Author: Jason Ditz

Once again reflecting the huge disconnect between Israel’s far-right government and common sense, Israeli MP Michael Oren, who previously served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, insisted that the US owes Israel unconditional support because God wills it so.

“God speaks only one language and it’s the language in which we are yelling at each other in the next hall,” Oren declared during the caucus, adding that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph would be considered “Jewish settlers in Bethlehem” today, and that God wants Israel to be strong.

The attempt to equate Jesus to settlers is a particularly bizarre comment, especially since it was made during a caucus focused on courting Christian support for Israel. It’s a transparently ham-fisted effort to shoehorn some of Israel’s worst, most opposed policies on the international community through Jesus.

On the one hand, the argument doesn’t hold water even within the spiritual context, as the Biblical story had Jesus et al. going to Bethlehem for the sake of a census. They were described in the text as living in Nazareth, which is an Israeli town, albeit one far-right parties are constantly trying to “trade” to a future Palestinian state because of all the Arabs that live there.

That’s neither here nor there, though, and the real issue is that Oren seems to believe this is part of a successful strategy to court US and international Christians toward supporting Israel. Oren appears to be dramatically underestimating the amount of work it takes to manipulate the average person, informed by his story of a far-right Texas Congressman promising him unlimited funds for Iron Dome because he thinks Jesus wants those missiles.

This ignores the reality that a far-right Texas Congressman would probably through money at anything war-seeming, and Oren’s four year term as the Israeli ambassador to the US appears to have left him convinced of our extreme gullibility.

We’ve gone through the paucity of evidence related to who was behind the OPM hack before. FBI officials suggested they were looking into a number of situations, including the possibility of “state actors,” which led some media outlets to say they might be looking at China, which led Congressmen to say they heard on the TV that China did it, which led the media outlets to cite the Congressmen as proof China did it.

The evidence hasn’t been there though, and officials are saying it never will be. Today, US officials announced in the Washington Post that even though they’re pretty sure China did it (likely because they heard that on the TV), they aren’t going to publicly accuse them of doing so, apparently unclear on whether the Washington Post counts as public or not.

Officials are also saying “privately” (again, in a huge circulation newspaper) that they might impose sanctions on China for the hack, but not publicly say the sanctions are because of the hack, even though they literally just did say that.

The OPM hacks breached the data of some 20 million US government employees past and present, and despite the speculation that China did it for some national security purpose, those people have also been advised of the risk of identity theft for credit scams and whatnot in case this was actually a private group that hacked them for all the valuable information.

In new comments today, FBI Director James Comey is claiming that he “believes” plots linked to the Fourth of July may have been thwarted by a series of arrests by the FBI, and that those plots may have killed people if carried out.

The details were almost preposterously scant, as Comey said 10 people were arrested over four weeks, some tied to ISIS, some tied to the Fourth of July, all of them unnamed. He didn’t say who they were or what they were charged with, but conceded that some were charged with things that weren’t terror related.

Comey went on to say that ISIS is a lot more unpredictable than al-Qaeda was, and that officials “can’t be sure” what, if anything, these operatives are planning to do at any given time.

The FBI has been issuing reports on “terror arrests” on a fairly regular basis for years, and the stories are almost always the same; some foreign-born US citizen is approached by FBI informants, eventually given a fake explosive, and arrested for planning to fake blow something up with it.

That these sorts of dubious arrests have historically been good enough in the eyes of Comey and others to publicly trumpet, and the latest round of arrests didn’t warrant even a mention of names or a broad-brush narrative suggests that the latest “plots” are speculative indeed, and that officials don’t feel comfortable enough with these “not terror” arrests to make them public knowledge.

With most of the major news media lapping up anything even tangentially terror related, Comey likely feels perfectly safe providing an over-vague claim of some arrests of somebody related to the possibility they were going to do something untoward, and indeed the reports largely give him a pass for providing literally no details on what he’s actually talking about.

At the same time, the FBI continues to press for more powers, and likely feels the need to both retroactively justify its July 4 warnings when nothing actually happened, and its demands for new powers by claiming to have foiled something-or-other.

The latest push from Comey has been on backdoor access to all commercial encryption software, suggesting that ISIS uses such software to inconvenience FBI surveillance schemes. That everyone else is also using the same software to ward off the same unwelcome snooping appears not to enter into his calculations.

The commercial encryption effort is likely to fall flat at any rate, as even if Congress theoretically did make all commercial US companies provide deliberately broken software so the FBI could snoop on them more readily, the open source alternatives would remain as robust as ever. Given the federal government’s long history of sabotaging such encryption efforts (see the RSA fiasco), it’s hard to imagine ISIS or anyone else was trusting commercial providers at any rate for anything truly mission critical.

Earlier this year, US officials announced a plan to set up a State Department office to centralize all government anti-ISIS propaganda on Twitter and Facebook.

The efforts of middle-management bureaucrats to connect to the young people in an anti-ISIS manner, in hopes of countering ISIS’ comparatively successful recruiting on the site was, naturally, a disaster. As with most great government blunders, its one more people want in on.

This time, it’s the British military, as General Sir Richard Barrons cautioned the West is “losing the Twitter battle,” and that the military is therefore going to Twitter to lie.

That’s not a typo, by the way, that’s flat out what Sir Richard said, that British troops need to go on Twitter to spread “lies” to fight ISIS. Military information control at its finest.

But if civilian bureaucrats couldn’t connect with the young people, career military bureaucrats probably aren’t going to do any better. Indeed, the fact that Sir Richard went into the operation by telegraphing (ironically in the Telegraph) his plans to lie to the public suggests just how bad an idea this truly is.

With a 7-day extension hinting at the possibility of a major breakthrough in nuclear negotiations with Iran, CNN turned the tables and instead released a story talking about US bunker-busting bombs being put on standby.

The focus on a “military option” against Iran, the idea that in the middle of key talks the US could just up and attack Iran out of the blue, wasn’t actually based on new anything US officials said. Indeed, the CNN piece relied solely on a single quote from Defense Secretary Ash Carter in an interview from way back in April.

US officials do occasionally make puzzling decisions to threaten to attack Iran, but this was not one of those times, and rather CNN invented this story as a whole cloth exercise in 19th century-style yellow journalism.

There is enough distrust between Iran and the West already, without the media inventing bogus stories about US bombs being readied to launch unilateral attacks.

The State Department is struggling to make up its minds on the Iraqi Shi’ite militias in the ISIS war, declaring Iran to be financing “terror-related activities” for supporting those militias, which are the same militias fighting on the same side as the US in Iraq.

including Iran in the annual terror report at all is a risky decision, as Congressional hawks are likely to try to use this to block efforts to ease sanctions as part of the final nuclear deal, though they tried to thread the needle by insisting that Iran isn’t plotting against the US, and that the Shi’ite militias in Iraq aren’t either.

Ultimately though, putting Iran in the report is a surprising decision both for the impact on sanctions and what it might mean for US-Iraqi relations, since they are in bed with these same militias.

The US has pressed Iraq on the militias for quite some time, and has tried to sideline the Shi’ite militias in favor of Sunni factions in Anbar Province, hoping this will ease sectarian tensions. So far, though, there hasn’t been much in the way of Sunni militias to bring on board.