Some short takes on the news

1.  Breaking news in the Mueller investigatioon.    Special counsel Robert Mueller has revoked Paul Manafort's plea deal for continually lying to investigators even while supposedly cooperating.   Manafort's defense is that he thought what he was saying is true.   Thus far, the reporting is based on anonymous sources only, so a degree of skepticism is in order.   However, Mueller is too careful to have revoked the plea deal without very good reason -- either contraverting evidence or confidence in his reading of Manafort as lying.

One of the issues, if true, would be a blockbuster -- a probable link of the Trump campaign with Wikileaks publication of the Clinton campaign emails.  The charge is that Manafort had met secretly with Julian Assange several times, one being about the same time he joined the Trump campaign as chief strategist.    Stay tuned for this breaking story.  It could be an essential key in proving conspiracy with Russia to influence our election.

And, if true, according to a theory of Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism expert:   if Manafort did have prior knowledge from Assange about the hacked emails from the Clinton campaign in the March 2016 meeting with Assange, then the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with the Russians (about "dirt on Clinton") would have been an act of treason, because it would involve meeting with representatives of a foreign government that had committed a crime to influence our election.


2.  President Trump's "caravan" fake news is fizzling before his eyes, even as he creates ever more blatant lies to justify stoking his base's outrage.   This weekend, his Homeland Security people even went so far as to fire tear gas canisters at women and little children -- claiming that they were throwing rocks at the border patrols agents.   Journalists have said they saw no rocks but only a situation where immigrants and asylum seekers were being kept on the Mexican side of the entry points and entry processing going at such a slow pace that people were becoming hopeless and desperate.   When a new line seemed to be forming, crowds rushed to get in the line -- which seems to have been what sparked the false claims by the Trump people that the crowd was out of control.

It's not going too far, I think, to blame the Trump administration for much of what is happening at the border.    They have made some terrible, inhumane policies and decisions.   Admittedly, it is a difficult situation -- but nothing like what Trump claims to justify his actions.    He is turning a difficult situation into a disaster of our own doing.


3.  "They silenced Khashoggi but gave thousands a voice."   This sums up the point expressed by Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident journalist living in exile in Canada, who is the subject of an article by Kareem Shaheen in The Guardian.

Abdulaziz considered Khashoggi both his mentor and father figure.  He was terribly disturbed by his death but "now takes solace in what Khashoggi has achieved in death.  "The idiots wanted to silence his voice," he says.   "But they made way for a thousand other voices."

The article continues to quote Abdulaziz:  "Today, Saudi activists are stronger, and their voices are heard.  I think now the silent majority believes in what we say, and thinks the regime is lying.  The mask has fallen and the ugly, murderous, thuggish, cowardly image has been shown."

There is no doubt that the image of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) has been badly tarnished.    Despite a multimillion dollar lobbying campaign here in the US to burnish his image as a young modernizer, a popular reformer, and the leader for the future that the Saudis needed -- despite that and the Trump family's embrace of him as their partner in stabilizing the Middle East, MbS's brutality is now coming back into the forefront.

He seized power by deposing a cousin, then imprisoned dozens of cousins  and had some tortured to extort vast sums of money from them.    He is largely responsible for backing the war in Yemen that has killed so many thousands of women and children.   He had the Lebanese prime minister kidnapped and held in Riyadh, forcing him to resign.  He led several other Arab nations in a blockade of the United Arab Emirates.   And he almost certainly was behind the savage murder of Jamal Khoshaggi.    All the cosmetic reforms (allowing movies and women's right to drive cars) shrink into insignificance when put on a balance scale with these brutalities.

Donald Trump and Jared Kushner have chosen the wrong horse to back in this race.    There is international outrage that MbS seems to be getting away with the crime without consequences.   However, Argentine authorities are looking into the possibility of charging MbS with war crimes (concerning the fighting in Yemen) when he attends the G-20 summit meeting in Argentina this week.   This was initiated by a complaint by the activist group Human Rights Watch.    That will likely come to naught.

Beyond all the thuggish acts, however, is the concern that the young Crown Prince is not the visionary leader we once thought.    He may be more open to modernity -- but he lacks maturity and good judgment that is most needed.