier had emailed several people to discuss sleeping arrangements for Donovan, telling them that, “There was some misunderstanding about how Jack Donovan would arrive down in Lynchburg for festivities this weekend”; the Wolves of Vinland are based outside of Lynchburg, Virginia.
7. Ian Smith was not alone. John Feee and Julie Kirchener–both hard line anti-immigration activists–have been hired by Team Trump. ” . . . . Jon Feere, a former legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, or CIS, has been hired as an adviser to Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan. At Customs and Border Protection, Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, has been hired as an adviser to Customs and Border Protection acting Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, said Lapan. The hiring of Feere and Kirchner at the federal agencies has alarmed immigrants’ rights activists. CIS and FAIR are think tanks based in Washington that advocate restricting legal and illegal immigration. The two organizations were founded by John Tanton, a retired Michigan ophthalmologist who has openly embraced eugenics, the science of improving the genetic quality of the human population by encouraging selective breeding and at times, advocating for the sterilization of genetically undesirable groups. . . .”
The Federation for Immigration Reform has been partly funded by the Pioneer Fund, an organization that operated in favor of the eugenics policy of Nazi Germany. “. . . . Between 1985 and 1994, FAIR received around $1.2 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund is a eugenicist organization that was started in 1937 by men close to the Nazi regime who wanted to pursue “race betterment” by promoting the genetic lines of American whites. Now led by race scientist J. Philippe Rushton, the fund continues to back studies intended to reveal the inferiority of minorities to whites. . . .”
Two hard-line opponents of illegal immigration have obtained high-level advisory jobs at federal immigration agencies in the Department of Homeland Security.
Jon Feere, a former legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, or CIS, has been hired as an adviser to Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan.
At Customs and Border Protection, Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, has been hired as an adviser to Customs and Border Protection acting Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, said Lapan.
The hiring of Feere and Kirchner at the federal agencies has alarmed immigrants’ rights activists.
CIS and FAIR are think tanks based in Washington that advocate restricting legal and illegal immigration. The two organizations were founded by John Tanton, a retired Michigan ophthalmologist who has openly embraced eugenics, the science of improving the genetic quality of the human population by encouraging selective breeding and at times, advocating for the sterilization of genetically undesirable groups.
Dan Stein, president of FAIR, noted in a 2011 New York Times article that Tanton did not hold a leadership role in the organization any more and was no longer on the board of directors. He is still listed as belonging to FAIR’s national board of advisors.
New aides and their connections
Kirchner worked as executive director of FAIR from October 2005 to August 2015. She then joined the Donald Trump presidential campaign as an immigration adviser before being appointed to Customs and Border Protection.
While at CIS, Feere promoted legislation to end automatic citizenship for US-born children of undocumented immigrants. He argued that bearing a child on US soil provides an immigrant access to welfare and other social benefits, which has spurred a rise in what he calls “birth tourism,” the practice of foreigners traveling to the United States to give birth to add a US citizen to the family.
The nonpartisan fact-checking website Politifact has mostly debunked those claims, concluding that US-born children do little in the long term to help their immigrant parents. Citizen children cannot sponsor their parents for citizenship until the young person turns 21 and any social benefits would be given to the child and not their undocumented parents, who would not qualify. The Pew Research Center also has found that the number of babies born to unauthorized immigrants in the United States has been declining steadily in recent years.
Feere also has been a strong critic of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program enacted by President Barack Obama via executive action that has granted protection from deportation to young immigrants brought to the country as children.
In one article published by CIS, Feere questioned whether children brought to the United States at an early age were sufficiently assimilated or loyal to this nation to be granted any type of legal status.
In a 2013 interview with The Washington Post, Mark Krikorian, executive director of CIS, worried about growing “multiculturalism” and contended that a “lot of immigration pushers don’t like America the way it is” and want to change it.
Stein, the president of FAIR, defended in a 1997 interview with the Wall Street Journal his belief that certain immigrant groups are engaged in “competitive breeding” to diminish America’s white majority.
“CIS has published articles that labeled immigrants ‘third world gold diggers’ and that blamed Central American asylum seekers for the ‘burgeoning street gang problem’ in the US, while Dan Stein has said that many immigrants that come to the US hate America and everything the country stands for,” said Heidi Beirich, director of Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which oversees the center’s yearly count of anti-immigrant groups. “We take these designations very seriously, and CIS and FAIR are far-right fringe groups that regularly publish racist, xenophobic material and spread misinformation about immigrants and immigration.”
Throughout the presidential campaign and since he’s taken office, Donald Trump’s immigration policy has mirrored details found in CIS reports. In April 2016, for example, CIS published a list of “79 immigration actions that the next president can take.” The list included such measures as withholding federal funds from sanctuary cities, eliminating the “Priority Enforcement Program,” which prioritized the deportation of the most serious criminals during the Obama administration, and reducing the number of welfare-dependent immigrants living in the United States.
Many of these recommendations have already been enacted, proposed or discussed by the administration, and some were included in Trump’s executive order on immigration issued in January.
“The campaign and the administration have used other material of ours so I’m delighted that they are using that immigration actions list,” Krikorian said. “But there’s a difference between using CIS’ material as source of important research and CIS actually having a direct operational link to the administration.”
Krikorian declined to comment on Feere’s job at ICE.
Feere, Kirchner, acting ICE Director Homan and acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner McAleenan declined requests for interviews.
Kirchner and Feere’s advisory roles at Customs and Border Protection and ICE have rattled some immigrants’ rights advocates, who say they are concerned by the newfound power and influence far-right nativist groups have gained within the government since Trump came into office.
“These groups have spent 20 years looking for ways that they could hurt immigrants and now they’ve been given the keys to the kingdom,” said Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigrant advocacy group based in Washington whose goal is to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Some pro-immigrant advocates already sense a growing breakdown in their ability to effectively get information from ICE.
“There is this general, very harsh sense within the nonprofit advocacy community that we are being entirely shut out on everything from engagement on policy all the way to individual immigrant cases, and just very basic information that ICE should be transparent about, like how many detention centers are currently in operation around the country,” said a representative from a pro-immigrant organization who, along with some other colleagues, requested anonymity in order to speak freely.
ICE adds groups to stakeholder meetings
This marks what some say is a drastic change in the relationship between ICE and pro-immigrant advocacy organizations. During the Bush administration, a coalition of pro-immigrant groups known as the ICE-NGO Working Group started holding confidential, closed-door stakeholder meetings several times a year with high-ranking immigration officials as an opportunity to express concerns and ask specific questions about enforcement policy, the rights of immigrants and their treatment while in detention.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association, the American Bar Association’s Immigrant Justice Project and the National Immigrant Justice Center are among the advocacy organizations that make up the ICE-NGO Working Group.
In February, at the first such get-together under the Trump administration, members of the working group felt blindsided to discover that some anti-immigrant, pro-enforcement groups also were in attendance.
In addition to CIS and FAIR, invitations were extended to the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is the legal arm of FAIR, NumbersUSA and Judicial Watch. These groups support stricter enforcement of immigration laws, reducing overall immigration levels and the increased detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants.
“We are frustrated and angry that what felt like a productive conversation and an exchange of ideas and information about how to ensure the safe and fair treatment of immigrants in their (ICE) custody has morphed into a meeting with organizations whose mission is to restrict immigration and perpetuate hate against immigrants,” said one pro-immigrant advocate who attended the February meeting.
Pro-enforcement, pro-immigrant groups debate
Leaders of the pro-enforcement organizations argue, however, that as clear stakeholders in the immigration debate they have every right to be at the ICE meetings.
“We were intentionally excluded from the meetings under the Obama administration, but with the new management, ICE invited some other groups, too, and it’s long overdue,” said Krikorian, who acknowledged he does not remember being invited to these meetings.
Pro-immigrant advocates have told ICE they would prefer if the agency met with those groups separately, which ICE has declined to do. Some advocates said they don’t take issue with people who have opposite views on immigration, but believe these groups have consistently spread verifiably false information to demonize the immigrant community and its allies.
“There’s obvious fear in the community because of the anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from this administration, but having Jon Feere, who came from CIS, in a leadership position at ICE and now these anti-immigrant groups showing up at stakeholder meetings for the first time in 14 years, it has also created this really deep-seated fear in the advocacy community,” said an immigrants’ rights activist who teared up recalling how one advocate felt she could no longer participate for fear of exposing herself to ICE.
“Many immigrants’ rights advocates are immigrants themselves, some are DACA recipients, and they are now afraid to even show up at the stakeholder meetings because they may be taken into custody while at ICE headquarters. These are smart, professional, well-educated advocates that are now scared to do their jobs,” said the activist.
As a result, immigrants’ rights organizations have since notified ICE that they have dissolved the ICE-NGO Working Group and will no longer participate in the quarterly gatherings.
ICE will keep meetings going
In a statement ICE said the meetings will continue:
“ICE is committed to transparency with all interested stakeholders — not just those of one opinion on immigration enforcement issues and policies. ICE appreciates constructive and diverse viewpoints from a wide spectrum of organizations interested in immigration enforcement. The agency continues to expand engagement with stakeholders and community members. Our goal is to make sure all members of the public fully understand what we do and what we don’t do.”
Peter Robbio a spokesman for NumbersUSA, a group that also scored its first invitation to the stakeholder meeting, described this as the best relationship the organization has had with any administration in 21 years.
Said FAIR’s Stein: “President Trump understands the immigration issue from the larger view of the national interest and has tapped a strong bench of people who bring expertise on the issue — some who are in the administration, some who are not.”
If pro-immigrant groups are unhappy about that, said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, they better get used to the new reality.
“I’m sure these left-wing groups are used to being able to control the debate and control the room, and I’m sure they would love to be able to continue to do that, even during the Trump administration,” Fitton said.
The pro-enforcement groups are enjoying the unprecedented input to shape immigration policy and hope to continue attending the stakeholder meetings with ICE.
“We should be encouraging more of these meetings,” Fitton said. “I know the liberal left is afraid to confront the arguments of their opponents and want to be able to talk to the government without anyone holding them to account, but we are not opposed to participating in them with the other groups.”
Not quite, says the other side.
“This isn’t exactly the same situation as having Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, both in the same room,” countered one pro-immigrant advocate. “The fundamental difference is that their agenda is driven by a nativist white supremacist approach to policy. So, to sit together in a room, not only does it have a chilling effect, but I think that many of the advocacy organizations, including ours, fear that we would be normalizing the nativist agenda as it gets into the halls of our government.”
6. An article cited, but not excerpted, in the audio portion of the program notes the role of the scapegoating of immigration in the rise of neofascist parties. The devastation from the middle East wars–Syria in particular–has driven large numbers of desperate refugees to Europe. This plays beautifully into the political agenda of so-called “populists” who cite them as the reason for the implementation of what is essentially a xenophobic platform.
What this article does NOT mention is that one of the Sweden Democrats’ most prominent financial backer is Carl Lundstrom, who was also the main financial backer of the Pirate Bay website that hosted Wikileaks.
“How the Far Right Conquered Sweden” by Jochen Bittner; The New York Times; 9/6/2018.
To understand why Sweden, a bastion of social democracy, might end up with a far-right party in government after national elections on Sunday, you need to take a walk with Ahmed Abdirahman.
An American-educated Somali immigrant who works as a policy analyst at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Abdirahman grew up and now lives in the suburb of Rinkeby-Tensta, where some 90 percent of residents have a foreign background, roughly 80 percent live on welfare or earn low incomes and 42 percent are under age 25. It is a violent place: Sixteen people were killed there in 2016, mostly in drug-related conflicts, an unheard-of number in this typically peaceful country. As we walk along one of its main streets at 7 p.m., shopkeepers pull down the metal shutters in front of their windows, while young masked men on scooters start speeding through the streets. A police helicopter hovers overhead.
The segregation and violence of Rinkeby-Tensta, and the likelihood that the far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats party will win the most votes in this weekend’s national elections, are both the result of the country’s long-running unwillingness to deal with the realities of its immigration crisis.
For decades, Sweden, once a racially and culturally homogeneous country with an expansive social welfare system, insisted that it could absorb large numbers of non-European migrants without considering how those migrants should be integrated into Swedish society.
As they did in cities across Western Europe, migrants tended to cluster in low-income neighborhoods; facing poor job prospects and rampant employment discrimination, they naturally turned inward. More young women have started wearing the hijab recently, Mr. Abdirahman tells me, and more young men “internalize the otherness” — rejected by their new society, they embrace the stereotypes imposed upon them. This can lead to a point where they reject gay rights or liberalism as “white, Western ideas,” and even attack firefighters because they represent the state.
As we walk around, Mr. Abdirahman, who is single and childless, confesses: “When I came here in 1998, to me this place was paradise. Today, I wouldn’t want my children to grow up here.”
Mr. Abdirahman says he was lucky: His mother encouraged him to contribute to society and get a good education. He earned a degree in international studies in New York, then worked in Geneva and with the United States Embassy here before going to work with the chamber of commerce. Not all immigrants get the same push at home, he says; some parents discouraged their youngsters from going to the city center to mix. Sweden, he is afraid, has entered a vicious circle of immigration, segregation and growing mutual hostility.
The situation grew worse with the latest mass influx of refugees, in 2015, after which a number of suburbs became almost exclusively migrant. Considered “no go” areas by some Swedes, these neighborhoods are known to outsiders only from horrific headlines. What people don’t get to see, Mr. Abdirahman worries, is the bus driver or the cleaning lady working themselves ragged to get their children into a university.
None of this is new, and yet the government, dominated by the traditionally strong Social Democrats and the centrist Moderate Party, did far too little. That left an opening for the Sweden Democrats, until recently a group relegated to the racist fringe of Swedish politics. In the past few years, the party has recast itself; just like the populist Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany and the Five Star Movement in Italy, it has repositioned itself as anti-establishment and anti-immigrant. The Sweden Democrats accuses all other political actors and the media of “destroying” Sweden, calls for a suspension of the right to asylum and promotes an exit of Sweden from the European Union.
The party has clocked up to 20 percent in the latest polls, enough to make a coalition government between the Social Democrats and the Moderate Party unlikely — and raising the chances that one of those parties will have to enter into a government with the Sweden Democrats. “If the major parties had been able to read the majority’s concerns, things would have been different,” Mr. Abdirahman says.
Similar stories have played out across Western Europe, from the Netherlands to Austria. But Sweden always imagined itself as something different, a society bound by its unique brand of togetherness. But that self-satisfaction justified a myopic approach to the very complex problem of how to integrate vast numbers of foreigners. If you believe in giving everyone a state-of-the-art apartment, social welfare and child benefits, then it’s unlikely you will tackle the hurdles of the highly regulated Swedish labor market.
The anti-establishment Sweden Democrats profit from the fact that they were often the first to point to the downsides of immigration. Yet as much as they despise wishful thinking, they replace it with simplistic thinking. No matter what problems there might be in Sweden — housing shortages, school closings, an overburdened health care system — in the view of the Sweden Democrats, it is always one group’s fault: migrants.
Andreas Johansson Heinö, an analyst with the think tank Timbro, believes that many Swedes will vote for the Sweden Democrats on Sept. 9 even though they see through the party’s crude thinking. He sees similarities to the United States, where a considerable number of people say they voted for Donald Trump not because they liked him but because they liked the idea of change.
Even if the Sweden Democrats win big on Sunday, the election might be a force for good. The Moderate Party, which is likely to take second place, might split over the question of whether to rule with them. And the Social Democrats, already under pressure to move to the left, might likewise fall apart. Sweden’s party landscape, in other words, might be blown to pieces.
If the country is lucky, some parts from this explosion will bind together as a new force — one that takes seriously the need for realism on immigration and integration, without falling for the siren song of right-wing populism.
7. On CNN former Republican senator Rick Santorum thought the big story of the day on which Manafort was convicted and Michael Cohen plead guilty was the first degree murder charge laid against an “illegal” Mexican migrant worker following the discovery of a deceased white Iowa college girl Mollie Tibbetts. Can this become a rallying cry for Trump and his anti-immigrant and racist dead enders?
We note in this context that:
- The announcement of Rivera’s arrest for the Tibbetts murder happened on the same day that Paul Manafort’s conviction was announced and Michael Cohen pleaded guilty. Might we be looking at an “op,” intended to eclipse the negative publicity from the the Manafort/Cohen judicial events?
- Rivera exhibited possible symptoms of being subjected to mind control, not unlike Sirhan Sirhan. ” . . . . Investigators say Rivera followed Mollie in his dark Chevy Malibu as she went for a run around 7.30pm on July 18. He ‘blacked out’ and attacked her after she threatened to call the police unless he left her alone, officers said. . . . It is not yet clear how Mollie died. . . . Rivera told police that after seeing her, he pulled over and parked his car to get out and run with her. . . . Mollie grabbed her phone and threatened to call the police before running off ahead. The suspect said that made him ‘panic’ and he chased after her. That’s when he ‘blacked out.’ He claims he remembers nothing from then until he was back in his car, driving. He then noticed one of her earphones sitting on his lap and blood in the car then remembered he’d stuffed her in the truck. . . . ‘He followed her and seemed to be drawn to her on that particular day. For whatever reason he chose to abduct her,’ Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation special agent Rick Ryan said on Tuesday afternoon. . . . ‘Rivera stated that she grabbed her phone and said: ‘I’m gonna call the police.’ . . . . ‘Rivera said he then panicked and he got mad and that he ‘blocked’ his memory which is what he does when he gets very upset and doesn’t remember anything after that until he came to at an intersection.’ . . .”
- Just as Sirhan had been in a right-wing milieu prior to the Robert Kennedy assassination, so, too, was Rivera: ” . . . . The prominent Republican family which owns the farm where Mollie Tibbetts’ alleged killer worked have insisted that he passed background checks for migrant workers. Christhian Rivera, 24, who is from Mexico, was charged with first degree murder on Tuesday after leading police to a corn field where Mollie’s body was dumped. Dane Lang, co-owner of Yarrabee Farms along with Eric Lang, confirmed that Rivera had worked there for four years and was an employee ‘of good standing.’ Dane’s brother is Craig Lang, former president of the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation and the Iowa Board of Regents, and a 2018 Republican candidate for state secretary of agriculture. . . .”
- Trump cited the Tibbetts murder in a Charleston, West Virginia, rally that day: ” . . . . President Donald Trump chirped in during his Tuesday address at a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, blaming immigration laws for Mollie’s death. ‘You heard about today with the illegal alien coming in very sadly from Mexico,’ he said. ‘And you saw what happened to that incredible beautiful young woman. ‘Should’ve never happened, illegally in our country. We’ve had a huge impact but the laws are so bad. The immigration laws are such a disgrace. ‘We are getting them changed but we have to get more Republicans.’ Gov. Kim Reynolds complained about the ‘broken’ immigration system that allowed a ‘predator’ to live in her state. . . .”
The prominent Republican family which owns the farm where Mollie Tibbetts’ alleged killer worked have insisted that he passed background checks for migrant workers.
Christhian Rivera, 24, who is from Mexico, was charged with first degree murder on Tuesday after leading police to a corn field where Mollie’s body was dumped.
Dane Lang, co-owner of Yarrabee Farms along with Eric Lang, confirmed that Rivera had worked there for four years and was an employee ‘of good standing.’
Dane’s brother is Craig Lang, former president of the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation and the Iowa Board of Regents, and a 2018 Republican candidate for state secretary of agriculture.
Dane’s statement said: ‘First and foremost, our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of Mollie Tibbetts.
‘This is a profoundly sad day for our community. All of us at Yarrabee Farms are shocked to hear that one of our employees was involved and is charged in this case.
‘This individual has worked at our farms for four years, was vetted through the government’s E‑Verify system, and was an employee in good standing.
‘On Monday, the authorities visited our farm and talked to our employees. We have cooperated fully with their investigation.’
The E‑Verify site allows employers to establish the eligibility of employees, both US or foreign, by comparing a worker’s Employment Eligibility Verification Form I‑9 with data held by the government.
The employee is eligible to work in the US if the data matches. If it doesn’t, the worker has only eight federal government work days to resolve the issue.
Despite the Lang family using the system, police say Rivera had been in the US illegally for between four and seven years.
Investigators say Rivera followed Mollie in his dark Chevy Malibu as she went for a run around 7.30pm on July 18.
He ‘blacked out’ and attacked her after she threatened to call the police unless he left her alone, officers said.
Rivera was identified by surveillance footage obtained in the last couple of weeks from someone’s home.
It showed him following the student in his car and Mollie running ahead of him. It is not yet clear how Mollie died.
Earlier Monday a member of the Lang family which runs Yarrabee Farms told DailyMail.com he was a personal friend of Mollie and her brothers and was ‘devastated’ by the news of her death.
It’s understood the company hires around 15 migrant workers, most of whom are believed to be Mexican.
Rivera is believed to have lived with a number of other migrant workers on a secluded farmhouse in Brooklyn owned by their employer.
Workers associated with the farm told DailyMail.com that they barely knew Rivera but confirmed that he lived there with a girlfriend named Iris Monarrez and their baby.
They said Iris had gone to stay with her mother after Rivera was arrested in Mollie’s murder.
Neighbors told DailyMail.com they had seen a black Chevy Malibu just like the one Rivera was driving when he abducted Mollie regularly driving to and from the property for the past couple of years.
Mollie’s autopsy is planned for Wednesday but the results may not be released for weeks.
Rivera told police that after seeing her, he pulled over and parked his car to get out and run with her.
Mollie grabbed her phone and threatened to call the police before running off ahead. The suspect said that made him ‘panic’ and he chased after her.
That’s when he ‘blacked out.’
He claims he remembers nothing from then until he was back in his car, driving.
He then noticed one of her earphones sitting on his lap and blood in the car then remembered he’d stuffed her in the truck.
Rivera drove her then to a corn field where he hauled her body out of the truck and hid her beneath corn stalks.
He was arrested on Friday after police honed in on his vehicle by viewing surveillance footage obtained from a private resident’s home surveillance cameras.
‘He followed her and seemed to be drawn to her on that particular day. For whatever reason he chose to abduct her,’ Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation special agent Rick Ryan said on Tuesday afternoon.
But it’s still unclear what the motive behind the killing was, Rahn said.
Rivera told police he had seen her in the area before. She is friends on Facebook with the mother of his daughter but it is not clear if he and Mollie knew each other.
President Donald Trump chirped in during his Tuesday address at a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, blaming immigration laws for Mollie’s death.
‘You heard about today with the illegal alien coming in very sadly from Mexico,’ he said. ‘And you saw what happened to that incredible beautiful young woman.
‘Should’ve never happened, illegally in our country. We’ve had a huge impact but the laws are so bad. The immigration laws are such a disgrace.
‘We are getting them changed but we have to get more Republicans.’
Gov. Kim Reynolds complained about the ‘broken’ immigration system that allowed a ‘predator’ to live in her state.
‘I spoke with Mollie’s family and passed on the heartfelt condolences of a grieving state,’ Reynolds said. ‘I shared with them my hope that they can find comfort knowing that God does not leave us to suffer alone. Even in our darkest moments, He will comfort and heal our broken hearts.’
At 3pm on Monday, law enforcement arrived at the farmhouse where Rivera worked, according to a neighbor.
FBI agents were still searching the house and a number of nearby trailers on Tuesday afternoon.
Neighbors said the building housed a ‘revolving door’ of hired migrant workers but that they had never caused any problems.
FBI agents attended another nearby property belonging to the farm overnight Monday to quiz Rivera’s co-workers, most of whom claim only to understand Spanish.
‘There was a panic when they arrived because they thought at first that it was ICE launching a raid,’ a local source told DailyMail.com.
‘A lot of these people arrive with forged documents. But it turned it was the FBI and it was about Mollie.’
According to public records the property being searched is owned by Mary and Craig Lang, whose family own the nearby Yarrabee Farms.
Mollie was staying alone overnight in her boyfriend’s home the night she went missing and was last seen going for a jog in the neighborhood at around 8pm but what happened afterwards has remained a complete mystery for weeks.
Her boyfriend opened a Snapchat photograph from her at 10pm which appeared to suggest that she was indoors but it is not known what time Mollie sent it.
In his arrest warrant, police describe Rivera’s chilling confession.
‘Rivera admitted to making contact with the female running in Brooklyn and that he pursued her in his vehicle in an area east of Brooklyn. Defendant Rivera stated he parked the vehicle, got out and was running behind her and alongside of her.
‘Rivera stated that she grabbed her phone and said: ‘I’m gonna call the police.’
‘Rivera said he then panicked and he got mad and that he ‘blocked’ his memory which is what he does when he gets very upset and doesn’t remember anything after that until he came to at an intersection.
‘Rivera stated he then made a u‑turn, drove back to an entrance to a field and then drove into a driveway to a cornfield.
‘He noticed there was an ear piece from headphones in his lap and that this is how he realized he put her in the trunk.
‘He went to get her out of the trunk and he noticed blood on the side of her head.
‘He described the female’s clothing, what she was wearing including an ear phone or head phone set.
‘He described that he dragged Tibbetts on foot from his vehicle to a secluded location in a cornfield.
‘He put her over his shoulder and took her about 20 meters into the cornfield and he left her covered in some corn leaves and that he left her there, face up.
‘The Defendant was able to use his phone to determine the route he traveled from Brooklyn.
‘Rivera then later guided law enforcement to her location from memory,’ the affidavit continues.
Rivera’s arrest and the discovery of the student’s body brings an end to five weeks of tireless investigation by the FBI, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation and local sheriffs.
Rivera’s initial court appearance is scheduled for 1pm Wednesday in Montezuma.
If convicted of first-degree murder he faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole.
Last week, the FBI said it believed she had been abducted by someone she knew.
They warned that the person was ‘hiding in plain sight’ and had even attended vigils held in her honor but no arrests were made.
A $400,000 fund for her safe return was established but it did not produce any leads either.
Greg Willey of Crime Stoppers of Central Iowa said her family and investigators would dedicate their resources to catching her killer ‘once they catch their breath’.
The Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation refused to share details of the discovery on Tuesday when contacted by DailyMail.com.
The only person who had been visibly scrutinized by police after she went missing was pig farmer Wayne Cheney.
He was grilled by officers more than once and had his property searched twice after search crews found a red t‑shirt that was similar to one owned by the student near his land.
It was never established if the t‑shirt did in fact belong to Mollie.
Mollie’s father Rob went back to California, where he lives, last week for what he called a much needed ‘break’ from the investigation
He said he had been urged by authorities to do so and that it was a ‘half way’ point in the investigation.
Rob was not in the state when his daughter disappeared.
Her boyfriend, Dalton Jack, was away for work when she disappeared as was his older brother Blake.
The youngsters lived together in a home in Brooklyn with Blake’s fiancee who was also cleared.
As the hunt for her intensified, authorities set up a website that was dedicate to finding her.
It provided a map detailing five locations police considered to be significant. The website also offered a tips page which generated hundreds of clues about what may have happened to her.
The news of her death shook the small town of Brooklyn where most residents are known to each other.
The Rev. Joyce Proctor at Grace United Methodist Church said she’d been praying for Tibbetts’ enemies ‘to do the right thing... and release her.’
Sadly that never happened.
Proctor, who said she heard Tibbetts ‘was a wonderful young lady’, said people were in shock their little town isn’t as safe as they first believed it was, the Des Moines Register reported.
‘I told the ladies at our prayer group this morning that if it’s not safe in Brooklyn it’s not safe anywhere,’ she said. ‘And I think that’s been a hard thing to realize for a lot of people here.’
7. Under hypnosis, Sirhan was able to recall a considerable amount of information about “the girl in the polka-dot dress”–a figure reported by many eyewitnesses to have celebrated the assassination of Robert Kennedy and appeared to have implicated herself and others in the crime. Note similarities between Christihan Rivera’s description of his attraction to Mollie Tibbetts and Sirhan’s description of his attraction to the girl in the polka-dot dress.
Convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan was manipulated by a seductive girl in a mind control plot to shoot Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and his bullets did not kill the presidential candidate, lawyers for Sirhan said in new legal papers.
The documents filed this week in federal court and obtained by The Associated Press detail extensive interviews with Sirhan during the past three years, some done while he was under hypnosis.
The papers point to a mysterious girl in a polka-dot dress as the controller who led Sirhan to fire a gun in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. But the documents suggest a second person shot and killed Kennedy while using Sirhan as a diversion.
For the first time, Sirhan said under hypnosis that on a cue from the girl he went into “range mode” believing he was at a firing range and seeing circles with targets in front of his eyes.
“I thought that I was at the range more than I was actually shooting at any person, let alone Bobby Kennedy,” Sirhan was quoted as saying during interviews with Daniel Brown, a Harvard University professor and expert in trauma memory and hypnosis. He interviewed Sirhan for 60 hours with and without hypnosis, according to the legal brief.
Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney, said prosecutors were unaware of the legal filing and could not comment.
The story of the girl has been a lingering theme in accounts of the events just after midnight on June 5, 1968, when Kennedy was gunned down in the hotel pantry after claiming victory in the California Democratic presidential primary.
Witnesses talked of seeing such a female running from the hotel shouting, “We shot Kennedy.” But she was never identified, and amid the chaos of the scene, descriptions were conflicting.
Through the years, Sirhan has claimed no memory of shooting Kennedy and said in the recent interviews that his presence at the hotel was an accident, not a planned destination.
Under hypnosis, he remembered meeting the girl that night and becoming smitten with her. He said she led him to the pantry.
“I am trying to figure out how to hit on her.... That’s all that I can think about,” he says in one interview cited in the documents. “I was fascinated with her looks .... She never said much. It was very erotic. I was consumed by her. She was a seductress with an unspoken unavailability.” . . .
. . . Sirhan maintained in the hypnotic interviews that the mystery girl touched him or “pinched” him on the shoulder just before he fired then spun him around to see people coming through the pantry door.
“Then I was on the target range ... a flashback to the shooting range ... I didn’t know that I had a gun,” Sirhan said.
Under what Brown called the condition of hypnotic free recall, he said Sirhan remembered seeing the flash of a second gun at the time of the assassination. Without hypnosis, he said, Sirhan could not remember that shot.
Well, it turns out Jamal Khashoggi was indeed planning some sort of significant civil protest movement within Saudi Arabia. That’s based on more than 400 WhatsApp messages shared with CNN by Khashoggi’s part in this effort, Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident living in Canada with a 340,000-strong Twitter following.
Khashoggi and Abdulaziz communicated almost daily between October 2017 and August 2018 about the plan. They called it the “cyber bees” plan, which emerged from earlier discussions about creating a portal documenting human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. There was also talk of producing short films for mobile distribution. And the plan included sending smartphone SIM cards to dissidents back in Saudi Arabia so they could tweet without being traced. Unnamed wealth donors were going to help finance the operation.
And it got as far as Khashoggi wiring Abdulaziz $5,000. But in August of this year, Abdulaziz learned from a source back home that his phone had been hacked and the Saudi government knew all about it. Abdulaziz’s phone was examined by Citizenlab and Amnesty International, both of which concluded that the phone was hacked using the software provided by NSO Group, an Israeli company specializing in providing hacking toolkits to governments.
Abdulaziz is now suing NSO Group, alleging NSO broke international laws by selling its software to oppressive regimes while knowing it could be used to infringe human rights. It’s unclear what kind of shot the lawsuit against NSO Group has, especially given the long track record of companies selling hacking toolkits to oppressive regimes. Recall how Hacking Team, the Italian company that sold hacking toolkits to governments, was basically brought by a Saudi/UAE group of investors. Also recall how Hacking Team happened to offer malware that researchers found to be awfully similar to the X‑Agent software that was attributed to be an exclusive ‘Fancy Bear’ tool and was used in the DNC hacks.
It’s also worth noting Michael Flynn’s ties to NSO Group. It turns out Flynn on was the advisory board of Luxembourg-based OSY Technologies and consulted for the US-based private equity firm Francisco Partners. and it turns out Fracisco Partners owns NSO Group and OSY is an NSO offshoot. Flynn joined OSY in May of 2016 and was paid more than $40,000 to be an advisory board member from May 2016 to January 2017. And recall how NSO Group’s approach to ensuring governments don’t abuse its software was to largely rely on governments to police themselves.
So we’ll see how the lawsuit against NSO Group proceeds, but the more we learn about what Khashoggi was up to, the more it looks like he was working on creating the seed of a Saudi version of the ‘Arab Spring’. But, of course, let’s not forget that Khashoggi was largely fine with the Saudi monarchy. His primary problem was with the new crown prince. According to Abdulaziz, “[Jamal] believed that MBS is the issue, is the problem and he said this kid should be stopped.” So it seems less likely this effort would have be used to trigger pro-democracy protests given the enormous challenges of pulling that off in a place like Saudi Arabia at this point and more likely that it was going to focus on simply getting rid of MBS. But given Khashoggi’s deep Muslim Brotherhood ties, who knows, we can’t rule out that the plan really was to start off with an anti-MBS drive with the hope of blowing it up into a full blown Muslim Brotherhood-backed ‘Saudi spring’:
“The exchanges reveal a progression from talk to action — the pair had begun planning an online youth movement that would hold the Saudi state to account. “[Jamal] believed that MBS is the issue, is the problem and he said this kid should be stopped,” Abdulaziz said in an interview with CNN.”
“[Jamal] believed that MBS is the issue, is the problem and he said this kid should be stopped.” That sounds like the primary purpose of this plan was to just get rid of MBS. Using a big Saudi youth movement over Twitter. And the plan included distributing SIM cars to dissidents back home so they could tweet anonymously:
But the plans came to a grizzly end following the hack of Abdulaziz’s phone by the Saudi government. Somehow, Abdulaziz received word from back home that government officials were aware of the plans. It was concluded by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab that NSO Group was behind the hack:
So now Abdulaziz is suing NSO Group. NGO is calling the charges “completely unfounded”, while simultaneously claiming that they can’t be responsible because they just give their software to governments and aren’t involved with how governments use it: “In addition, products supplied by NSO are operated by the government customer to whom they were supplied, without the involvement of NSO or its employees.” It’s the same defense we’ve seen from NSO Group before, that NSO Group just hands their hacking tools over to governments and aren’t actively helping governments use it:
So it’s going to be interesting to see if all of the Western media focus on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi starts including coverage of the international marketplace for cutting-edge hacking tools sold to authoritarian regimes around the world. Because Saudi hacking-related stories are now at least tangentially related to the story of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Stories like the Saudi/UAE purchase of Hacking Team. Or the Saudi/UAE attempt to use Psy Group — company offering hacking-related services — in the 2016 elections to benefit the Trump campaign. And then there’s the new offshoot of Cambridge Analytica, Emerdata, that appears to be owned by a UAE-backed group. All of these stories point towards a rapidly growing hacking/digital dirty tricks capacity by the Saudi government and its close Gulf allies enabled by the global marketplace for elite hacking services. Hopefully that story gets a lot more coverage now.
Is Saudi Arabia teaming up with AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer owned by Trump-ally David Pecker, to blackmail Jeff Bezos? That’s the bizarre, yet plausible, scenario that’s starting to emerge.
First, we have the blackmail claims Jeff Bezos just publicly made yesterday when he made a blog post on Medium.com detailing what appears to be a pretty straightforward blackmail attempt by AMI. Specifically, AMI was threatening to publish ‘dick pics’ and various other intimate photos of Bezos and Lauren Sanchez unless Bezos released a statement “affirming that they have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AM’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces” and stop “referring to such a possibility.” And according to Bezos, this entire blackmail attempt is a result of Pecker becoming “apoplectic” over an investigation The Washington Post was doing into Pecker and AMI’s interest in expanding to Saudi Arabia:
“Bezos claims that AMI CEO David Pecker was “apoplectic” over an investigation The Washington Post was doing into Pecker and AMI’s interest in expanding to Saudi Arabia, including AMI’s publication of a pro-Saudi Arabia tabloid last year ahead of the arrival of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”
So Bezos suddenly reveals a blatant blackmail attempt by AMI that he is assuming is related to the The Washington Post’s investigation into AMI’s growing ties to the Saudi government. But there’s still a big question over how AMI got the images and emails for the blackmail in the first place. And according to Washington Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia, Bezos’s investigators believe that a “government entity” may be behind the theft of that information:
““…They have begun to believe, the Bezos camp, that this publication by the National Enquirer might have been politically motivated,” Roig-Franzia told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. “[Bezos security chief] Gavin de Becker told us that he does not believe that Jeff Bezos’ phone was hacked. He thinks it’s possible that a government entity might have gotten ahold of his text messages.””
So Bezos’s investigators don’t believe his phone was actually hacked and think it’s possible that “a government entity might have gotten ahold of his text messages.” Keep in mind that Sanchez’s phone could still have been hacked to obtain these texts and images. But if not, that suggests the information from obtained ‘in transit’, i.e. grabbed while the messages were being sent over the internet.
One government agency that would obvious have had such powers is the NSA, raising the question of whether or not Trump used his presidential powers to get involved. But given the suspicions that Pecker was specifically enraged over the Washington Post’s investigations into AMI’s attempts to expand into Saudi Arabia and develop Saudi ties, and given the obvious tensions that would exist between Bezos’s Washington Post over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the other obvious government agency suspect would be a Saudi intelligence agency.
Along those lines, it’s worth noting the other recent story of apparent intimidation by a group involved with Saudi hacking operations: the alleged targeting of Citizen Lab, the Canada-based cyber-focused research group focused on exposing government hacking operations around the world. According to reports from just a couple of weeks ago, agents believed to be associated with the Israeli hacking company NSO Group allegedly approached Citizen Lab researchers under false pretenses for the purpose of goading them into making anti-Semitic comments for the purpose of discrediting the group. And as we’ll recall, it appears to be NSO Group’s hacking tools that were used by the Saudi government to hack Jamal Khashoggi’s phone.
Also recall Michael Flynn’s ties to NSO Group. Flynn on was the advisory board of Luxembourg-based OSY Technologies and consulted for the US-based private equity firm Francisco Partners. and it turns out Francisco Partners owns NSO Group and OSY is an NSO offshoot. Flynn joined OSY in May of 2016 and was paid more than $40,000 to be an advisory board member from May 2016 to January 2017. And recall how NSO Group’s approach to ensuring governments don’t abuse its software was to largely rely on governments to police themselves.
So the company that appears to have sold the Saudi government powerful hacking tools was also recently sending undercover operatives to discredit an organization that was exposing their activities. Might this tie into the story of the blackmailing of Jeff Bezos? Who knows, but the intertwined relationships and overlapping motives are hard to ignore:
“Twice in the past two months, men masquerading as socially conscious investors have lured members of the Citizen Lab internet watchdog group to meetings at luxury hotels to quiz them for hours about their work exposing Israeli surveillance and the details of their personal lives. In both cases, the researchers believe they were secretly recorded.”
Someone clearly wants to discredit Citizen Lab. And based on the odd line of questioning that the Citizen Lab researchers towards NSO Group and the fact that Citizen Lab revealed that one of the iPhones of Jamal Khasghoggi’s confidantes had been infected by NSO Group’s spyware months before Khashoggi’s murder, it seems pretty likely that either the Saudi government or the NSO Group is behind this discreditation operation:
The first Citizen Lab researcher Bahr Abdul Razzak, who was invited to meeting a man who reached out to him over LinkedIn. But it turns out this man and his company don’t appear to exist and when Abdul Razzak met this met and kept asking strange questions about his work on the NSO Group’s software and leading questions about whether or not Abdul Razzak was reporting on NSO Group due to hatred of Israel:
Then John Scott-Railton, another Citizen Lab researcher, got a mysterious invite of his own. So Scott-Railton and AP reporters set a trap. They met with this second individual, who again directed the conversation in the direction of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, until AP reporters confronted the man about why his company doesn’t appear to exist:
At this point, no one knows who those men are and at this point the AP has found no evidence that they’re actually linked to the NSO Group:
So were these NSO Group private investigators? Perhaps spies hired by the NSO Group? Or were they hired by the Saudi government? Who knows, but given the large numbers of companies operating in the private intelligence space the number of possible suspects is pretty vast. Recall how Cambridge Analytica pitched the idea of setting up a “honey-pot” trap using Ukrainian prostitutes to discredit the opponents of a prospective client and keep in mind that the new offshoot of Cambridge Analytica, Emerdata, that appears to be owned by a UAE-backed group. Entrapment is an old trick and there’s going to be no shortage of companies offering such services.
Also keep in mind that NSO Group is just one of the hacking entities that have been found to have Saudi ties in recent years. For instance, there was Hacking Team, the Italian company that sold hacking toolkits to governments, was basically brought by a Saudi/UAE group of investors. Recall how Hacking Team happened to offer malware that researchers found to be awfully similar to the X‑Agent software that was attributed to be an exclusive ‘Fancy Bear’ tool and was used in the DNC hacks.
So we have possible Saudi government hacking activity involvement in the blackmail of Jeff Bezos and the parallel story of some sort of entrapment scheme targeting Citizen Lab, which played a key role in exposing the using of NSO Group spyware in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
And that all points towards one of the more chilling aspects of the growing AMI/Saudi ties: the fact that the Saudi government appears to be willing to hack with impunity suggests AMI is going to have a lot more blackmail material going forward as this AMI/Saudi relationship blossoms.
There’s a report out in the Guardian about an alleged foiled Jordanian coup plot. A foiled coup plot that would have installed a more compliant member of the Hashemite royal family in power that was orchestrated the contemporary ‘usual suspect’ for the Middle East: Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).
And given the timing and circumstances surrounding the plot, we have every reason to assume it was being carried out with the full knowledge of Jared Kushner. Why was the Trump administration interested in overthrowing a long-standing US ally? Well, it sounds like King Hussein of Jordan wasn’t keen on a key provision of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations the Trump administration was pushing at the time. That would be the provision that strips the Hashemite dynasty of exclusive authority over the Haram al-Sharif compound in Jerusalem, over which the Hashemite dynasty of the King of Jordan has maintained custodianship since 1924. That district just happens to be the site of both of al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock and a key source of legitimacy for the Hashemites. Under the peace plan, the Saudi and Israeli governments would share control of this district. The Jordanians apparently didn’t even know the details of the peace plan until it was finally revealed.
Both Kushner and MBS were reportedly increasingly upset with King Hussein over Jordan’s resistance to the peace plan. Remarkably, it sounds like Jordanian plotters continued pursuing the plot even after Trump left office, with one of them contacting the US embassy in March of this year to solicit support for the Saudi-backed member of the royal family. It wasn’t until April of this year that the favored member of the Jordanian royal family, Prince Hamzah bin Hussein, a former crown prince and half-brother of the king, was arrested by Jordan’s intelligence services. He remains under house arrest.
The whole story gives us a peak at another chapter of the Trump presidency’s foreign policy ambitions. It also gives us a better idea of the nature of the deepening relationship between the Israeli and Saudi governments. A relationship rooted in a mutual loathing of Iran and the Shia Muslim world that appears to have deepened enough to point where the Saudis were effectively being invited in to co-govern the Palestinians.
And while Trump may be out of office, the interests driving the coup plot obviously haven’t suddenly dissipated. MBS is still presumably plotting away. So while, on one level, this is the story of a foiled coup plot, on another level it’s probably a preview for the next iteration of MBS’s ambitions:
“However, away from the courthouse, evidence that a family feud could have been driven by a broader conspiracy has also been taking shape. The alleged deeds of Hamzah and his two accused conspirators are increasingly being seen as the dying echoes of a larger plot, fuelled by Jordan’s closest allies, that could have imperilled Abdullah’s grip on the throne if Donald Trump had won a second stint as US president.”
The dying echoes of a large plot. That’s what we’re looking at here although we still have no idea how large that plot ultimately was. But we know it involved an Kushner Israeli-Palestinian peace that would have extended the Saudi royal family’s dominance of the Sunni Muslim world.
And in terms of the coup plot itself, it sounds a lot like plans for a ‘color revolution’ of some sort, with a focus on ‘demoralization agents’:
It also sounds like this coup plot was accelerating during the final months of the Trump administration, when a desire to secure a Middle East peace plan was apparently causing the Trump administration to make all sorts of offers to the various interested parties, like F35s to the emiratis and the removal from the terror blacklist for Sudan. The Jordanian government clearly wasn’t open to these offers, hence the coup plot:
But what is perhaps the most significant detail of this story, in terms of assessing what to expect from this interests behind this plot going forward, is the fact that one of the plotters, Sharif Hassan, apparently approached the US embassy in March of this year asking for assistance. It’s the kind of bold move that suggest he had done this before quite a few times during the Trump administration:
Did Sharif Hassan approach the US embassy in Amman soliciting support for the coup plot back in March with or without MBS’s tacit approval? The question of whether or not MBS was still pushing this plot even after Biden took office is an important question. Because if there’s one thing we can say with confidence about this story is that this definitely wasn’t the only secret plot to reshape the Middle East that Jared Kushner and MBS were working on.