Saturday, 9 November 2024

US loses no time to stir ‘shit’ with Iran and China

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US loses no time to stir ‘shit’ with Iran and China

 KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 9, 2024: The US today announced charges in alleged Iranian plot to assassinate its president-elect Donald Trump.

The failed plot was allegedly directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to avenge the death of Gen Qassem Soleimani in 2020.

But, why now - after four years and the reelection of Trump as president - the revelation of charges?

Co-incidence? No way.

So, expect international matters to worsen in US-relations with Iran and China (the US anti-China policy is indisputable with the US House passing RM7 billion to deliver Anti-China Propaganda Overseas).

World peace and stability is now at a higher risk with the Donald Trump-driven US out to no good.

No News Is Bad News reproduces below news reports on the charges in an alleged Iranian plot and US’ US$7 billion anti-China policy:

US announces charges in alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Trump

AFP

-09 Nov 2024, 01:54 PM

The foiled attempt was allegedly directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to avenge the death of Gen Qassem Soleimani in 2020.

US president-elect Donald Trump has faced two other separate assassination attempts this year, including a shooting at a campaign rally when a bullet grazed his ear. (AP pic)

WASHINGTON: US prosecutors announced charges on Friday in an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate president-elect Donald Trump and a prominent dissident Iranian-American journalist.

The foiled assassination plot on Trump was allegedly directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to avenge the death of Iranian Gen Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in 2020 in a US strike ordered by Trump during his first term in office, the justice department said.

Farhad Shakeri, 51, an Afghan national who is believed to be in Iran, was “tasked” by the IRGC with providing a plan to kill Trump, the department said in a statement.

Shakeri and two other men, Carlisle Rivera, 49, and Jonathon Loadholt, 36, both of New York, were charged separately with plotting to kill an Iranian-American dissident in New York.

Rivera and Loadholt are both in US custody and made a court appearance in New York on Thursday.

“The charges announced today expose Iran’s continued brazen attempts to target US citizens, including president-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents who criticise the regime in Tehran,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said.

Trump faced two other separate assassination attempts this year, including a shooting at a campaign rally when a bullet grazed his ear.

On Friday, the justice department described Shakeri as an “IRGC asset residing in Tehran.”

It said he immigrated to the US as a child and was deported around 2008 after serving 14 years in prison for robbery.

“In recent months, Shakeri has used a network of criminal associates he met in prison in the US to supply the IRGC with operatives to conduct surveillance and assassinations of IRGC targets,” the justice department said.

It said Loadholt and Rivera, at Shakeri’s direction, spent months conducting surveillance on a US citizen of Iranian origin who is an outspoken critic of the Iranian regime and has been the target of multiple prior kidnapping and murder plots.

She was not identified in court documents but appears to be dissident journalist Masih Alinejad.

A general in the Revolutionary Guard was charged by US prosecutors in late October in connection with a separate plot to assassinate Alinejad, who lives in New York.

According to the criminal complaint against Shakeri, he allegedly disclosed the plot to assassinate Trump in telephone conversations with FBI agents in recent months.

Shakeri held the conversations with FBI agents because he was hoping to obtain a sentence reduction for a person who is imprisoned in the US, it said.

Shakeri told the FBI he was approached by an IRGC official in September about organising the assassination of Trump.

He allegedly told the IRGC official it would cost a “huge” amount of money, to which the official responded: “Money’s not an issue.”

On Oct 7, Shakeri said he was asked to come up with a plan to kill Trump within seven days.

The IRGC official allegedly said that if Shakeri was unable to come up with a plan in that time frame, the IRGC would seek to kill Trump after the election because it assessed he would lose and it would be easier to assassinate him after the vote.

The US has repeatedly accused Iran of seeking to assassinate US officials in retaliation for the killing of Soleimani. Tehran has rejected the accusations.

A Pakistani man with alleged ties to Iran pleaded not guilty in New York earlier this year to charges he tried to hire a hitman to kill a US politician or official.

The state department has also announced a US$20 million reward for information leading to the arrest of the alleged Iranian mastermind behind a plot to assassinate former White House official John Bolton.

News

U.S House Passes RM 7 Billion To Deliver Anti-China Propaganda Overseas

8 November, 2024

Since at least 2016, foreign interference in American elections and civil society have become central to American political discourse. The issue is taken extremely seriously by the U.S. government, which has levied sanctions and called out foreign adversaries for sowing “discord and chaos” through their propaganda efforts.

But apparently Washington takes a different view when it comes to American propaganda operations in foreign countries. On Monday, the House passed HR 1157, the “Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund,” by a bipartisan 351-36 majority. This legislation authorizes more than $1.6 billion for the State Department and USAID over the next five years to, among other purposes, subsidize media and civil society sources around the world that counter Chinese “malign influence” globally.

That’s a massive spend — about twice, for example, the annual operating expenditure of CNN. If passed into law it would also represent a large increase in federal spending on international influence operations. While it’s hard to total all of the spending on U.S. influence operations across agencies, the main coordinating body for U.S. information efforts, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), has an annual budget of less than $100 million.

There is obviously no issue with the U.S. government presenting its own public view of what China is doing around the world, and doing so as forcefully as needed. But this bill goes beyond that by subsidizing “independent media and civil society” and other information operations in foreign countries. Indeed, this is already routine. The Global Engagement Center, which will likely play a strong role in implementing the bill, spends more than half its budget on such grants, and USAID, which will also play a lead role, makes grants to foreign media and civil society organizations a key part of its efforts. HR 1157 would supercharge these programs.

Crucially, HR 1157 doesn’t seem to contain any requirement that U.S. government financing to foreign media be made transparent to citizens of foreign countries (although there is a requirement to report grants to certain U.S. congressional committees). Thus, it’s possible that the program could in some cases be used to subsidize covert anti-Chinese messaging in a manner similar to the way Russia is accused of covertly funding anti-Ukrainian messaging by U.S. media influencers.

Such anti-Chinese messaging could cover a wide range of bread-and-butter political issues in foreign countries. The definition of “malign influence” in the bill is extremely broad. For example, program funds could support any effort to highlight the “negative impact” of Chinese economic and infrastructure investment in a foreign country. Or it could fund political messaging against Chinese contractors involved in building a port, road, or hospital, for example as part of Beijing’s globe-spanning Belt and Road Initiative.

Because some dimensions of U.S. information operations could be classified, it can be difficult to get a complete picture of the full range of what they look like on the ground. But a 2021 “vision document” on psychological operations and civil affairs from the First Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg gives a fascinating glimpse.

The document provides a case study (or “competition vignette”) of what an integrated effort to counter Chinese influence could look like in the fictional African country of Naruvu. In the vignette, members of a Special Forces Civil Affairs team spot a billboard with a picture of a port and Chinese characters. Quickly determining that the Chinese are investing in a new deep-water port in Naruvu, the 8th Psyop Group at Fort Bragg’s Information Warfare Center (IWC) works with local and U.S. government partners to immediately develop an influence campaign to “discredit Chinese activities.”

The influence campaign “empowered IWTF [Information Warfare Task Force], in coordination with the JIIM [local and U.S. government partners] to inflame long-standing friction between Naruvian workers and Chinese corporations. Within days, protests supported by the CFT’s ODA [Special Forces Operations Detachment Alpha], erupted around Chinese business headquarters and their embassy in Ajuba. Simultaneously, the IWC-led social media campaign illuminated the controversy.”

Faced with a combined propaganda campaign and intense labor unrest, the Chinese company is forced to back down from its planned port. (Although the vignette continues to an even more Hollywood-ready ending in which U.S. special forces break into the construction company’s offices, confiscate blueprints for the port, and discover that it is actually a Chinese plot to emplace long-range missiles in Naruvu to threaten U.S. Atlantic shipping).

This case study illustrates the extremes information warfare could reach. But of course it is fictional, and most operations funded to counter Chinese influence will be far more mundane and less cinematic. Indeed, some will probably look similar to the activities the U.S. government has bitterly condemned when foreign governments financed them in the U.S. civil society space, such as making social media buys or funding organizations sympathetic to Washington’s perspective.

But it’s still worth thinking about the consequences of such efforts. They are of course likely to make U.S. protests against similar foreign government activities look hypocritical. Beyond that, pumping a flood of potentially undisclosed U.S. government money into anti-Chinese messaging worldwide could backfire by making any organic opposition to Chinese influence appear to be covertly funded U.S. government propaganda rather than genuine expressions of local concern.

As the publics in many nations are likely to be suspicious of U.S. as well as Chinese involvement in their internal affairs, this could easily discredit genuine grassroots opposition to Chinese influence. A historical example is Washington’s funding of Russian civil society groups that criticized the integrity of Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections. This backfired by allowing Putin to depict the opposition as tools in a U.S. plot and resulted in sharp restrictions on U.S. activity in Russia, including the expulsion of USAID.

Another problem raised by the proposed legislation is the possibility that anti-Chinese propaganda financed by this program will flow back into the American media space and influence American audiences, without any disclosure of its initial source of funding. Protections against U.S. government targeting of domestic audiences are already weak, and what protections do exist are almost impossible to enforce in a networked world where information in other countries is just a click away from U.S. audiences.

It’s easy to imagine U.S.-funded foreign media being used as evidence in domestic debates about China’s international role, or even to attack U.S. voices that advocate for a different view of China that is propagated by a hawkish U.S. government. During the Trump presidency, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), a likely recipient of many of these funds, supported attacks on U.S. critics of Trump’s Iran policy. More recently, congressional conservatives have claimed the GEC has advocated for censorship of conservative voices who disagree with Biden’s foreign policies.

The overwhelming bipartisan majority for HR 1157 is a snapshot of a culture in Washington that seems not to see the risk to U.S. values and interests when we engage in the same covert activities that we criticize in other countries.

Source : Responsible State Craft

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