General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHistoric New Harpers Article Exposes Who Controls America
Very disturbing stuff, but explains a lot.
http://off-guardian.org/2015/12/18/historic-new-harpers-article-exposes-who-controls-america/
"To boil it all down to the essence: The fundamentalist-Sunni royal family of the Sauds have bought the highest levels of the U.S. government in order to control U.S. foreign policies, especially the ongoing wars to take down the governments of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and ultimately (they hope) of Russia itself, which latter nation has allied itself instead with Shiia countries. The controlling entities behind American foreign policies since at least the late 1970s have been the Saud family and the Sauds’ subordinate Arabic aristocracies in Qatar (the al-Thanis), Kuwait (the al-Sabahs), Turkey (the Tuktik Erdoğans, a new royalty), and UAE (its six royal families: the main one, the al-Nahyans in Abu Dhabi; the other five: the al-Maktoums in Dubai, al-Qasimis in Sharjah, al-Nuaimis in Ajman, al-Mualla Ums in Quwain, and al-Sharqis in Fujairah). Other Saudi-dominated nations — though they’re not oil-rich (more like Turkey in this regard) — are Pakistan and Afghanistan."
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
leveymg
(36,418 posts)Last edited Sun Jan 3, 2016, 11:48 AM - Edit history (3)
a controlling interest in. Money is the permanent establishment, and they have bought everything of real value in the west. That includes the GOP and most of the Democratic Party, whether you and they know it or not. The next President knows it, as did the mentor who brought her and her husband into al-Yamamah. Google the last word, it's Arabic for the name of the slush fund set up to buy US and British politicians with oil sales to the west and reverse arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yamamah_arms_deal
And, oh yes, they're business partners with the Israeli right-wing. They also exercise their share of influence. Working together, they stand a fairly good chance of succeeding in their separate plans to put us out of the way.
Response to:
http://off-guardian.org/2015/12/18/historic-new-harpers-article-exposes-who-controls-america/
Fast Walker 52
(7,723 posts)explains part of this alliance-- I suspect both are using each other for their own ends, with the help of Saudi money.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,347 posts)and neither does the Harper's article it is claiming as its basis: http://harpers.org/archive/2016/01/a-special-relationship/?single=1
Perhaps you had been reading another article that did talk about Israel?
leveymg
(36,418 posts)http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/23/world/clinton-and-his-ties-to-the-influential-saudis.html
Clinton and His Ties to the Influential Saudis
By TIM WEINER
Published: August 23, 1993
The conventional wisdom in Washington in the election last year was that George Bush was the great friend of Saudi Arabia -- after all, he went to war to defend the kingdom.
It turns out that Bill Clinton was hardly unknown to the Saudis.
One of President Clinton's college classmates at Georgetown University was Prince Turki bin Feisal. Today Prince Turki is the head of the Saudi Arabian intelligence service. The two stay in touch, an Administration official said.
As Governor of Arkansas, Mr. Clinton worked hard to secure a multimillion-dollar Saudi donation to a Middle Eastern studies program at the University of Arkansas, said Bernard Madison, the dean of the university's Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.
The discussions about the donation began in 1989. They involved Americans with ties to both the Saudis and Mr. Clinton; officials of Stephens Group Inc., the Arkansas business empire that has provided crucial financial assistance to Mr. Clinton; and David Edwards, an investment banker in Little Rock who has Saudi clients and is a friend of Mr. Clinton.
Mr. Clinton's efforts included a 1991 meeting with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Ambassador, the dean said.
According to Mr. Madison, the Saudis did not give their first donation to the university -- a $3.5 million gift -- until last summer.
Mr. Madison said: "The gulf war intervened. It was put on hold. They didn't have a lot of money."
One week after he was elected President, Mr. Clinton discussed the donation as part of a telephone conversation he had with Saudi Arabia's monarch, King Fahd, according to a spokesman for Mr. Clinton.
Another $20 million arrived in February, a few weeks after President Clinton's inauguration, Mr. Madison said.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,347 posts)theory that blames Israel for stuff you don't like. Doe you just have an obsession with Israel?
leveymg
(36,418 posts)Israel and Saudi Arabia have held five secret meetings since the beginning of 2014 to discuss the common threat Iran posses to the region, it was revealed for the first time Thursday at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, according to Bloomberg.
Although the two are considered to be historic enemies, with Saudi Arabia refusing to recognize the Jewish State's right to exist, they never-the-less have engaged in a campaign of clandestine diplomacy in an effort to thwart the Islamic Republic's growing influence in the Middle East.
Israel should keep its relations with Saudi Arabia as quiet as possible as it continues to explore other ways to improve relations, Prof. Joshua Teitelbaum, an expert on Saudi Arabia and the modern Middle East, told The Jerusalem Post.
“Beyond facing a similar threat from nuclear threshold Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia have been brought closer together by the Obama administration’s strategic decision to draw down its involvement in the Middle East by seeking a strategic balance between Sunnis and Shiites,” said Teitelbaum.
For the Obama administration, said Teitelbaum, who is an expert at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA), there is little respect left for Saudi Arabia, which it sees as responsible, if indirectly, for 9/11 and Islamic State.
“While Iran might support the terrorist Hezbollah and Bashar Assad, Sunni extremists have profited from Saudi support.”
Do you need more? I could do this all day, if you like.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)leveymg
(36,418 posts)http://harpers.org/archive/2016/01/a-special-relationship/
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43724.htm
(Repost)
A Special Relationship
The United States Is Teaming Up With Al Qaeda, Again
By Andrew Cockburn
December 14, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "Harpers" -
( . . .)
By the beginning of 2012, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and the United States were all heavily involved in supporting the armed rebellion against Assad. In theory, American support for the Free Syrian Army was limited to “nonlethal supplies” from both the State Department and the CIA. Qatar, which had successfully packed the opposition Syrian National Council with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, operated under no such restrictions. A stream of loaded Qatari transport planes took off from Al Udeid and headed to Turkey, whence their lethal cargo was moved into Syria.
“The Qataris were not at all discriminating in who they gave arms to,” the former White House official told me. “They were just dumping stuff to lucky recipients.” Chief among the lucky ones were Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, both of which had benefited from a rebranding strategy instituted by Osama bin Laden. The year before he was killed, bin Laden had complained about the damage that offshoots such as Al Qaeda in Iraq, with its taste for beheadings and similar atrocities, had done to his organization’s image. He directed his media staff to prepare a new strategy that would avoid “everything that would have a negative impact on the perception” of Al Qaeda. Among the rebranding proposals discussed at his Abbottabad compound was the simple expedient of changing the organization’s name. This strategy was gradually implemented for the group’s newer offshoots, allowing Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham to present themselves to the credulous as kinder, gentler Islamists.
The rebranding program was paradoxically assisted by the rise of the Islamic State, a group that had split off from the Al Qaeda organization partly in disagreement over the image-softening exercise enjoined by Zawahiri. Although the Islamic State attracted many defectors and gained territory at the expense of its former Nusra partners, its assiduously cultivated reputation for extreme cruelty made the other groups look humane by comparison. (According to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, many Nusra members suspect that the Islamic State was created by the Americans “to discredit jihad.”)
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, driven principally by its virulent enmity toward Iran, Assad’s main supporter, was eager to throw its weight behind the anti-Assad crusade. By December 2012, the CIA was arranging for large quantities of weapons, paid for by the Saudis, to move from Croatia to Jordan to Syria.
“The Saudis preferred to work through us,” explained the former White House official. “They didn’t have an autonomous capability to find weapons. We were the intermediaries, with some control over the distribution. There was an implicit illusion on the part of the U.S. that Saudi weapons were going to groups with some potential for a pro-Western attitude.” This was a curious illusion to entertain, given Saudi Arabia’s grim culture of Wahhabi austerity as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s flat declaration, in a classified cable from 2009, that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”
Some in intelligence circles suspect that such funding is ongoing. “How much Saudi and Qatari money — and I’m not suggesting direct government funding, but I am suggesting maybe a blind eye being turned — is being channeled towards ISIS and reaching it?” Dearlove asked in July 2014. “For ISIS to be able to surge into the Sunni areas of Iraq in the way that it’s done recently has to be the consequence of substantial and sustained funding. Such things simply do not happen spontaneously.” Those on the receiving end of Islamic State attacks tend to agree. Asked what could be done to help Iraq following the group’s lightning assaults in the summer of 2014, an Iraqi diplomat replied: “Bomb Saudi Arabia.”
muriel_volestrangler
(101,347 posts)rather than to your own post. But well done on linking in #14 to the article I linked to in #8, and seeing it as 'more'. I suppose that means you hadn't bothered reading it before, despite it being what the OP was based on.
The OP's theory that Saudi Arabia controls US foreign policy, even about Russia, is just an idiotic conspiracy theory, by a writer known for writing any old tosh. You've just added Israel in to that, on the basis that Israel and Saudi Arabia have a better relationship than either do with Iran. It's all bollocks. You're welcome to wallow in it.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)Didn't hear from you. Hence, crickets. BTW: The "controls" wording came from the title of the secondary article that picked up and reposted the Cockburn piece in Harper's.
I prefer other terms to describe this dual-track foreign political influence campaign by Israel and the Saudis to undermine Obama's diplomacy and to push the US into war with Iran and its Shi'ia allies. These Mideast powers have been underwriting sedition in order to carry out genocide against a common foe.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,347 posts)You wrote #11 in reply to yourself; #12 in reply to yourself; and #14 in reply to yourself. You've never replied to my #10. The only time you replied to me was #9. I don't revisit threads just to check if someone has replied to themselves.
You are obsessed with Israel. You have not 'established a nexus'; just that Israel and Saudi Arabia talk to each other, despite SA not formally recognising Israel as a state. Yes, 'controls' comes from the 'secondary' article; and it's just an opinion piece from a guy who wants Obama impeached: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/07/republicans-rule-obama-impeachment-democrats-well-see.html
leveymg
(36,418 posts)No disrespect intended. This is a dead thread. Perhaps we can rejoin on the Greatest thread or I'll post something myself later about the Harper's article, if I have time.
Fast Walker 52
(7,723 posts)but yes, I still think their relationship is super weird and certainly not "kosher".
raouldukelives
(5,178 posts)
haikugal
(6,476 posts)
Scuba
(53,475 posts)
Fast Walker 52
(7,723 posts)leveymg
(36,418 posts)
betterdemsonly
(1,967 posts)Last edited Sun Jan 3, 2016, 10:29 AM - Edit history (1)
This will be ignored strenuously by our resident neocons, since it doesn't come from a site with a foreign or conspiracy taint, and the people who agree will not keep it kicked.
