Durham’s Nugget: An intelligence tale

In a quick-look treatment on 16 May, Lee Smith unerringly identified a central data point from John Durham’s special counsel report on the FBI’s conduct of Crossfire Hurricane.

That point is John Brennan’s handwritten record of having briefed President Obama and a group of administration seniors, on 3 August 2016, about “Russian intelligence” on Hillary Clinton’s operation to generate a fake narrative in which Russia colluded with Donald Trump.

Smith points out that James Comey was reportedly in attendance at that meeting.  That would mean Comey knew throughout the execution of Crossfire Hurricane that it was entirely possible much if not all of the supposed “evidence” of Russia-Trump collusion was coming from a campaign “oppo” effort mounted by Clinton.

Yet with this implication in throbbing neon in the special counsel investigation, Durham ultimately let Comey off the hook

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Israel: Rumors of war in a world transformed

On 9 April 2023, Israeli Arabist scholar and former intelligence officer Mordechai Kedar published an article recounting information recently received from an associate he describes as a source he has “known for years – an expatriate from the Middle East, a supporter of Israel, who lives in Europe and is in continuous contact with people in Iran and Iraq.”

The article is in the outlet Makor Rishon (“Firsthand Source”), owned by Israel Hayom.  The information outlined by Kedar is from his source’s “assessment that Iran is planning to launch a combined attack on Israel in the foreseeable future that will include all the forces at its disposal in the Arab countries” – Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

Kedar proceeds to describe missile and rocket barrages from all the implicated territories (including the more-distant nations), along with an unconventional ground attack from Lebanon and Gaza using motorcycles and ATVs, assisted by local Arab sabotage in Israel, Judea, and Samaria.

In a new geo-military landscape, Belarus’s Lukashenko goes to China

Just over six years ago, in January 2017, I noted in an article at Liberty Unyielding that China had recently closed a logistics gap eyed for some 200 years by military planners.  The gap had been felt as a hindrance for much longer than that, but it became especially significant to warfare and geopolitics in the age of rail.

China’s feat was completing a capable, reliable rail network all the way from China’s eastern coast to the UK, on the western edge of Europe.  On 1 January 2017, Beijing inaugurated the first freight train service from China to London.

Rail service all the way across Asia and Europe, and not operated by Russia to at least Eastern Europe, had never existed before.  The lack of such service was a key factor in every kind of geopolitical calculation about Asia:  economic and military as well as political.  The Soviet “iron curtain” had laid a long stasis

TOC Ready Room 16 December 2022: Censorship, gas lights, and Russia-Iran missile/drone adventure

A phenomenon has been developing in recent weeks that should raise our level of concern about the nature of public discourse, especially as brokered by the media.

It’s more than what the media, per se, are doing, however.  It has to do with “news” that purports to be coming from government, but is backed by no actual evidence, and is unverifiable in terms of whether it came from government at all, much less could be held accountable in any way.

We’ll have some examples below that clarify what I’m talking about.  To start with, however, a tweet exchange for orientation to the topic:

Nevada, Utah, and Venezuela: A tale of two oil and gas policy moves

Possibly, if these events hadn’t all been concurrent, I mightn’t have noticed either tale, or the events it encompassed.

But they did all unfold at the same time.  And they struck me quite forcibly.

One struck me in particular, for reasons I suspect will be obvious.  So I’ll just mention that one at the outset, to get things started.

In October 2022, a batch of Venezuelan bonds bought by Goldman Saches back in May 2017 reached their final maturity date.  The bonds were against the Venezuelan state-owned oil and gas company, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA).  They were nominally worth $2.8 billion when purchased for some $865 million in 2017.  Many business and political commentators thought it was a bad buy at the time: a use of investors’ money that was neither sound from a business standpoint nor impressive from a moral one.