This release appears to be sent as a warning to the house of Saud rather that anything critical. Russia Maybe? They at least are in conversations.
However the point is well made that an awful lot of intelligence analysis generally is ridiculous. That Saudi's is terrible merely confirms that the distribution is skewed terribly and we need to expect little of it. Do these folks ever think to read the Economist? At least that source pays for been wrong or simply stupid in terms of reputation.
I would actually approach the Economist to cover areas of interest and pay for staffing with zero strings attached. Their work is good and commercial informants often catch the right signals. After all, just how might you construct a nuclear installation without ordering specific steels? Governments can then pay bonuses for private briefings.
The Ridiculous Nature of Saudi Intelligence: What the Saudi Cables Released by WikiLeaks Say and Dont Say
Global Research, June 23, 2015
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/what-the-saudi-cables-released-by-wikleaks-say-and-dont-say/5457713
http://www.globalresearch.ca/what-the-saudi-cables-released-by-wikleaks-say-and-dont-say/5457713
WikiLeaks released the first batch of the so-called Saudi cables on June 19, 2015. By June 22, a total of 61,214 of the documents were released online. More than half a million of these cables are in the hands of WikiLeaks.
In the Arab World there is great interest about the documents. The Lebanese newspaper Al-Akbar has also partnered itself with WikiLeaks to release the so-called Saudi cables, as it has with previous leaks. The Saudi cables, however, do not tell the world and Wikileaks readers anything new about Saudi Arabia.
The Buying Influence of Riyadhs Petro-Dollar
The House of Saud has characteristically tried to buy influence. It wrongly believes that loyalty can be bought. Call them subsidies, grants, bursaries, or business contracts: they are all forms of bribery.
The documents released by
WikiLeaks confirm that the House of Saud has used bribery as a major
foreign policy tool by financing political figures in other
countriessuch as the pro-Israeli warlord Samir Geagea in Lebanonand
buying off individuals and organizations to secure its interests. This
bribery includes co-opting and recruiting both Arabic and non-Arabic
media outlets.
Additionally, the cables
confirm that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been spying on its citizens
abroad, closely following Saudi university students to see if they want
changes in Saudi Arabia, watching dissidents, trying its hardest to
handicap Iranian interests, destabilizing Iraq, helping the dictators of
Bahrain, and using Saudi-financed media to sanitize its image and
deceive Arab audiences. Again, none of this tells us anything new that
we did not know about the Kingdom and its decadent rulers.
The House of Sauds Information War
The documents depict the House
of Saud as waging a perpetual and systematic campaign to influence and
manage the media as part of a vulgar perception management strategy.
Not only are Saudi-owned media outlets like Al Arabiya and Asharq Al-Awsat
part of this, the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information has been
central to this policy of buying influence using the revenues from Saudi
Arabias oil sales.
The Saudi cables show that
Riyadhs rulers have used a gradient strategy. The House of Sauds media
strategy starts with co-optation through bribery by what we can call
agents of influence. Agents of influence can include diplomats, public
relations firms, and lawyers. The House of Saud has teams of lawyers,
consultants, and public relations firms constantly working for it and
monitoring the media and the House of Sauds public image at all times.
It is the task of the agents of
influence to find and contact the media outlets reporting negatively
about the House of Saud. In some cases the agents of influence find them
and in others Saudi officials in Riyadh order the agents of influence
to contact the third parties. The preliminary task of the agents of
influence is to neutralize the negative reporting about the House of
Saud. This is primarily done through bribery. Riyadh has paid for
massive subscriptions of Arab newspapers in countries like Jordan,
Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, and Mauritania as a means of inducing the
publications to self-censor themselves or to provide positive coverage
about the House of Saud.
If bribery does not work then a
strategy of containment involving slander is applied followed by a
strategy of confrontation that involves litigation and sabotage. Both
the containment and confrontation strategies of the House of Saud
involve falsely planting stories under what is generally categorized as
black propaganda. Aside from promoting the image of the House of Saud,
co-opted media outlets are important for the strategies of containment
and confrontation because they launch attacks on those targeted by the
House of Saud. Targets have included Arab activists, Iran, Russia,
Hezbollah, the newspaper Al-Akbar, and Syria.
The Obvious versus the Unmentioned
Again, it has to be noted that
it widely known that bribery have been an important and central policy
tool for the morally bankrupt Saudi princes. It also has to be
emphasized that the information about the Saudi media strategy released
by WikiLeaks is not a new revelation. These Saudi activities have widely
been recognized.
Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia has
reacted to the release of the cables by WikiLeaks by warning its
citizens to refrain from reading the documents. Riyadh has emphasized
that ignoring the documents is a matter of national security. It has
also declared that the documents being released by Wikileaks are
doctored fabrications without even providing one example.
What is missing from the Saudi cables that WikiLeaks released
heretofore are any documents about the House of Sauds support for
Al-Qaeda and the other armed gangs that are wreaking havoc inside Syria,
Lebanon, and Iraq. This is important and noteworthy.The Timing of the Release: Targeting Rapprochement between Moscow and Riyadh?
There are some very important
questions to be asked and thought over about the Saudi cables. Are the
release of the Saudi cables retaliation for Saudi aggression in Yemen or
punishment for efforts by the House of Saud to exert itself
independently from Washington? Why is the crisis in Syria and Saudi
support for the foreign fighters ravaging Syria largely left out of the
leaks? If Saudi involvement in the fighting in Syria was seriously
mentioned in the cables released by WikiLeaks it could incriminate other
countries, such as the US, Britain, France, and Turkey.
The release of the Saudi cables
may hurt Saudi Arabia economically and weaken its media strategy, which
will lead to both economic and political instability for the Kingdom as
it increasingly fails to control more information about the House of
Sauds actions. Furthermore, the Saudi cables have been released on the
eve of important talks and negotiations between Saudi and Russian
officials that follow agreements and earlier talks between the Russian
Federation and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the St. Petersburg
International Economic Forum. The bilateral talks are set to consolidate
a series of agreements made on cooperation and trade between the
Kingdom and the Russian Federation that will help boost the besieged
Russian economy that Washington is trying to crash. This is why it is
important to think over the origins and motives of the Yemen Cyber Army
and ask who is pulling its strings? Is a genuine Saudi adversary behind
the Yemen Cyber Army or an unhappy ally that wants to prevent any
rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Russia?
One of the documents that is getting increasing
focus is an agreement between Russia and Saudi Arabia to vote for one
another to join the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. Is it
a mere coincidence that UN Watch decided to focus on this agreement to
criticize Russia and even refers to it as a dictatorship in an article published
by Hillel Neuer on June 21,2015? Conversely, UN Watch has remained
silent about the multitude of similar agreements made by the US with the
House of Saud and other dictatorships. What has UN Watch said about
Bahrain or Gaza? Why does it oppose the Venezuelan government? In
reality, the goal of UN Watch has been to use the United Nations Human
Rights Council to further the interests of the US and Israel while it
undermines the body for criticizing Israeli human rights violations. UN Watch even helped legitimize the war on Libya by NATO in 2011 and has pushed for a war with Syria. Now it is targeting Russia.
Although Riyadh could be
manipulating Moscow for Washington, joint funds, space cooperation,
nuclear agreements, investments, and arms deals all seem to be in the
works. The last time Saudi Arabia made major deals with the Kremlin
nothing came out of them, either because the House of Saud was toying
with the Russians or due to orders being sent from the US to Riyadh.
The Ridiculous Nature of Saudi Intelligence
Another point that is worth
mentioning is the unprofessional nature of the Saudi intelligence
structure. This is not new information either, but it still worth
mentioning. Reading the leaked documents it becomes very clear that the
Saudi intelligence structure is sloppy, unsophisticated, and badly
trained. The analyses made in the Saudi intelligence reports are
ridiculous and even rely on both tabloids and unverified internet
research from open sources.
A case in point is the Saudi intelligence report that mentions this author.
As one of the subjects inside the initial batch of Saudi cables that
WikiLeaks released, I took particular interest in looking over the Saudi
intelligence memorandum that I was wrongly mentioned in as Mahdi
Nazemroaya Darius. This particular Saudi intelligence memo relies on
internet research to look at the background of myself and several
colleagues who have pointed out how Saudi Arabia has supported terrorism
and worked with the US and Israel in a destabilization campaign in the
Middle East and North Africa.
Probably based on an assumption
that I am of Iranian origin based on the name Darius, the memo
ambiguously and wrongly speculates that I could be working for Iran
without giving any context to what that could mean. The description of
others are also all vulgar caricatures that simply refer to them as
anti-American or anti-Western.
A Deficit of Critical Thinking in the Information Age
The type of misanalysis that is
exemplified by Saudi intelligence analysts is increasingly endemic of
intelligence services and the consultative firms that governments around
the world, including in the United States, are increasingly relying on.
In this regard, it is worth mentioning that this is actually the second
time that I found myself mentioned in a document released by WikiLeaks;
the first time was in 2013 when WikiLeaks released a hacked email about the possible whereabouts of Muammar Qaddafi
from the Texas-based intelligence consultation company Strategic
Forecasting (Stratfor). Stratfor was also off. The Texas-based company
mistakenly listed me as an employee of the Associated Press inside Libya
during NATOs bombing campaign while it was discussing the situation in
the Rixos Al-Nasr and making arguments based on association fallacies.
In regards to the Saudi
intelligence memo, it is clear that no real efforts were made to do
proper background checks outside of the internet. It makes one cynically
ask if Saudi Arabias intelligence structure does much more than police
the Kingdoms local population and if it is the intelligence bodies of
the US and other countries, including Britain and Israel, that are doing
most the important intelligence work for Riyadh.
Looking over the documents
released by WikiLeaks it becomes clear that they confirm what is already
known about the House of Saud and that there is a serious problem of
analysis in the organizational structures of Saudi Arabia. A lack of
critical thinking is not a problem that money and bribery can solve
either. With this type of mentality and lack of analytical thinking
about the world, it is of little wonder that Riyadh got itself in a
quagmire in Yemen. There, however, remain important questions about the
motives for the release of the Saudi cables and about the background of
the Yemen Cyber Army.
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