It Was ISIL, Not Hackers, Who Hijacked French Election

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

08 May 17

hat hackers, most likely Russia-linked, were trying to throw the French election to Marine Le Pen this weekend by releasing thousands of emails from her opponent Emmanuel Macron, probably struck too late to achieve their goal. They were counting on the rule that candidates may not speak on election day, so Macron cannot defend himself from any controversies created by the emails. Russia has given loans to Le Pen’s campaign and it is pretty obvious that Moscow likes her anti-European Union, anti-NATO far right French fascism.

But these interlopers are late to the party. The biggest de facto backer of Le Pen’s hateful, far right nationalism is ISIL (Daesh, ISIS). And she is likely in the run-offs because of ISIL attacks on France. Otherwise, one of the more mainstream candidates would likely have defeated her. That is, ISIL has already hijacked the electoral process, whatever happens today.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his clique, some of them ex-Baath Iraqi officers, have taken revenge on the world for the American war on and occupation of Iraq 2003-11. Sunni Arabs, they felt that the US had overturned their hegemony in Iraq and installed a government of pro-Iran Shiites and separatist Kurds.

They are seeking polarization, a great war of Westerners of Christian heritage against Muslims, in which they can claim the mantle of natural protectors of Muslim interests.

They deployed this strategy in Iraq from 2003-2011, hitting Shiite soft targets over and over again, in an attempt to get the Shiites to over-react and crush the Sunni Arabs. They succeeded all too well. In 2006-2007, as Karen DeYoung at WaPo first showed, they provoked Shiite militias to ethnically cleanse the bulk of the Sunnis from Baghdad. The hard line Shiite fundamentalist government of Nouri al-Maliki (2006-2014) declined serious attempts to incorporate the Sunnis. (It is also true that not all Sunnis wanted to be incorporated into such a government).

Once they had their foothold in Syria from 2013, Daesh came back to Iraq and advertised themselves as saviors of the Sunnis. Some key Sunni leaders bought this line, though it would be unfair to say the Sunni Arabs in general did. In 2014 they brought in ISIL and seceded from Iraq. The largely Shiite army in the Sunni north was attacked by massive angry crowds and Daesh guerrillas and ran away, collapsing. Daesh set up a so-called “caliphate” (It is highly unpopular in the Muslim world and would show up as even more unpopular if poll-takers called it Daesh instead of the misleading “Islamic State”).

The politics and brutal violence of ethnic polarization allowed ISIL to take over 40% of Iraqi territory and to take two rural, thinly populated eastern provinces of Syria. They ruled sadistically and rapaciously, so that when the largely Shiite Iraqi army liberated strongly Sunni Falluja, locals hugged their liberators.

ISIL should get the Darwin Award for their mishmash of strategies. Terrorism as a strategy depends on not having a return address. That way the perpetrators can blow up something but the authorities cannot find them. (Ayman al-Zawahiri, a mastermind of 9/11, is still at large).

But declaring a capital (Raqqa in eastern Syria) and establishing a state with a bureaucracy gives ythem an obvious home address. If a state commits terrorism, that isn’t terrorism, that is an act of war. I don’t think ISIL ever had more than about 4 million people, which it more or less kidnapped, under its rule. It had no air force, and relatively little armor. For it to attack France and Belgium just guaranteed that NATO would ally with the Baghdad government, despite its close coordination with Iran, and give air support to the war effort against the faux “caliphate.” Hence, from fall of 2014 until now, ISIL has met with humiliating defeat after defeat and now just has a quarter of so of Mosul, its last significant urban possession (Hawija and Telafar are small cities, likely 50,000 each).

Like mercenaries signed up on the wrong side and in retreat, the ISIL crew are now looking for other killing fields.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his minions think it would be nice to have the Muslim neighborhoods of Europe under their control. That would bring in a lot of money and European Muslims often have high degrees of education and valuable skills.

The problem is that most European Muslims are secular-minded and uninterested in fundamentalism, much less in radicalism.

We think there are 5-7 million Muslims resident in France. It is hard to know, since French secularism makes it difficult to do a government survey of religion. Still, government ministries got permission to carry out such a survey a few years ago. Less than half that number show up in government surveys as Muslims. The rest are there, but they are just into other things (e.g. hip-hop) and do not have a strong marker of religious identity. This configuration is not unusual for minorities. In the US, there are roughly 5.3 million Jews but only 3 million of them say they believe in God. (there are another couple million persons with at least one Jewish parent who follow another religion). The proportion of agnostics among French Muslims is even higher.

There is no French Muslim community. Only 5 percent of French Muslims belong to a religious organization. There are only 10 Muslim schools in the whole country. Less than a fifth of French Muslims say they would vote for a Muslim candidate regardless of the person’s party affiliation. For the other 80%, “Muslim” is clearly not the most important marker of identity.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIL, and Ayman al-Zawahiri of al-Qaeda, hate this situation. It makes them angry every morning when they get up.

They want French Muslims to be extremists like themselves. They want them as virtual citizens of the faux caliphate.

They have a secret weapon in their quest to radicalize French Muslims.

Marine Le Pen?

Marine Le Pen.

If they can get people of Gallic heritage to attack the French Muslims and make their lives miserable, then ISIL will find it easier to recruit them.

Hence the November, 2015 attack on Paris, which deeply traumatized the country in the wake of the assassination by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula of staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January of 2015. The attack left 130 dead and 366 wounded. Apparently if it had gone better the terrorists had been planning to set off explosions in the stands of a soccer game that the president was attending, on live t.v. As it was, they hit a rock concert and a Cambodian restaurant– the softest of soft targets, with no security implications whatsoever. Then on Bastille Day (the French 4th of July) of 2016, ISIL swayed a Tunisian to drive a truck into a crowd, killing 86 and wounding 434.

That is the kind of attack they had launched on Iraqi Shiites for 11 years before they took over Sunni Iraq.

They were hoping that the French would go out and mistreat French Muslims and shore up the latter’s religious identity, radicalizing them and making them available for recruitment.

The French public will decide today whether ISIL succeeded in its plot against France.

Senate Intelligence Committee Takes Control of Yates Testimony

By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News

08 May 17

EDITOR’S NOTE: The testimony of former acting attorney general Sally Yates had long been sought by Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee and delayed by their Republican counterparts. It now appears the Senate Intelligence Committee will instead be the first to hear testimony from Yates.

What makes this interesting is that Yates’s testimony was so aggressively thwarted by Republican House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes back in March that Nunes was forced to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation amid charges that he acted at the behest of a White House that sought to bar Yates from appearing.

Two Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee, Ranking Member Adam Schiff and Congressman Eric Swalwell, both of California, are former prosecutors. During open testimony by FBI Director James Comey back in March, both Schiff and Swalwell pressed Comey very effectively for a sense of the gravity and progress of the investigation. In totality, the March hearing before the House Intelligence Committee significantly accelerated public interest in the investigation.

The progress of the Senate Intelligence Committee has been by comparison far slower, to the point of inaction. In fact, during a recent appearance by Comey before the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, both Republicans and Democrats seemed disinterested in the Russia investigation, preferring to focus on Comey’s decision to inform Congress that new emails had surfaced in the Clinton email investigation 11 days prior to the November presidential election.

While the genesis of Yates’s testimony being moved from the House Committee to the Senate Committee is not clear, one undeniable effect is that Yates still will not be interviewed by the very capable Democratic former prosecutors on the House Committee who have sought to interview her on the record for months. – MA/RSN

Sally Yates to testify about her discussions with the White House on Russia

By Devlin Barrett and Sari Horwitz, The Washington Post

ally Yates was the attorney general for only 10 days — an Obama administration holdover whose role was to quietly manage the Justice Department until the Trump administration could quickly replace her. Instead, her brief time in the job has fueled months of fierce political debate about the White House and Russia.

On Monday, Yates is to testify before a Senate subcommittee about her discussions with the White House, testimony that was delayed for more than a month after a previously scheduled appearance before a House committee was canceled amid a legal dispute over whether she would even be allowed to discuss the subject.

Lawmakers want to question Yates about her conversation in January with White House counsel Donald McGahn regarding then-national security adviser Michael Flynn. People familiar with that conversation say she went to the White House days after the inauguration to tell officials that statements made by Vice President Pence and others about ­Flynn’s discussions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were incorrect, and to warn them that those contradictions could expose Flynn or others to potential manipulation by the Russians.

Yates’s testimony Monday is expected to contradict public statements made by White House press secretary Sean Spicer and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who described the Yates-McGahn meeting as less of a warning and more of a “heads up’’ about an issue involving Flynn.

In February, Spicer told reporters that Yates had “informed the White House counsel that they wanted to give a heads up to us on some comments that may have seemed in conflict. ... The White House counsel informed the president immediately. The president asked him to conduct a review of whether there was a legal situation there. That was immediately determined that there wasn’t.’’

The same month, Priebus described the Yates conversation in similar terms, telling CBS’s “Face the Nation’’ that “our legal counsel got a heads up from Sally Yates that something wasn’t adding up with his story. And then so our legal department went into a review of the situation. ... The legal department came back and said they didn’t see anything wrong with what was actually said.’’

On Monday, President Trump took aim at Yates in a possible attempt to divert the focus of her testimony by urging the subcommittee to raise questions over alleged “classified” leaks.

“Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Council,” wrote Trump in a Twitter post early Monday, apparently misspelling the word counsel.

But Trump offered no further details to back up his claims, and there has no independent evidence produced to support Trump’s claims of links between Yates and classified leaks.

Trump and congressional Republicans have repeatedly sought to shift the focus of hearings about Russian election year meddling to questions about who in the U.S. government may have leaked details about the FBI’s probe into possible coordination between Trump associates and Russian officials.

People familiar with the matter say both statements understate the seriousness of what Yates told McGahn and that she went to the White House to warn that Flynn could be compromised — or blackmailed — by the Russians at some point if they threatened to reveal the true nature of his conversations with the ambassador.

Those people said that although Yates’s testimony may contradict Spicer and Priebus, her appearance Monday is unlikely to reveal new details about the FBI’s investigation into whether any Trump associates coordinated with Russian officials to meddle with last year’s presidential election, in part because many of the details of that probe remain classified.

Former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. is also scheduled to testify at Monday’s hearing. Lawmakers had invited another Obama administration official, Susan E. Rice, to testify, but she declined.

Rice, who served as Obama’s national security adviser, has been under scrutiny from Republicans who have suggested that she mishandled intelligence information involving Americans. Trump said she might have committed a crime when she asked intelligence analysts to disclose the name of a Trump associate mentioned in an intelligence report, a practice known inside the government as “unmasking,” though he has offered no evidence to back up that accusation. Rice has said she did nothing improper.

Before she became acting attorney general, Yates was the No. 2 official at the Justice Department in the final years of the Obama administration. Yates had spent decades in the Justice Department as a prosecutor in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Her brief tenure in the top Justice Department job ended days after her meeting with McGahn, when she was fired by Trump over an unrelated issue. She had instructed government lawyers not to defend the president’s first executive order on immigration, which temporarily barred entry to the United States for citizens of seven ­Muslim-majority countries and refugees from around the world.

Flynn was asked to resign in February, after White House officials said he had misled Pence about the nature of his conversation with the Russian ambassador.

Anticipation of Yates’s testimony has been building since March, when she was scheduled to testify before the House Intelligence Committee — a hearing that was canceled by the chairman, Rep Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). In the days before the originally scheduled hearing, Yates’s attorney, David O’Neil, had been locked in an argument with Trump administration officials about whether she would be barred by executive privilege from testifying about her conversation with McGahn.

A week before the planned House hearing, O’Neil went to the Justice Department to discuss the issue of her testimony. That day, he wrote a letter to the department in which he said those officials had “advised’’ him that Yates’s official communications on issues of interest to the House panel are “client confidences’’ that cannot be disclosed without written consent. In his letter, O’Neil challenged that interpretation as “overbroad.’’

In response, a Justice Department lawyer wrote back that Yates’s conversations with the White House were probably covered by “presidential communications privilege,’’ and referred him to the White House. As O’Neil awaited a response from the White House, Nunes canceled the hearing, making the legal issue moot.

After The Washington Post reported on the letters, Spicer said it was “100 percent false’’ that the administration had sought to block Yates’s testimony, and said he welcomed it.

Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.