PRESS ROOM

"President Biden “can and should reverse the deal… as part of a review of the entire U.S.-UAE alliance in light of the urgent need to revise U.S. strategic objectives in the Middle East as a whole.” "

"[T]he Future Investment Initiative (FII) and the informal Davos labels attached to it by non-profits infuriate the World Economic Forum (which has nothing to do with it). Those labels hint at a broader point though: elite organizations and decision-makers mill in the same crowds and adopt similar approaches to the world. If, collectively, top bankers have amnesia over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, non-profits see attaching collective shame to them as a way to force change.

Sunjeev Bery, executive director of Freedom Forward, has been urging leaders not to attend: “I applaud the International Monetary Fund and CNBC, who recently confirmed that they would not attend.”

President Biden “can and should reverse the deal… as part of a review of the entire U.S.-UAE alliance in light of the urgent need to revise U.S. strategic objectives in the Middle East as a whole.”

“It is very important that we deal with White supremacy in an honest way,” retired Army Major Danny Sjursen told this writer. “And that includes the violent paramilitary wing of it, which has always been a part of our history, realizing that it is an inextricably linked and vital portion of empire.

"[S]ome non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including Mighty Earth, Be Slavery Free, Green America, Freedom United, and Fair World Project, have raised concerns about the accuracy of these reports, suggesting that the true figure is even higher than reported. According to them, “despite decades of hype and voluntary corporate efforts, child labor had increased to 2 million children.”"

The guess of this long-time war-watcher (and one-time war fighter) reading the tea leaves: expect Biden to both eschew big new wars and avoid fully ending existing ones. At the margins (think Iran), he may improve matters some; in certain rather risky areas (Russian relations, for instance), he could worsen them; but in most cases (the rest of the Greater Middle East, Africa, and China), he’s likely to remain squarely on the status-quo spectrum.

The UAE appears to have the most to lose here, given the sweet deal they were getting for America’s premier stealth fighter, plus killer drones and other munitions. But they were on a roll, points out William Hartung at the Center for International Policy, who says the $23 billion package was the biggest deal arranged by Trump in his four years of office, rivaled only by a $23 billion shipbuilding offer to Japan.

“This is no time to be offering a flood of new weaponry to the UAE, given its role in fueling the wars in Yemen and Libya, its diversion of past U.S.-supplied arms to extremist groups, and its record of internal repression,” said William Hartung, the author of the report and director of the think tank’s Arms and Security Program.

“This is no time to be offering a flood of new weaponry to the UAE, given its role in fueling the wars in Yemen and Libya, its diversion of past U.S.-supplied arms to extremist groups, and its record of internal repression,” said William Hartung, the author of the report and director of the think tank’s Arms and Security Program.

“If I was a member of Congress,” said Ben Freeman of the Center for International Policy, “my first question to a think tank witness, under oath, might be to provide a list of their funders if their organization doesn’t publicly provide their donor list.”

"A coalition of human rights organisations called on corporate executives to drop out of the event, dubbed ‘Davos in the Desert’, which takes place in Riyadh and virtually on 27-28 January.

Groups including Freedom Forward, Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) and MENA Rights Group cited concerns about Riyadh using the event to distract the public from human rights concerns.

“Businesses that partner with Saudi Arabia's dictatorship are enabling a brutal government that uses its power to smash the democratic aspirations of people both inside and outside of Saudi Arabia's borders,” Sunjeev Bery, the executive director of Freedom Forward, told Middle East Eye."

There are two major types of intelligence failure: classic failures involving incorrect or unexamined assumptions and a failure to incorporate new information, and the politicization of intelligence that finds political interference corrupting intelligence production. The 9/11 terror attacks and the insurrection on January 6th were classic failures, with flawed assumptions leading to the failure to incorporate new evidence into intelligence products.